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The boy, Matthew Robson, an intern at Morgan Stanley, was asked to research teen behaviour and the reasons behind it. He covered each aspect of modern world media such as radio, television, Internet, newspaper, gaming, marketing, music and cinema. Breaking each down into general teenagers' views on the matter, and where the majority of interest lay.

Among his discoveries, was that teenagers do not like to pay for music and download it instead from file-sharing sites. Seriously ? this is a revelation ? I mean, file-sharing sites and their notoriety are at least a decade old. The prevalence of teenagers on such sites is self-explanatory.

Before I get too carried away, he went on to say that teenagers do not like Twitter, but instead spend 4+ days a week on Facebook as this is an easier way to keep in contact with their entire group of friends using one service. Surprise, suprise. Twitter's never been in favour with the tweens of this century, this is well known. It's a platform for individuals with something to say, or companies and services to engage with consumers - neither of which the teens are. What he failed to mention is that this is partly due to the glamour-less look of Twitter. A short bio and a single picture is as much personalising as is possible on your Twitter profile, which should scare away non-conforming teens looking to pimp out their individual shrine on every social network they encounter. Combine that with the cost of text messages to this service and they've lost their young demographic.

With regards to newspaper and gaming he spoke of teen reluctance to spend money on such things, and so favoured Wii to PS3, free papers to paid-for-print. Another obvious reality, surely. They're teenagers, they don't earn money, they have and always will choose the cheapest option.

With regards to mobile phones, they try to get the most for their money; handsets that play music are favoured over those that don't. And they use these to share music with friends. Cinemas they still frequent, as a meeting place for friends, and a way to spend an evening. Once again, I am not certain why this is newsworthy.

On the topic of marketing, the insights were the most ridiculous. Teenagers disliked mainstream banner advertising, found viral marketing catchy and humourous, and didn't see the point in pop-up internet ads. Do we need to be a pimple-faced adolescent to appreciate an ad-free website ? or prefer a viral marketing campaign (ala T-Mobile's Trafalgar Square sing-a-long) over in your face banner ads and marketing ?

What shocked me the most was that this made the front page of the FT. Anyone living, and preferably awake, in the 21st century with cellphones, LCD televisions and the world wide web would surely know and even share most of these teenager outlooks on new media.

In this time of recession, the real message by Robson can be summed up for everyone, we're "using more and more media, but are unwilling to pay for it".

Today was a very important day in the lives of South African's, and I felt especially patriotic and hopeful on a day when voters went to the polls for the 4th time since our democracy was founded in 1994.

Aside from reading some scathing articles about our probable future president - and having to realise the validity of most of the points raised, I was particular proud of a trend on the ever-popular microblogging service, Twitter. The trend being that the South African elections made it all the way to second spot on Twitter trends for the better part of the morning using hashtag #saelections.

South Africans from across the country were sharing voting stories on the microblogging service of standing in long queues wrapped in blankets with flasks of coffee, of election party cars parading around with loudspeakers and music, of having to deal with voting stations running out of ballots. And it all brought the Twitter community in our African country together for one day.

We can be proud in a country with a broadband market penetration of under 10% and some of the worlds highest mobile phone costs. We still managed to tweet more than Miss California's faux paus in the pageant, more than even Susan Boyle, the Britians Got Talent singing sensation whose YouTube video views exceeded Barack Obama's victory speech. The only subject more tweeted about this morning was Earth Day, which in fairness is fairly big competition.

Needless to say as I write this, we have, like our democracy once the ballots have been counted, disappeared off the map.

I came across a discussion on ads on Twitter here.

Basically, a company called Be-A-Magpie will pay you to advertise in your tweets (every 5 or so tweets). The advertisers bid on words or topics, the winning bidders advertise through you related to that word/topic.

This would probably annoy most of your followers and reduce their number quite rapidly. The downsides of losing your loyal entourage, definitely outweigh the monetary compensation. And this seems to be the general consensus on Twitter and most technology blogs.

I have a better suggestion, albeit a small modification on their idea.

Allow advertisers to pay for words as suggested, much like Adwords from Google. These words, when they type them into your tweets if you sign up, are links to the advertiser's site. The more paid by an advertiser for the word, the more frequently this word links to them and not a competitor. The difference here being that words appearing in your tweets become links. You're not suddenly sprouting new advertising tweets to spam your followers stream.

This is a far more unobtrusive way to include ads in tweets. It also shouldn't annoy your followers as they have the option not to click on the word. And your tweets are yours, written by you, not by advertisers.

The model could even be changed to a CPC (cost per click) rather than per impression basis.