Totally blogalicious? Are college students reading blogs?

This semester I completed a research project for my COM research class. My group project was centered around one main question:
Are College Students Reading Blogs?

The answer, my friends, is very simple.
And scary.
NO.

Out of the 105 students we surveyed, only 27 said that they read blogs!

We surveyed 25 students at BU's student center and the results we found were very interesting.

• significantly more males were reading blogs. (64%)
• it seems like female students can't actually identify what sites are blogs..."is like Perez Hilton a blog?"
• NO ONE (we surveyed) read more then 10 blogs! (SERIOUSLY!)
• While 74% of respondents spent 10-30 hours on the internet a week, 75% of respondents spent less than 5 hours a week reading blogs.
• Word Of Mouth is an incredibly powerful medium in college circles

These statistics really surprised me. Sure our sample was made up of students from the different colleges at BU. But it really seems that college students either don't want to, or don't have time to emerge themselves in the blogosphere. Although it doesn't surprise me that there aren't students from the health sciences school represented in our survey, I would think that more students from our College of Communication were reading blogs.

My question is how are communications students gonna keep up today's fast paced media landscape?

Sure, I do know some students that keep blogs. But these students are RARE! Most people who know me as a blogger think I'm slightly crazy. Blogs, seriously Danielle?

It's true!

Don't get me started on what they think of Twitter. I explained twitter to my interactive marketing class and people thought that I was nuts!


Should more colleges push students to be active online? Should they introduce students to different social media sites? Should it be integrated into everyone's education?

Are you a college students who reads blogs? What do your friends think?