Teenagers have not exactly been the Internet's poor relation over the years. On the contrary, second-level students have always been some of the busiest users and innovators.
It's certainly not terribly unusual to hear of Internet millionaires who are still not 20 years old, or of young people running lucrative web-design businesses after school.
And if you type the name of a popular musician, film star, television programme or comic-book character into your favourite Internet search engine, chances are that a high proportion of the fan-sites you come across will be created by American teenagers. (Or by ex-teenagers: an awful lot of such sites turn out to have been abandoned years ago by young people who've grown out of the activity - so the site, for example, might gush about Leonardo DiCaprio's "latest movie, Romeo and Juliet". Wouldn't it be great if old "digital newspapers" turned yellow, like real ones do, to tell you straightaway that they're out of date?)
As part of their participation in the Eircom Ennis Information Age Town - a project which saw Ennis, Co Clare, take the lead as Ireland's most "wired" locality - students at second-level schools there got a chance to create on-line newspapers that reflected the culture and activities of their schools, and also the interests of Irish young people today. (You can check them out, and other aspects of the Information Age Town, at http://ennis.ie.)
To be sure, they are not the only students and schools in Ireland that have managed to create their own sites. But the Ennis schools were unusually well trained and resourced for the projects - not only with fast computers and connections, but also with equipment to help get the most of the web's visual possibilities.
Since students are generally pretty busy people, the student "digital newspapers" have worked toward big "editions", like a printed student newspaper, involving months of work (see A Day in the Life, right), whereas many web-sites tend to be more fluid, posting new material when it's ready but leaving links to older material in place; "archives", when they are clearly marked as such, can be among the most useful things to be found on any website.
The personal web-sites that young people often create on the Internet are often highly idiosyncratic, full of the quirkiness of teenage life: it's commonplace to find a teen page that leaps from photos of favourite pets to hymns of praise for The X-Files, with plenty of links out to, for example, a favourite dirty-joke site elsewhere on the Internet.
Unusual interests can be pursued and shown off: young Troy Stone, in faraway South Australia, made a nice site of his favourite Greek myths, complete with a flaming-torch graphic. (It's at www.whyallahs.sa.edu.au/studentpages/ 1998/yr9/stonet/home.htm.)
School sites are different. First of all, even a quite independent student site is probably not going to push out the bounds of censorship, what with teachers watching and everyone knowing who does what on the site. After all, what with the school's name on the site, surely the principal has some interest in ensuring that standards are maintained, even if the standards are just a tad boring.
Secondly, the interests touched upon generally have to be broadly popular - like the sections of a newspaper rather than an entry in an encyclopaedia.
And a school site is quite self-contained. It may have many, many internal links, to its various sections - sports, news, technology - and to features unique to the technology, such as a game of Pong. But it rarely sees itself as a starting point for a good explore elsewhere on the Internet.
That said, creating and (equally importantly) maintaining an Internet site is a fun way for students to show a bit of "school spirit", and to learn the technical skills, the novel ways of linking information, through verbal and visual means, that will dominate the first years of the new millennium.
