Thursday's Wall Street Journal took an interesting look at some of the problems facing teens looking for summer work. As someone who worked numerous jobs during my high school summers (not all that long ago), I thought I'd offer some tips. I learned far more working during high school than I did in the classroom (although I could also say that about watching cartoons and blowing my nose), and this was partly a result of finding jobs that were unique and matched my interests. So here are my tips:

Don't focus on the money...unless you have to. In some families, cash is so tight that the teenage worker needs to earn as much as he or she can, and I understand that. But if you're not in that situation, the best advice I can give you is to not worry about how much the job pays. There's a good chance that you will be forking over tens of thousands of dollars for your child's education and a dollar or two an hour will hardly make a dent (even if your child doesn't blow it on clothing, video games, and dates), and a good high school job can be a great education -- and it pays! So don't let money stop your child from taking a job he'd love over one he isn't so excited about.

When I was in high school, every cool kid had a half-a-dozen pairs of The Gap Inc. (NYSE:GPS) jeans. We'd go shopping in their stores around Christmas season and see four or five of our classmates behind the register, and another 20 or 30 among the customers. In college, Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE:ANF) became my new aspirational casual retailer of choice, and I could pick their iconic striped sweaters and slim cargo pants out of any crowd.

But now? Gap and Abercrombie, we are so over you!

Amey Stone and I were IM-ing, trying to figure out why this was. We had lots of ideas, firstly, as Amey said, "maybe it's those half-naked men standing in the doorway that are scaring off mothers with young children." This makes sense on a lot of levels. When I was a college kid, the half-naked men were the perfect sex symbol. But the target audience for these clothes has gotten both younger (12- and 13-year-old girls instead of college kids), and older (moms like Amey and me who used to be hot for the half-naked). If the younger set are shopping, in today's increasingly protective culture, they're doing it with mom -- and mom isn't about to bring her 12-year-old into a store that clearly sells sex alongside the sweaters.

As for the older set, we moms with two or three very young children? The last thing we want to see is a half-naked man, even if he's exceptionally cute. Let's be frank. Our libidos are 1/10th of their normal selves thanks to the hormones involved in child-rearing. We'll stick with the J. Crews and the safe boutiques, with the cute little frog umbrellas and not the clothes that make our eight-year-olds look like they're trying out for America's Next Top Swimsuit Model.

Pity News Corp. (NYSE: NWS, NWS.A) spent half a billion dollars to buy MySpace, whose profitability rests solely on the attention span of teenagers. Google, Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) should take a lesson about its purchase of YouTube. Get your money while you can, because teenagers move on to the next cool thing with lightning speed.

Yuki Noguchi from The Washington Post, wrote last week that the popularity of MySpace, THE required teen social spot last year, is already plummeting in favor of Facebook. Not only purchasers, but advertisers as well, are betting they can predict the social behavior and coolness factors of teens. There aren't enough regression analysis models in all of econometrics to account for such irrational variables.

Xanga, the precursor to MySpace, was THE biggest site in 2003, averaging over 90 minutes per visit per user as teens developed and edited their online profiles or scoped out the profiles of others. In September 2006, the average viewing time of a Xanga profile was 11 minutes. The story is the same with Friendster, which averaged almost two hours of user time per visit in October 2003. In February 2006, average viewer time peaked at just over 3 hours. By September 2006, average viewing time was 7 minutes.

MySpace has already showed the beginnings of a decline in average viewer time. In October 2005, the average viewer time was almost 2 and a half hours. By October 2006, average time had slipped to 2 hours. The up and coming social network site is Facebook, which is still showing increases in average viewer time, now up to 70 minutes per visitor per month.

Among teens, there is very little in the way of brand loyalty. Mostly, teens crave innovation and new experiences within the confines of group experience. Given the increased scrutiny social network sites encounter from teachers and parents, as well as recent negative publicity caused by predators using MySpace, investors and advertisers can expect the next replacement social network site any minute. Too late, it's gone.

I love breakfast.

But I'm not a morning person. And when I happen to be out and about, garage saling or running errands or recovering from what I like to call a "mommy hangover," I find myself at a McDonald's. And all I want is breakfast. Somehow the Sausage McMuffin satisfies that need I have for protein, salt, and iron, without making me feel as if I've given my soul to the demons of empty calories.

If it's after 10:30 a.m., though, I'm sunk. And given that I (a health-conscious adult who tends to steer clear of partying 'til the wee hours) want breakfast past 10:30, I can only imagine how much the considerable teenager and, umm, hungover demographics would appreciate being able to eat Sausage McMuffins and hashbrowns and all kinds of other deliciousness at 11 a.m., or 12:30, or even four in the afternoon. I know. Shocking, right?

I've thought since my own teenage years that McDonald's and fast food restaurants of every kind were ignoring a huge consumer need by cutting off breakfast in mid-morning. Now, it seems that McDonald's finally agrees; the news from Jim Skinner's presentation at the Bank of America 36th Annual Investment Conference: breakfast, all day, will soon be here. All that's needed is a change to a new "flexible operating system."

If I were the CEO of McDonald's Corporation (NYSE:MCD), I'd be slapping myself on the forehead. Doh! Why didn't they figure this out sooner? Hello? Customers don't like to be told, "no, you can't have that which you most desire. We made a rule. Breakfast 'til 10:30, not a moment later!" Customers don't come to fast food restaurants because they're looking for discipline, limits, lessons in punctuality. They come to fast food restaurants to satisfy a desire, to indulge their longings for fat, crispy, sweet, bacony sausagey eggy...

That's why I, a health nut, a disbeliever in fast food, might now buy MCD stock. Because offering breakfast all day is an indication that management gets it. McDonald's stock was up 37 cents to $38.15, a 1% increase and a few cents from its 52-week high, on the news today.

I participated in a panel discussion at a conference on Saturday with a couple of young, smart, geeky teenagers -- i.e., the absolute center of most marketers' universe. These girls, Iris and Sheena, were the very definition of "early adopter" and "Generation Y" all rolled into one, a tiny yet brilliant focus group on the future of technology, social networking, and the internet.

Someone asked if Iris had a blog, and she said, "I hate to say this, but [pause] MySpace." She and Sheena both related how they checked out their MySpace accounts daily to see if friends had tried to contact them. For the two of them, both from lower-income families and members of under-represented minority groups, their technology lives consisted of homework, their podcasts, and MySpace.

If I were less of an analytical sort, I'd immediately say that MySpace is clearly winning the social networking arena. The site has the teenagers! What's more, it has hours each day of attention from these girls, from my youngest sister, my babysitter -- all of the 13- to 25-year-old demographic, really. But then I thought for an instant more, and I realized that Iris and Sheena were both the perfect example of MySpace's market domination and the reason why Microsoft, AOL, and Google will always win the race for ad dollars.

There's no money in these teenagers' MySpace behavior.

I was once a teenager. Really. And I think I was, well, kind of uncool. I was actually a cheerleader, which was totally not cool in the late 80s and early 90s. I wore acid-wash jeans and shoulder pads and penny loafers, which were cool. Then.

So when I tell you that this new Wal-Mart thing is uncool, I should know. Because it looks a lot like me, in 1987. That girl on the left here, in one of the videos on Wal-Mart's new The Hub social networking site for teens, she looks eerily like my best friend, Courtney. Wearing the exact same clothes. Let me say this: in 2006, that is not a good thing.

No, Wal-Mart isn't showing video from the 80s. It's trying to become some cool locale for tweens and teens. You know, where they can discuss fashion and music and -- well, probably not sex. As Brian White pointed out last week, there are so many rules about what teens can do with the home pages the company hopes they will create on the MySpace-type The Hub, why would any cool, edgy teen want to play here? To show off their facility navigating the fashion wasteland of the retail giant's stores?

According to Bob Garfield of Advertising Age, "If well-executed, such an effort might cultivate individual users, gather market intelligence on the group, destigmatize Wal-Mart as a declasse purveyor of unfashionable clothing and establish a beachhead on the web for the fast-approaching digital future ... [but] it's totally not well-executed. It's the most not-well-executed ever."

"We shouldn't tuck anything in, it's so not cool anymore," says the pink-tee and acid-wash-jeans clad "Ashley" on her featured video (clearly not produced, or written, by a teenaged girl named "Ashley"). Nope. And neither are you, Wal-Mart.