Come On, Let's Vogue

A crop of intern-starring shows from MTV such as The Hills and I'm From Rolling Stone has raised the profile of under- and unpaid learn-while-you-don't-earn student workers everywhere. At least the ones on TV do more than get coffee and photocopy.

The attempts to make more of that interest online deliver mixed results. In addition to the usual episode guides/photos/playlists for the RS show, MTV provides an almost entirely irrelevant arcade-style "drive to the intern interview" rally game (only cabdrivers drives in Manhattan), sponsored by Ford. Rolling Stone itself features a writing contest - for which the prize, inexplicably, is a guitar. (A finalist in last week's contest is 37, which seems a tad on the elderly side for an intern.)

The Hills enables shopping on SeenOn along with the usual. But the intern-enslaving publication in this case, Teen Vogue, is presenting a blog by its interns, and the results are fun, aspirational and brand-enhancing for the show, the mag and the interns themselves.

I wonder how many Conde Nast HR employees it took to shovel through this year's batch of intern applications?

Predators Are Everywhere

Four families in four different states are suing MySpace after their 14- and 15-year-old daughters were sexually abused by adults they met on the site, according to an AP story.

It doesn't change the opinion I expressed in an earlier post . While I recognize that the statement by MySpace's chief security officer that online safety requires users to ''apply common sense offline safety lessons in their online experiences and engage in open family dialogue'' is self-serving, I agree with it. Do cities get sued because they have dark alleys?

This is not off-topic, by the way. Safety is an issue for women and girls wherever we are. Technology simply provides a new place for predators to hide.

Teenage Wasteland

As a former editor of Tiger Beat, writer for Seventeen, and captain of and consultant to numerous teen-focused websites, I'm considered something of an expert on the elusive teen girl market. It's not easy, even for someone who recalls her awkward teenage years all too vividly: teenage girls are fickle, fussy and easily distracted. Just ask Elle Girl or Teen People, both of whom shuttered their print editions last year.

But there's plenty of money there; teens spent $169 billion in 2004, according to TRU. While not quite the growth market they once were when their baby-boomer parents were a bit younger (do the math - the youngest boomer was born in 1964), teens are still a huge force. And it's axiomatic among marketers that if you get a girl to buy your brand at 13, especially if you sell shampoo or tampons, you have her for life. (That's possibly wrong, but I'll discuss that some other time.)

Teens also worry their parents in every generation, and for good reason: they're hormone-addled and testing their limits. Still, put those limits somewhere they want to go and they'll make a point of figuring out how to get around them. Which is why the latest MySpace move is interesting.

According to today's Wall Street Journal, MySpace, which now has 60 million monthly visitors, is planning to offer parents free monitoring software, codenamed "Zephyr," so they can keep track of what name, age and location their children are using to represent themselves on MySpace. The site is under pressure to keep kids safe, and state attorneys general are piling on to try to get the minimum age for registrants raised to 16 from the current 14 and to have MySpace verify claimed ages against public databases, a prohibitively expensive task even if it were possible.

Naturally, owner NewsCorp doesn't want to do that. Though MySpace has a reputation as a teen site, more than half of their visitors are now over 35, according to Comscore, so they're fighting to keep a younger base. And they're already having trouble monetizing the audience they have, which, no surprise, has also become more male (it probably has something to do with all the porn star "friends" they can make).

The vast majority of teens are way smarter online than their parents are anyway. The Journal article points out that only 50% of parents have installed any kind of monitoring software, and it appears that one of the problems with Zephyr may not be that anyone with admin privileges on a home computer can manage it - and chances are that in a household with teenagers, the admin is probably under 20.

A recent Pew study found that teen girls, the group parents are likely to be most concerned about, are particularly protective of their social-networking spaces, making use of existing safeguards to shield their profiles from visitors they don't know and preferring networks that are more closed such as Facebook.

So MySpace is putting on a cute little show. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL have seen Zephyr and don't seem to be interested - they have their own security systems, including parental controls. But it makes everyone appear concerned, and puts the onus back on parents, where it belongs.

Teens will maneuver around any restriction. People who run sites where the minimum age for registration is 13, as mandated by the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (a.k.a. COPPA), know that the number of 13-year-olds in their user databases far exceed their expected demographic proportions.

I don't want to belittle parents' worries. Kids do stupid things. But the offline world is far more dangerous than the onine, and that's where teens need help and better communication. How many 16-year-olds have been hurt or killed by meeting strangers or driving drunk after using a fake ID to get into a bar? How does that compare with getting a friend request from some geezer?

The point is that the medium isn't the problem. The message, in this case that technology can substitute for parents talking to their kids, is.