One of the themes that pops up regularly here is whether the folk scene is doing enough to attract younger people through the doors and thereby to perpetuate the scene when us oldsters go to that great ceilidh in the sky. There have been many and various opinions and responses to this theme - pro and con - which I don't want to resurrect here. What I'm interested in is a word or two on what some of us term the "net" generation or, more currently, the "Google" generation. A youngster in the net or Google generation is defined by the pundits as someone who was born in or after 1993, and has therefore probably grown up knowing the internet world from very young. Of course, the majority of the youngsters in this definition will be from IT-developed countries.

I work in higher education, dealing with students and educational and information resources for students, and this concept of a net generation becomes increasingly important when discussing methods of teaching which may or may not mesh with the way in which this generation learns - and methods of imparting resource information which also mesh in. It's not assumed, incidentally, that the net generation outlook is any better or worse than old-fashioned ways - it's just different, and there are advantages and drawbacks in both.

Typically, the net generation person might be someone who, while lying around in a chair, is simultaneously listening to an iPod, chatting with their friends either one-to-one on email or collectively on social networks, doing a school project using Google and other internet search engines - all potentially at the same time in one seamless internet mash-up. The current question for the educators and information professionals is whether the methods that they have traditionally used should be re-examined and changed to acknowledge the very different approaches taken by their charges. This re-examining of approaches takes into account web 2.0 technologies and social networks using RSS feeds, wikis, blogs and others of that ilk.

"Well what the devil has all this to do with folk clubs?" I hear you splutter... Well, actually, quite a lot. If we're really serious about attracting new, young blood into the scene, and we think it's necessary, then an insight into the net generation environment might make us think slightly differently about how we do things. I've just been trawling through folk club web sites, planning a mini-break, whistle-stop tour of clubs in the Lancashire, Cheshire area in May. The web sites are similar in many ways - as you would expect them to be. Some have a presence on MySpace - a nod to social networking - and most don't. And so on. So, for example, a good club presence on MySpace, club RSS feeds of diary dates to mobiles, good, up-to-date club blogs - selections of stuff on YouTube as embedded links... all part of the game.

Now some clubs do much of this already - and I'm not saying that older, more traditional methods of communication should be let go - but the whole concept of the net/Google generation is something worth a look at if we're really serious about getting young faces into old clubs.