Back in my early days of my personal web usage, my web page creation habits were fairly sporadic – mostly because I was new to this whole thing, and wasn’t quite sure what to do with my newfound command of HTML.

At some point along the way, though, I discovered a number of interesting “online diaries,” as they were called in those days, and grew quite fascinated with the ability to peek into the lives of others who were thousands of miles away.

Since my teenage years, I’ve been online nearly constantly, be they my BBS days or on the Internet, and as such, I was generally chatting, emailing and participating in online forums at any given point. Still, it took some time reading these online diaries before it dawned on me that they were simply posting up in the same candid and conversational tone I used in my other copious online interactions.

And it was at that point I decided to take my personal websites into a truly personal direction, and blog my life. After all, if I’m producing thousands of words a day as a natural course of me being online, why shouldn’t I concentrate that content I produce in a centralized location for my friends to consume?

This realization, as I said, took me a minute to come around to – but it’s the reality that today’s young people live in.  Everyone around them is creating written content in both long form and short as a natural course of living their lives.

That’s why it’s not surprising to me in the least to see that Wired has a long-ish piece on the new “literacy revolution” occurring in to today’s young folk.

Andrea Lunsford […] is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

"I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

This newfound fact of life points to two key trends that I think are important to consider when creating ecosystems for today’s young people to exist within:

Accessibility is of Utmost Importance

Why is Twitter experiencing meteoric growth?  Is it because it’s the new hottness?  To a certain extent, yes.  More importantly, it’s more accessible than any other social network that’s preceded it.

You don’t need a computer to access Twitter.  You don’t even need a smartphone to access Twitter.  All you need is access to SMS, the most common baseline electronic technology in the world.  There are literally billions more devices with access to SMS than there are desktop or laptop PCs.

You can generate content of millions of different kinds with access to SMS, via the power of Twitter.  You can’t say that about Facebook, MySpace, or the myriad of other social networking utilities out there today.

Ownership of Content, Be It Perceived or Legal, is Essential

When a user comes to the realization that the content their creating in SMS, email or other digital form has value, they want to centralize it and brand it with their own identity.  That can mean it will exist on a blog, a Twitter stream or in some other social network.

If that social network or other location is too strongly branded with an identity they can’t control, or there is the perception that that content they create isn’t owned by them, there must be some perceived value proposition for the content creator.

That can mean an instant audience, as is the case with Facebook or YouTube.  That can mean the promise of monetary reward, as is the case with group blogs.  It can even mean the gift of community and authority, but it can’t be a one-sided relationship.