Cosmo Girl and My Space...

I thought it might be helpful by looking at site already aimed at young girls, to see what people are already doing and not doing.
http://www.cosmogirl.com

• Cosmo Girl does have a political aspect to it. It is looking for girls to be political correspondents during the elections. Also, Hilary Clinton's face pops up nice and big for each young girl to see (propoganda?, who can be sure?).
• No sign of any blogging or user created imput, just spoon feeding your girls ideas about sex and make up and clothes and games. Yes.
• The Web site itself is set up pretty poorly, lots and lots of scrolling. Score.

I got some stats on myspace. It's pretty broad knowledge about a few different demograhics, so I thought it might prove helpful.

• 78% of site members are over 18 and under 40 (probably higher than this as a lot of users put their age as 99 years etc to hide their age or be funny)
  
• there's a 51% male, 49% female split (http://www.trendcatching.com/2006/05/myspace_usage_s.html)
• 87 million accounts, 1/4th minnors
• $13 million each month in advertising

There's also some specific information about designing myspace-esque sites for digital netive we might want to consider.

"I maintain that we (as educators, parents and adults) should WANT to help students safely and appropriately WRITE THE WEB, not just read and consume it. Digital immigrants come from a generation of media consumers and an old media broadcast model of transmission-based entertainment. Young people today, the digital natives in our midst, increasingly reject that model. They will consume some media content via TV, but they also like interacting via IM, DSN, and games. They are not monolingual when it comes to media. They are not even bilingual, they are fluent in multiple modalities and do not fear the proliferation of digital languages within our networked communications landscape." (http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2006/07/08/myspace-statistics-and-adult-responses/)