Aside from gossipy columns about trying to talk to boys and fantasy-filled odes to teen idols, there was precious little useful information about growing up as a teenaged girl.
"The lack of interesting media was the subject of a lot of high school late-night discussions," Odes says. "After we started studying at NYU, we thought maybe the Web would be the place to do something different."
What Drill, Odes and Heather McDonald started as part of a media class at New York University is now gURL, a popular Web 'zine that recently won a Webby Award in the best "Living" site category. For these women, now graduates, gURL is a job.
An Interactive Teen Fest
gURL is not your mom's teeny-bopper magazine. The issues this Web 'zine and online community deals with are important to girls.
"We want to get away from the prescriptive tone of the magazines," Odes says. "Our users have broadened the scope of topics they want to deal with."
And gURL is interactive. Users can post pressing questions about relationships and body changes, give advice to other gURLs, try their hand at poetry, and read lots of articles that poke good-natured fun at the adolescent experience.
"There are some very real and adult questions out there," Drill says. "They might be questions too embarrassing to ask in real life, but they feel really comfortable asking them here."
A Growing Audience
gURL does seem to be finding a niche. Teen girls are one of the fastest growing segments of Internet users, according to the latest World Wide Web survey conducted by the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center at Georgia Tech. In the 16- to 20-year-old age group, females outnumber males 57 to 43 percent. Girls in younger age groups are also catching up to male users.
Yet until gURL, there were few sites specifically aimed at teenage girls, and the ones that were mimicked the teen magazines that gURL's founders found so frustrating when they were teens.
"Adolescence is about trying to define yourself," Drill says. "Most of the magazines aimed at teens don't encourage them to be themselves. Instead, they're trying to sell cosmetics or whatever."
Going Online With the gURLs
Where else could author Judy Blume sound off on sexuality and still come across as real as her books? The various sections of gURL include Dead Women You Should Know About (Gertrude Stein is currently featured), the Boob Files (about body image), My Blurry Vision (about getting glasses), and Looks Aren't Everything.
There are even some Shockwave-enhanced games: one requires players to find various items in an extremely untidy room, while another requires them to punch or kick through cartoon speech balloons containing "come-ons" a woman might hear while walking down the street.
Initially, gURL was expected to run one edition, get a grade from the professor and shut down. But the site hit a nerve.
"The response was amazing," Odes says. "We kept it going, and then more people said they wanted to connect with other readers, so we started the community."
Careers Can Happen Online
gURL has become somewhat of an unexpected career for its founders. The site was recently purchased by Delia's, a mail-order clothing retailer which has its own Internet presence. The founders now have the luxury of running their site and actually getting paid for it.
With capital comes expansion. The site recently introduced gURLmail, a free Web-based e-mail service for gURL members. Free home pages could come soon. Chat rooms, open for only a few hours a day, have also become popular.
And a printed form of gURL is, if not in the works, at least in the conceptual stage.
"Our job is not only to give girls a reason to be online," Odes says, "but to have them realize that this message can exist offline."
