Dear diary, along with everybody else online:

Stephanie O’Brian, a senior at Rock Bridge High School, said she tries to write in her blog at least once a day.

Among teenagers, she’s not alone.

A recent study out of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, an initiative of the Pew Research Center that focuses its studies on the impact of the Internet, found 57 percent of online teens can be considered “content creators.”

The study says content creators are “online teens who have created or worked on a blog or Web page, shared original creative content or remixed content they found online into a new creation.”

O’Brian is one of about 4 million people — that’s 19 percent of online 12- to 17-year-olds — who have created a blog, according to the study.

Savannah Jones-Salisbury, also a Rock Bridge senior, started blogging two years ago when a friend moved away.

“I started writing in a sort of journal that she could read,” Jones-Salisbury said. “I would write about personal stuff, and I was worried someone would find it so I wrote everything in code, especially names.”

Like O’Brian, she answered questions through e-mail.

O’Brian and Jones-Salisbury both blog with Xanga, a community of online diaries that lets users post entries that appear in reverse chronological order, customize their blog’s appearance and post comments on other users’ blogs. Other popular blog communities include LiveJournal, Blogger and Open Diary.

The study also found blogging is most popular among girls ages 15 to 17, saying “25 percent of online girls in this age group keep a blog.”

Jones-Salisbury said she writes about her daily life in her blog.

“Occasionally I post pictures, too — and that’s fun to do, something I couldn’t do in a regular diary,” she said. “I sometimes post pictures of nature-type stuff that I thought was beautiful and worth sharing. I also post pictures of myself if I think something was particularly interesting about me that day, like if I did my nails differently or when, earlier this week, I dyed my hair.”

O’Brian said she writes about everything from her day-to-day thoughts to song lyrics in her blog.

“I used to write about my day in great detail,” O’Brian said. “Once school started, my days got very boring rather quickly so I keep to the basics.”

About 8 million teens — 38 percent of online teens — read blogs, and about 62 percent of those teens only read the blogs of people they know, according to the study.

O’Brian said she tends to read only her friends’ blogs.

“Being a senior in high school and really involved in school and work, I find it hard to really talk with all my friends and stuff, so reading about their day or what’s going on makes it easier,” she said. “Plus, it’s a great place to put inside jokes. I’m sure there are about a bajillion on mine.”

But Jones-Salisbury said she sometimes reads the blogs of people she doesn’t know because she can find people she can relate to.

“Sometimes it seems like everyone at my somewhat privileged high school is either doing perfect in school or flunking out,” she said. “No one’s ever sick with anything beyond the flu. Sure, there are people like that blog, but I’m not interested in them. I find comfort in knowing that I’m not the only one with problems — even if I am the only one in my school.”

Jones-Salisbury’s blog has largely replaced her traditional diary.

“I do feel it’s unfortunate that I don’t privately diary as much,” she said. “I still have my composition notebook, and I use it when I’m not around a computer. But the screen is easier for me to use, since I type faster and because I know that if my house burns down or something I can still access what I wrote when I was younger.”

O’Brian doesn’t think the increased use of blogs instead of online diaries is a bad thing.

“It’s just the way things are nowadays,” she said. “However, I do find my spelling and grammar declining at an alarming rate, with a major increase in my use of slang. It’s quite depressing, but I don’t mind.”

Donna Strickland, assistant professor of English at MU, said the positive aspects of the blogging trend outweigh the possibility of online slang slipping into academic writing.

“That’s easily corrected,” she said. “And I don’t think that’s really a rampant problem.”

The best part about the trend is the opportunity it gives to anybody who wants to write, Strickland said.

“The critics say that means a lot of stuff not worth reading gets published,” she said. “But there’s also a lot of good stuff going on and a lot of interesting scholarly work — not scholarly in the traditional sense, but in people exchanging ideas.”

Strickland’s interest in blogging prompted her to start a course, “Blogging in Theory and Practice,” which will be offered for the first time next semester.

“I think it’s exciting that so many people want to write,” Strickland said. “Often you hear that nobody cares about writing, but apparently people do want to write, so as a writing teacher I want to pay attention to that popularity.”

Strickland said blogging is a good medium for writers to explore and expand their capabilities.

“It’s not the same as academic writing,” she said. “But it’s a form of academic scholarly communication — a way for scholars to communicate with each other and exchange ideas. That’s what I tend to value it for in my own practice.”