A new Sesame Street -- online

Open Sesame! On August 11th. That's the date, according to Elizabeth Jensen in today's New York Times, that Sesame Workshop's goes live with its new Web site, http://www.sesamestreet.org/. Gary E. Knell, president and CEO at Sesame Workshop, wants traffic on the site to double in the next year or two.

To do that, I wonder if Sesame may have to pull off a new trick: Bring in some older children or attract more parents of children who are too young to have good control of the computer mouse. Most people, and kids, associate the Sesame brand with toddlers and preschoolers up to age 5. In my own experience, as mother and interviewer, after age 5 many children see Sesame as too young for them. Yet it is only in the late 3s and 4s that children are of the age to navigate around on Web sites easily by themselves. With that slim population segment - the 3 to 5 year olds -- the site may need visitors from different age groups to make a jump in traffic.

Maybe Sesame is expecting its streaming video clips to attract the younger and older. As Grover tells me in the current site's beta video area, there will be hundreds and hundreds of clips to watch, all searchable by keyword. "Or click one of your Sesame Street friends to see a list of their clips," Grover says, angling for himself to be selected.