June 25, 2000

5:06 PM

teens spin web of the future.great article re: the winners of a competition for teenagers maintaining useful, unique, nonprofit sites.

Emily Boyde, 17, of Newcastle, Australia, was the only female finalist. Her Web site, MatMice, allows kids to create their own Web sites and view sites made by their friends.

She taught herself to write HTML, the language used to create Web sites. "I don't know a lot of other females who do this sort of thing," she said. "But after I saw the Internet, I liked the look of it. So I decided to learn to use it myself."

Emily rocks my world.
What do you think of the winners?
posted by gusset (2 comments total)

Wow, that secondsaver site is pretty slick. I can't believe a teen had enough scripting and database knowledge to program that. And he's giving away all the code. Very impressive.

Kudos to Philip Greenspun for encouraging kid programmers and for giving away so much money to the winners.

That MatMice site however, isn't tremendously impressive. I thought it'd by a diaryland clone, but it's just a place to put text around pictures the site supplies. Not exactly mind-blowing...
posted by mathowie at 7:19 PM on June 25, 2000

Oh, I don't know, Matt; I quite liked MatMice. It's a school project by a 17-year-old; should we really expect $20 million dollar start-up quality? And she's already had a thousand kids using it to make their own homepages, which I think is pretty impressive. Maybe the kids who aren't confident enough (or knowledgable enough) to make their own pages by themselves would appreciate having pictures supplied for them.

What impressed me was the thoughtful privacy policy - they seem to be doing all the right things to reassure parents and prevent potential problems.

I also liked the tone of the site - it comes off with just the right degree of enthusiasm without sounding condescending. If it had been built by a 27- or 37-year-old instead of a 17-year-old, it might not have had that.
posted by rory at 10:01 PM on June 25, 2000