Will Brazen Careerist be the LinkedIn of Gen Y?

As a popular and controversial blogger on career management, Penelope Trunk (who formerly blogged for Yahoo! finance), knows how to get attention. She does it by giving contrarian advice ("why graduate school is outdated"), blogging about her marital problems and dating life, and by frequent references to sex (always with connection to a career issue),

This week, she's hoping to shine the spotlight on Brazen Careerist, an online network she has co-founded, which she hopes will be GenY's answer to LinkedIn.

People in different age groups network differently, says Trunk, and they need different tools to get jobs and manage their careers. As she sees it, Baby Boomers responded to ads in newspapers, Generation Jones (the tail end of the Baby Boom) used sites like Monster and Careerbuilder, and Generation X dominates LinkedIn. "We're due for a new recruiting tool," she explained. "And it has to deliver what Gen Y wants, which is conversations in a professional environment. They have been networking online since they used IM in the fifth grade to talk to the popular kids after school."

Trunk says that younger people are put off by LinkedIn because it is dominated by people older and more experienced than they are. (The average age on LinkedIn is 41.) "Kids tell their parents to dump their Outlook contacts into it and then they target them outside of LinkedIn. It's also more of a database than a networking tool," she added.

The Brazen Careerist team says it will provide a level playing field where younger workers can network and manage their professional identity online. "They don't want to do it on Facebook because they've already been posting their personal stuff there, and they want to be hired based on their ideas so Brazen Careerist offers an idea-based rather than an expereinced-based resume," said Trunk. She also says that employers don't want to get their information about candidates from Facebook and that people shouldn't worry too much about their postings there because "employers know their are raunchy moments in everyone's life and they don't want to hear about it." As proof for this, she cites a guest post on the Brazen Careerist blog by Jason Warner, a VP in Human Resources at Google.

The site won't be restricted to people of any age group. In fact, if these ideas resonate with older people, Trunk encourages them to join.

What do you think? Do the different generations want different things in their online networking sites?