science

Gurl.com

Gurl.com is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Gurl.com rather than just read about it. In short: Gurl.com (pronounced "girl dot com"; formerly stylized as gURL.com from 1996 to 2011) was an American website for teenage girls that was online from 1996 to 2018. It was created by Rebecca Odes, Esther Drill, and Heather McDonald as a resource centered on teen advice, body image, female sexuality, and other teen-related concerns.

Key takeaways

Gurl.com belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Gurl.com to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Gurl.com from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Gurl.com (pronounced "girl dot com"; formerly stylized as gURL.com from 1996 to 2011) was an American website for teenage girls that was online from 1996 to 2018. It was created by Rebecca Odes, Esther Drill, and Heather McDonald as a resource centered on teen advice, body image, female sexuality, and other teen-related concerns. First published as an online zine, it later expanded into an online community. At one point, it provided a free e-mail and web hosting service, known as Gurlmail and Gurlpages respectively. Clothing retailer Delia's purchased the site in 1997; it was sold to PriMedia in 2001, who in turn sold it to iVillage in 2003. Alloy, later rebranded as Defy Media, acquired it from iVillage in 2009. The website ceased activity after Defy Media's closure in 2018 and was acquired by Hearst Magazines, who redirected it to Seventeen's website. As one of the first major websites aimed at teenage girls in the United States, Gurl.com was heavily associated with zine culture and third-wave feminism; it was also used in academia to study the online behavior of teenage girls. Unlike teen magazines in the 1990s, Gurl.com was known for its humorous tone, unconventional approach to teen-related topics compared to mainstream media, and contributions from its audience (such as editorials and artwork). The popularity of Gurl.com led the creators to co-author three teen advice books, the first being Deal With It! A Whole New Approach to Your Body, Brain, and Life as a gURL (1999). Gurl.com won the I.D. Magazine Award for Interactive Media in 1997 and a Webby Award in 1998; its founders received the New York Magazine Award in 1997 for their work on the website. Gurl.com was also met with privacy concerns, as well as criticism from conservative and anti-pornography advocates for its sex-positive stance and sex education resources.

History

Rebecca Odes and Esther Drill, childhood friends from West Orange, New Jersey, conceived the idea of managing a magazine while they were in high school, as teenagers in the 1980s. Dissatisfied with the teen magazines available to them growing up, they sought to curate alternative media that would properly address the concerns of teenage girls. In 1995, while they were graduate students at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, they, along with fellow student Heather McDonald, decided to form a female-positive online space aimed at teenagers, as they felt the Internet lacked such communities in the 1990s. They wanted to create an uncensored resource for girls, with features similar to those in a teen magazine, but also wanted to build a community centered on female interests, with peer advice and opinions from other girls. Gurl.com was then created as Odes, Drill, and McDonald's Master's Thesis project. The name of the website combined the word "girl" with the acronym "URL". The logo of the website contained a closed fist with painted nails. The website was launched in May 1996. After Gurl.com's initial launch, the website was included as a member of EstroNet, a web portal designed to drive traffic to independently owned websites created by women. The clothing retailer Delia's approached Odes, Drill, and McDonald with an acquisition offer and purchased the website in December 1997. Odes, Drill, and McDonald continued to work on the website from Delia's offices. Gurl.com was included as part of the website network iTurf (Delia's online subsidiary) in an attempt to launch an e-commerce market targeting Generation Y. Gurl.com was initially launched as a non-commercial website, but it began selling merchandise from Delia's catalogue beginning in May 1998. On September 2, 1999, iTurf partnered with America Online to feature content from Gurl.com on their website in a section called AOgirL. In May 2000, Gurl.com sponsored Take Back the Decks: An Evening of Women in Underground Music, an all-female music festival held at Lighthouse Frying Pan in New York City, New York. From November 16 to November 21, 2000, Gurl.com held the Movers, Shakers, and Media Makers Film Festival at the Pioneer Theater in East Village, Manhattan, with Kim Peirce, Christine Vachon, and Nancy Savoca as guests. Following the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Delia's sold or closed down all of their Internet properties in late November 2000, with the exception of Gurl.com. On November 23, 2000, Gurl.com was redesigned with less focus on e-commerce. In May 2001, PriMedia, the parent company of Seventeen, acquired Gurl.com in an attempt to expand its teen-centered properties. In August 2003, while downsizing and paying off its debts, PriMedia sold Gurl.com to iVillage, with Drill and McDonald joining staff. In 2005, Gurl.com opened its first mobile store powered by M-Qube, selling ringtones and wallpapers for mobile phones. In 2009, Alloy acquired Gurl.com as part of their strategy to build a digital entertainment hub aimed at teenagers and young adults. Alloy later relaunched Gurl.com in 2011 with a new logo, containing a cursive font with the "u" shaped as a heart. Once Alloy merged with Breaker Media and became Defy Media in 2013, Gurl.com focused on video content and had a YouTube channel. The website ceased activity after 2018 with the closure of Defy Media. Once Gurl.com was redirected to Seventeen's website, Hearst Magazines later announced on February 15, 2019 that they acquired Clevver, including Gurl.com, which Defy Media had grouped with Clevver's network. In 2020, Jamie Petitto, who had been a video editor for Gurl.com from 2012 until its closure, stated in a video post on her social media accounts that Gurl.com had stopped updating since 2017. She also stated that she had offered to buy Gurl.com from Defy Media but could not meet their demand of $3 million.

Content

Zine

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Gurl.com

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Gurl.com claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Gurl.com before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Gurl.com ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Gurl.com

In research: Gurl.com appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Gurl.com in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Gurl.com is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics American health websites, American women's websites, Community websites, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Gurl.com outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Gurl.com in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Gurl.com means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Gurl.com out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Gurl.com in simple terms?

Why does Gurl.com matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Gurl.com?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Gurl.com.