GIGAOM — Though Twitter is used by celebrities like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher, a recent analysis by Nielsen concluded it hasn’t yet caught on with the under-25 set, which it found accounts for just 16 percent of Twitter users. But not everyone agrees with the way the findings, gathered under the title “Teens Don’t Tweet; Twitter’s Growth Not Fueled By Youth” are being presented, nor the methodology used to procure them. There’s a lot we still don’t know about the number of teens and young adults on Twitter, social media researcher Danah Boyd pointed out in a blog post last week...

MARKETINGSHERPA — Referrals from friends are a strong influence on how teens and tweens learn about “new brands and cool new stuff,” according to survey results released last week by Pangea Media. Pangea is an entertainment an online advertising company that operates a network of quiz-related websites. The survey received 2,396 responses, and allowed for multiple selections when asking “How do you find out about new brands and cool new stuff?” The results...

The K Zero Universe chart is the leading indicator and visualisation of companies in the virtual worlds category. The chart segments are updated on a regular basis and published to our blog. The latest versions can always be found on this page. High-res versions can be requested here...

Since I'm fairly new on Twitter and still trying to sort it out, an article in the current issue of Advertising Age caught my eye. "Michelob joins keg party at Twitter, but will its tweets draw heat?" asks the headline, while the subhead makes reference to the age-verification problems that added to Anheuser-Busch's decision to pull the plug on its Bud.tv experiment. The article mentioned six brands with Twitter feeds, with followings ranging from a few hundred to nearly 4,700. Nothing like the followings that Ashton Kutcher and Oprah pulled, but still a fair audience. As I read the article, I wondered how tight the liquor marketers are with trying to keep underage teens from being exposed to what are, essentially, marketing messages...

Kids today still play baseball and cut out paper dolls. But increasingly they are playing online—in virtual worlds. Altogether in 2008, an estimated 8 million US children and teens visited virtual worlds on a regular basis, and eMarketer projects that number will grow to over 15 million by 2013. Virtual world usage among children in the US is already quite strong and getting stronger. eMarketer estimates that 37% of online children ages 3 to 11 use virtual worlds at least once a month. By 2013, 54% will...