At one of my former media gigs, a guest speaker who advised us not to think about our web site as the end-all be-all "destination" but instead as one planet in a solar system of different sites. He said that our social media presence and making our content portable was...

I'm a huge Harry Potter fan -- at 39. I devoured the books (and audio books) and have seen all of the movies. I even dragged my husband to a midnight show last year where we were the only ones in line not wearing a Hogwarts uniform or sporting Harry's...

Having worked for a couple of large cable networks with robust legal departments, the need to have proper releases when recording anyone anywhere for entertainment purposes was drilled into my head. When I speak to young people I often emphasize that they should think the same way when it comes...

The tragic suicide of Tyler Clementi, the 18-year-old Rutgers student who died after a fellow student allegedly live streamed video of Tyler having sex with another man, is, unfortunately, a side effect of growing up in the digital age. Tyler's generation came of age with the Internet and tools to...

Having just successfully reassured another group of parents that the internet won't eat their young, listening to CNN's clueless American Morning anchor attempt to pin this one on MySpace and YouTube really irritated me. She basically asked the victim's mother if MySpace would now be persona non grata at home,...

I've been noodling over yesterday's MySpace announcement since, well, yesterday. While I applaud any effort to make the site safer for teens, there is an aspect of all this that feels forced. Whenever industry reacts to the threat of legislation or regulation, vs. being proactive early on, the measures...

I read Jon Fine's column about the insane growth of TMZ and couldn't help but ponder what this expanding obsession with celebrity screw ups means to youth culture. According to the article, "In September, TMZ.com notched 10.5 million unique U.S. visitors, dwarfing its entertainment-news rivals. In fact, the site,...

Dove is back with its latest "Campaign for Real Beauty" film Onslaught and a new press release about a new initiative attempting to address the fallout of all this beauty advertising to women and girls. From their...

Anyone who doesn't know who Vanessa Hudgens is, does not have a tween in their lives or is not tuned into pop culture. She's the female star of Disney's hugely popular High School Musical franchise, and last week,...

I grew up in Nashville, TN. Nashville is not the "deep south," and it has become much more diverse since the 80s with different immigrant populations settling in the area, but I still remember that distinctive form of southern racism. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of racism to go...

Nothing taps into the spirit of youth rebellion more than when a corporation uses its power (and army of lawyers) to sue a young person. Whether the company is technically right or wrong, the fact that they are suing "the little guy" inherently paints them in a negative light. I've...

I began my career in youth media working at a non-profit magazine for girls called Teen Voices in Boston, MA. In addition to publishing the magazine, we ran youth programs for at-risk low income girls. This was right around the time MTV's Real World was going to film in...

Yesterday a production assistant for a national talk show got in touch to ask if I would be interested in talking about teen pro-ana or mia sites. It turned out they changed the topic (to "Rainbow parties" and kids who make "cheese" by mixing Tylenol PM and heroin),...

My first roommate at Antioch College really missed her best friend. She missed her so much she would make tape recordings talking about her day and mail them back home to Minnesota or one of the M states. This was in addition to constantly hogging the payphone in the dorm...

I know I'm about to sound like the stereotypical Gen Xer when I say you can learn from menial labor. I've written about this on Ypulse before, how the hot sweaty days I spent making bagels at 15 were character building. The latest labor statistics are showing that less...

MySpace discovered 29,000 registered sex offenders on its service and has deleted them. This is every parent's worst fear about the service -- that it is teeming with predators looking to make contact with the kids and teens who have profiles. The good news is that MySpace has been...

I recently co-authored a white paper for a think tank called New Paradigm tackling the common perceptions or misperceptions of "The Net Generation," i.e. young people 13-20. One of characterizations we examined was that "they don't read newspapers and are focused on their own myopic concerns and culture, and...

Virtual worlds used to be the stuff of science fiction. They came into being with video games and have now gone mainstream so even non-gamers can party in MTV's virtual Laguna Beach or buy real estate in Second Life. For tweens and teens, all the world's an igloo...

Teens have always experimented with drugs without their parents' knowledge -- at a park, in a car or at a party. Sometimes even at home, right under their noses. Because this generation of teenagers has grown up chronicling their lives online, and because the internet reflects what teens have always...