Pete Cashmore writes a popular blog about new Web 2.0 services at Mashable.com. He's a consultant for organizations looking to leverage the new social web paradigm. Pete frequently covers web services that he says are designed to "feed the MySpace beast".

Along with Second Life (subject of an upcoming interview) MySpace is a topic that many nonprofit organizations are giving some amount of thought to engaging with. The MySpace profile page for the film An Inconvenient Truth has been added to the friends list of almost 70,000 MySpace users. That profile page uses multimedia extensively and if your organization seeks to get into MySpace, you may want to consider moving beyond a simple default page as well.

Other organizations participating in MySpace include Green Peace USA, Philadelphia's Clean Air Council, the World Wildlife Federation and many, many more.  When MySpace users  add one of these groups as a friend, they are notified whenever new items, events or writings are added to the organization's page.

I began by asking Pete whether the widespread belief was correct that MySpace is a site filled with young people posting photos of themselves intoxicated and under-clothed. "You've been there," he said, "yes, that's true - but it's popular!"

Pete told me that people interested in MySpace should be warned that the site itself is not well constructed. It's filled with clunky, unreliable code. It's really propelled, he said, by musicians and young peoples' desire for fame and notoriety.

Despite all of the above being true, in a previous NetSquared interview, Amsterdam tech consultant Gillo Cutrupi told me that MySpace is where the young people are and nonprofits are not in a position to be picky. I asked Pete about that and he agreed. It would make sense, he said, for nonprofits to at least create a profile page in MySpace - so long as they don't do so "like old people wearing sunglasses to be down with the kidz." (Don't spell kids with a z, he said.)

If your organization is interested in creating a MySpace profile page, Pete said that there are a number of third party services available that make it easy to build a much richer MySpace page than the default tools enable.

The most commonly used is Photobucket for image hosting. Flickr gets all the hype, but recent stats indicate that Photobucket gets far more use in MySpace. This may be because it is very simple to use.

Other options Pete said are worth checking out include Rokyou and Slide for slideshows and Image Shack for images. There are also a wide variety of video hosting and embedding tools available for use, including but not limited to MySpace's own video tool.

The key to finding things that will work to liven up a MySpace page is that any widgets you use have to be in Flash format, javascript (the most common format for blog and website widgets) will not work in MySpace. There really are a huge number of Flash widgets that can be plugged into the system and bring added functionality and richness to a profile page.

Is it worthwhile for your organization to invest time and resources in engaging with MySpace? That's a tough call. If young people are an important constituency for your organization then it may very well be. If you decide to do so, it's easy and worth doing to leverage third party services to bring multimedia content into your page.

Interviewee Pete Cashmore blogs and offers Web 2.0 consulting at Mashable.com. The following are excerpts from the three most recent posts on the site.