Has blogging run its course?

Once regarded as a cutting-edge form of communication, blogging has fallen out of favor with younger Internet users, according to a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Three years ago, 28 percent of teens and young adults identified themselves as bloggers. But in a study conducted last year and set for release Wednesday, just 14 percent of teens (defined as ages 12 to 17) and 15 percent of young adults (ages 18 to 29) say they're blogging.

Why the sudden drop-off? According to Amanda Lenhart, one of the report's authors and a senior researcher at the Pew Internet Project, many younger Internet users feel like blogging is no longer relevant as new forms of social media have taken hold.

"Blogging appears to have lost its luster for many young users," Lenhart said in a statement. "The fad stage is over for teens and young adults and the move to Facebook—which lacks a specific tool for blogging within the network—may have contributed to the decline of blogging among young adults and teens."

Among older adults, however, it's a different story. Pew found that 11 percent of adults 30 or older identified themselves as bloggers, up from 7 percent in 2006.

But for the younger generation, often referred to as digital natives, social networking sites seem to have supplanted longer-format standalone blogs as the favorite means of engaging with the social Web. Seventy-three percent of teen Internet users said they have a profile on a social networking site, well up from 55 percent in 2006.

Lenhart pointed to the popularity of status updates and micro-blogs as prime contributors to the waning interest in "macro-blogs," though Twitter has surprisingly little to do with it.

Pew found that just 8 percent of teens Internet users said they use the much-hyped micro-blogging service, roughly the same proportion that said they have characters on virtual worlds.

Twitter and other status-update service were most popular among young adults, with a third of respondents between 18 and 29 telling the Pew researchers that they use Twitter or a similar status-update mechanism, like the feature Facebook offers.

The study also highlighted the fragmentation of the social networking landscape, finding that 57 percent of adults who engage with social networks have profiles on more than one site.

Among adults with social networking profiles, 73 percent have an account with Facebook, followed by 48 percent who said they have a MySpace page, and 14 percent who are members of LinkedIn. The study found that younger adults were much more likely to have MySpace profiles than older users, while the popularity of Facebook was roughly even among younger and older adults.

Kenneth Corbin is an associate editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.