Tech & Teens Round-Up

• MySpace = So Last Year, according to the Washington Post. First it was Xanga, then MySpace, now Facebook. By this time next year (or sooner, more likely) , it'll be something else. Question: do teen-serving librarians migrate along with their users to the next hot online location? Answer: maybe. It depends on what your specific users are doing. If your teens are still hot for MySpace, stick with it. If they're moving on to Facebook or whatever thing is next, move with them. As Stephen Abram always says, you've got to go where your users are.
• Entrepreneurs see a Web Guided by Common Sense -- a NY Times piece on Web 3.0 (link doctored for permanent readability). We knew this was coming, but didn't know when. Get ready, people! If you don't think this will have a serious impact on the field of librarianship, think again:

  "[I]n the future, more powerful systems could act as personal advisers in areas as diverse as financial planning, with an intelligent system mapping out a retirement plan for a couple, for instance, or educational consulting, with the Web helping a high school student identify the right college."

• The Overconnecteds -- another NY Times piece from a few weeks back. This one is about the effects, positive and negative of our Totally Wired (TM Anastasia Goodstein) youth. Their brains really are wired differently from ours.
• The Not-so-Sunny Side -- LA Times article on Laguna Beach, MTV's wildly popular & increasingly catty real-life soap opera, which bills itself as "The Real O.C." (in response to Fox's dying-a-slow-and-painful-death teen soap, The O.C.)
• Did I mention Anastasia Goodstein? She's going to dominate this last bullet point, with her summary of What Teens Want West (hint: authenticity is a big theme -- Library 2.0, anyone?), Going Where Teens Are or Going It Alone (see above re: MySpace vs. Facebook vs. whatever's next), and Are Teen Magazines Really Just Tween Magazines?