Social *activism* networking for teens!

We're seeing a trend you might call niche social networking. There’s the whole passel of family blogging, photo-sharing, and networking sites, a few examples of religion-based social networking, the social sites revolving around specific music genre, and our own BlogSafety.com (social networking for parents who want to talk about social networking!). Today a very interesting new category: social networking for social change. The category’s first site: YouthNoise.com, a project of Save the Children (here’s their press release. This is an exciting development, don’t you think? “YouthNoise launches with more than 113,000 registered users from all 50 US states and more than 170 countries worldwide and averages approximately 3 million page views per month, which is comparable to the most popular teen Web sites. A recent study demonstrated that participation in YouthNoise yields a 25% increase in volunteering and a 90% increase in the global awareness of users from ‘modestly aware’ to ‘highly aware’."