Videogames: Hazardous to privacy?

That’s what 10news.com in southern California cites consumer privacy experts as saying. The videogame 10news refers to is Battlefield 2142 by Electronic Arts, which, when installed on a PC, also installs spyware. If the spyware creates problems in running your computer, a source says, the game company recommends that the customer uninstall one of Microsoft’s security updates. Doing so would render the computer vulnerable to compromising security hacks. The upshot of this story: read the fine print before installing a computer game.

Who is Time's 'you'?

It’s not just teenage social networkers, ABC News reports, referring to Time’s decision that the Person of the Year is “you,” as in all the you’s driving the user-driven Web. Citing Nielsen/NetRatings figures, ABC says about 55% of YouTube’s users are 35-64 and 25% is 18-34; and about 57% of Wikipedia’s users are 35-64 and 23% 18-34. As for MySpace, ABC says the actual number of its users is “probably closer to half” the 100 million+ profiles on its service because that figure “includes inactive accounts, fake accounts and multiple accounts (which might be set up by a single user). About 30% of users hadn't logged in since creating their page, according to an informal analysis done by tech Web site forevergeek.com.” And ABC cites the view of a Harvard Business School professor that the increasing ranks of 35-to-54-year-olds are parents wanting to check out what their kids are up to on the site (not that there aren’t plenty of single adults looking for dates on the site, ABC adds). “And there are many casual MySpace users who set up a profile, but do most of their networking on niche sites. Michael Ellenbogen, a 30-something filmmaker, has a MySpace presence but spends most of his time on aSmallWorld.” Writing on this subject, a Toronto Globe & Mail columnist cites some notable “come-from-nowhere” stories of social-Web stars getting lucrative contracts in the mainstream media.

Social networking-plus

It's kind of like MySpace-meets-Teen Second Life. Teen-targeting HabboHotel.com has added social-networking elements to its mix, BrandRepublic.com reports. That makes HabboHotel more like South Korea-born Cyworld (which recently launched in the US): a cross between a social site and a virtual world. The social part is called "Habbo Home" and will feature "friend lists and links to other Habbo's profiles. Users can decorate their profile pages using backgrounds, customisable stickers, sticky notes and widgets. To interact with other Habbo's users can click directly on to other Habbo Home users' profile page or use the console instant messenger service within Habbo Hotel." BrandRepublic adds that HabboHotel has more than 64 million users in 29 countries. In the UK their age range is 11-18. Another hybrid is IMVU, which brings the virtual-world element of avatars (also used in Cyworld and Habbo) to instant messaging. Here's an interview about it with IMVU's creator Will Harvey, who also helped create the teen world of There.com. BTW, if you're curious about what virtual worlds are like, Forbes reports Elizabeth Corcoran spent some time in Second Life (not to be confused with the teen version) and wrote an in-depth account of the experience. She mentions one of its attractions, the game's virtual economy, in which one's avatar can make real money. GameSpot tells the very real story of language teacher Ailin Graef, who has made $1 million in real money selling virtual real estate in the worlds of Second Life, Entropia Universe, IMVU, and There.

Social sites topped 2006 searches

Social networking dominated Web searches this past year, Britain’s VNUNET reports. “Bebo took the crown as the most searched for term throughout the year, followed by MySpace.” Not surprisingly “World Cup” came in third, followed by video-sharing site Metacafe.com. But YouTube didn’t even make the Top 10 (“video” was No. 7). And Internet News reports that social networking “rocked the [Internet] industry” in 2006, adding that the surge in high-speed Net connections was a huge factor.

Child investment advisers

If you’re a venture capitalist, it pays to have children these days – literally. One such told the New York Times that her daughters were her secret weapons. The daughters good-naturedly called themselves “lab rats.” These young people may be friends and family, the Times says, “but their impact can be broad, because venture capitalists not only help steer the development of new ideas but also invest billions of dollars in those ideas on behalf of investment groups and wealthy individuals.” Interestingly, this is new. It was not the case during the dot-com boom. But this is Web 2.0, the youth-driven as well as user-driven Web. It’s probably why Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2006 is You. As Time, “look at 2006,” and you’ll see a story that “isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before” – the year of MySpace.com, YouTube.com, and Wikipedia.org.

MySpace more mobile

Social-networking giant MySpace is about to get more ubiquitous. It just struck a deal with Cingular that allows more than just Helio users to socialize via cellphone. Internet News reports that “MySpace Mobile for Cingular allows subscribers to edit MySpace profiles, view and add friends, post photos and blogs, send and receive MySpace messages for $2.99 a month.” Facebook works with has a similar deal with Cingular too, and YouTube with Verizon, according to Internet News. But this “agreement marks a change in the way carriers present content.” Before, the phone companies adjusted it for teeny screens. Now they’re reportedly bowing out of the process more.

Socio-political Web: Very worldwide

Iran "remains a staunch opponent of Internet freedoms - or any freedoms at all," The Guardian reports - and yet "Farsi has made it into the top 10 languages on the Net." Iranian bloggers, especially women, are "keeping Iranian freedoms alive," according to The Guardian, which adds that there are an estimated 70,000-100,000 active blogs in Iran, "the vast majority in Farsi." In South Africa, StudentVillage.co.za is a fast-growing social site and sign that the genre is increasingly location-based. A tiny "Internet center" in a Bangladeshi town has helped people find affordable health care, apply for passports, hold online weddings, find overseas jobs, and stay in touch worldwide; don't miss this insightful Washington Post article. Here's a view of Web benefits from India, an author working on two collaborative books. A day in the life of a teen blogger in Nepal is described in her words here. Finally, a vibrant discussion - with posts from all over the world – on the program of $150 laptops for children in third-world countries can be found in the International Herald Tribune, building on a story on the subject by John Markoff of the the New York Times.

A 20-something on mobile socializing

Check out this week's issue of my newsletter for the second part in our series about social Web sites and services from the perspective of a university student studying their impact. This week, Ann Moylan-McAulay looks at social networking on phones, specifically Dodgeball.com.

Police on the social Web

Law-enforcement people are using the social Web more and more in their work, the Raleigh News & Observer reports. "Most commonly it's detectives in the gang and intelligence units who troll the sites, but … more officers are getting trained because the sites have become so popular - and young people are so frank on them." If a kid has a photo of himself holding a gun, police won't start a file on him, but they'll definitely add what they find online to a file if the person is already the subject of an investigation. They also use the social Web to find out what kids are thinking and talking about in schools and neighborhoods, the News & Observer adds. But police also know that kids can act out online, that what they say and depict is not necessarily true. One officer told the News & Observer that it isn't illegal to pose with a gun "unless you are a convicted felon. Even then, he said, it would be difficult to prove the gun is real," and photos can be altered.

'Trust with verification'

That's the parenting approach PC World writer and licensed family therapist Steve Bass recommends to his friends, along with monitoring software. The friend he leads his article with has five kids 16 and under. "You've probably guessed I abhor programs that spy on users - but Mom and Dad really need to know what's cooking online," Steve writes (though, ideally, we don't need spyware to know that). "Philosophically, though, I'm okay with watching what people do on their PC provided they're fully aware that it's happening." I tell parents that too. If you're concerned, you're not getting the picture directly from your kids, and you have to use monitoring software, be up front with them about it, if possible – because if you monitor secretly, how much harder is it to work together *after* you've found them doing something inappropriate and have to confront them with it? Readers, how about you – what's your approach to protecting your online kids? Email me anytime. [BTW, Steve goes on to explain in the article how his monitoring program of choice works – check it out.]

Mobile-y social teens & the future

I've just seen another piece of the (near) future. I was reading this press release about how "The N" (MTV's "nighttime network for teens"), mobile social site Mbuzzy.com, and online research firm OTX are together creating "the first-ever wireless teen research panel" called "Teens Everywhere." "This new methodology gives the network direct access to a panel of 10,000 young people for immediate feedback about their lifestyles as well as network programming, advertising, events and other information" – something their parents may want to know about. In exchange, the teens get access to a new social-networking microsite (micro to fit on a phone screen), where they can upload and download phone content via computer or phone (ringtones, photos, videos, songs, info, etc.) and socialize with one another (the press release doesn't say if they get new phones too, which would be quite a draw). They'll be recruited from the existing Mbuzzy.com community as well as The-N.com and Quizilla.com (a popular profile-decorating site). But the piece of the future I'm seeing, here, is Mbuzzy. It mashes up a whole lot of elements and parties interested in converging – teenagers, content, devices (phone and computer), and professional content providers (record labels, game producers, film and TV producers, etc.). Because Mbuzzy is both a social site and a distribution service of both professional and homemade media for both phone and computer, it makes everybody very happy. Teens can create and distribute their own content as well as socialize around it, plus they can download (and buy) "cool content" for their sites and phones from their favorite artists and labels. For the digitally literate, it's getting increasingly annoying *not* to be able to move whatever content you have around to and from whatever device and share it with whoever you want, whenever you want. Mbuzzy fixes that. People in music, TV, and film probably get that, but they wish they could just sell it, not have it shared quite so much! [For example, see "UK kids' tune-swapping on phones."]

Left Behind Games: New game, social site

Among the rapidly multiplying niche social-networking sites is the just-launched DreamWebSpace.com. It's another brainchild of Left Behind Games, "evangelical Christian software corporation spun off the best-selling book series," CNET reports. Left Behind is promoting it as a "safe and profanity-free alternative to services like MySpace that have largely unregulated content." As for the company's just-released game Left Behind: Eternal Forces, I decided to see how much coverage it has been getting and a search of Google News turned up more than 200 news outlets around the US and overseas picking up the story about the controversy it has sparked. A couple of examples are from Reuters and the Associated Press, the latter a brief item on a Presbyterian minister's protest against the game. Reuters earlier described the game this way: It's "set in New York City after millions of Christians have been transported to heaven. Players are charged with recruiting, and converting, an army that will engage in physical and spiritual warfare with the antichrist and his evil followers."

For young game developers

Microsoft wants to create the YouTube of videogames, the BBC reports. The difference is, though, a lot more people know how to shoot and produce videos (and post them in a site like YouTube) than know how to design games. So Microsoft made its game-development tools available to everyone – including students. Five UK universities "were involved in the initial trial of the software, suggesting tweak to the tools." A computer science lecturer at Hull University got started right away on working the game-development tools into his curriculum, he told the BBC. "While the games that can be created by these new tools will be rudimentary in comparison to the best-sellers, it would hark back to the days when games were made on a shoestring budget." The development software can be downloaded for free, "but many may want to join the XNA Creators Club, which allows [game] developers access to technical support, white papers, starter kits and other assets to help turn the games into reality. This will cost £65 [about $128] for an annual subscription, or £30 for a four-month subscription."

Va.'s online-teen protection plan

Echoing Sens. Schumer and McCain's announcement last week (see this item), Virginia is now looking at a proposal to bar sex offenders from social-networking sites. The state attorney general, Robert McDonnell, is proposing requiring the state's 13,500 sex offenders to register their email addresses and IM screen names," InformationWeek reports, adding that "the proposal was immediately endorsed by MySpace.com." The proposal, which will go to Virginia's General Assembly for approval, calls for the offenders' electronic IDs to be turned over to social sites for blocking. Here are reactions to the McCain-drafted legislation at CNET.

FTC: Disclose online stealth ads

You might call it digital word-of-mouth. Probably since the beginning of blogs, advertisers have been creating ad blogs – blogs that look like any other pundit blog or music-fan blog, but that are really more like banners ads or billboards. Now, in a milestone development for Internet marketing, the Federal Trade Commission is going to require that advertisers disclose their relationships with paid bloggers, the Washington Post reports. "In October 2005, Commercial Alert, an advertising and marketing watchdog group in Portland, Ore., petitioned the FTC to consider taking action against word-of-mouth marketers," according to the Post. Among the practices Commercial Alert has spotlighted since then are Procter & Gamble's use of "a volunteer force of 250,000 teenagers to promote the company's products to friends and relatives." Procter & Gamble says the participants in its "Tremor" marketing division are free to be positive or negative when they talk about products and only receive products to sample, no other compensation. The FTC's action appears to address the online version of existing word-of-mouth regulations.

Patch your Windows!

We all just experienced "patch Tuesday" again. Microsoft released seven PC security patches this month. "The software maker originally planned to release only six security bulletins as part of its monthly patch cycle. However, it added a seventh to deliver a fix for two flaws that affect the Windows Media Format," ZDNET reports, adding that they were to take care of 11 security flaws, most in the Windows operating system. "However, there were no fixes Tuesday for a pair of known flaws in Microsoft Word that are also being exploited in malicious software." If you need to download the patches manually, just go to Microsoft Update. Washington Post security writer Brian Krebs offers protection advice for the long term at the bottom of his coverage of patch Tuesday.

Views on Vista

For family PC owners wondering about whether or not to upgrade to the new Vista operating system, here are multiple perspectives on the subject – from smart people who have been following Microsoft developments for years. The bottom line from SafeKids.com's Larry Magid, writing in the New York Times is: "Even if your PC is Vista-ready, that doesn’t mean you should buy the upgrade kit. For most users, especially those whose hardware isn’t quite up to speed, it might make sense to wait until it’s time for a new PC" (after January 30). PBS tech pundit Robert X. Cringely echoes that thought with a bit more bite: "Will people upgrade their existing systems? Of course not. Microsoft operating systems are always designed for future PC's, not for the installed base. Part of the plan is to make Vista work poorly on current computers so we'll all have to buy new ones." CNET looks at whether the PC security component of Vista is a privacy intrusion, and the Associated Press and the whole picture of Vista security.

UK kids' tune-swapping on phones

Note what kids in the UK are doing on phones and you'll see what's coming to the US. Copyright law isn't exactly on the minds of British child cellphone users. A recent survey found that almost a third of UK 8-to-13-year-olds share music with their phones – "using the built-in Bluetooth wireless feature of many phones … but without the consent of copyright holders," the BBC reports, and "almost a half (45%) of children who said they did not swap music via their phones said they would like to." A quarter of British children under (more than 1 million) have a mobile phone, "and newer models are commonly used as MP3 players to listen to digital music."

Game industry to parents...

Check out the ratings! With the help of Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT) on Capitol Hill recently, the videogame industry launched a new consumer-awareness campaign. Senator Lieberman "said parents must play a central role in learning about the ratings and what games their children should be playing," Fox News reports. CNET adds that "both senators have been vocal critics of the game industry in the past." The videogame ratings are at the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Meanwhile, London's TimesOnline.com reports that Left Behind: Eternal Forces, which "depicts a crusade of violence by Christians could be heading for the bestseller charts this Christmas, even though it has been condemned by Muslims and secularists." And two mainstream news outlets looked at the latest research on videogames' effects on teenage brains: NBC and USATODAY, leading with the story of a high school history teacher's own thoughtful test of whether videogames teach anything and, if so, what and how well?

2006: 'Tsunami of self-expression'

That's from Jon Pareles of the New York Times. He adds: "Simply unleashing it could be the easy part. Now we have to figure out what to do with it," and I think he's right. Individual media producers (your kids and mine) have to figure it out, as do professional artists, lawyers, parents, media companies, educators, judges. "The music business in particular is going to have to remake itself with lower and more sustainable expectations, along the lines of how independent labels already work. But let the business take care of itself; it’s the culture that matters." And Jon goes on to describe the fragmentation, or segmentation, of the music scene, as well as the "tabulation" – the way "sites featuring user-generated content prominently display their own most-viewed and most-played lists" or sites like fluxblog.org and obscuresound.com "that gather hard-to-find songs for listeners to download" - the now slower (but maybe more authentic?) ways we get to the "top of the charts." But that's the question – is the grassroots way a better way to get to good art than huge marketing dollars on the record companies' part? Maybe. Check out The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. And stay tuned to the user-driven Internet – I'll be watching right along with you. ;-) [Thanks to Michael Geist of BNA Internet Law for pointing Jon's article out.]

High-school-sports social site

Sports Illustrated has invested in its future. It struck a deal with Takkle.com, a social-networking site that's all about high school sports. "Under the alliance announced today, sports fans can go to Takkle.com to nominate candidates for SI’s Faces in the Crowd, a longstanding department of the magazine that recognizes student athletes," MediaWeek.com reports. SI will also feature a pick-of-the-week athlete video chosen among videos posted on Takkle.com. Here's the press release from the two companies.

Virtual concert for tweens

Whyville – which claims to be "the leading educational virtual world" for kids 8-15 - is putting on its first virtual concert. The very real pop/R&B singer Stacie Orrico, who sold 3.8 million albums by the time she was 18 (she's now 20), will appear (as an avatar) in a live, 45-minute performance this Saturday (12/9), the site announced this week. The some 6,000 "Whyvillians" expected to attend "will be able to chat with each other during the performance"; clap for Stacie; buy virtual souvenirs, tunes, and ringtones (using "clams," Whyville's virtual money); and submit questions to Stacie during the concert. "Selected kids will join Stacie on 'stage' at the site's "Greek Theater" and ask their questions, live in front of thousands of their virtual friends." Stacie will also "make several virtual costume changes during the show and auction off these virtual goods on ebay.com." All this seems very educational about concerts in "real life," including the commercial part of the music biz. More such education' is coming from Toyota. "Whyville will co-sponsor a [Toyota] Scion owner's activity - a special [concert] 'after-party' for kids who own a virtual Scion in Whyville, and their passengers," the Whyville press release says. Youth marketing expert Anastasia Goodstein explains in Business Week: Toyota "let kids buy and customize virtual Scions and taught them what happens when they miss a virtual payment" (here's more on Whyville in an earlier issue of Business Week). Anastasia describes how marketing works in other youth-targeting virtual worlds, including There, MTV's Laguna Beach, and Teen Second Life. A very different education campaign in Whyville is its joint program with the Centers for Disease Control to teach kids about disease prevention with virtual flu shots - administered to Whyvillians so they won't catch "Why-Flu," a CNET blog reports.

The upward mobile

This Korean experience will soon be reality here in the US. In "Upward Mobility," BusinessWeek.com describes the phone-based digital life of ambitious Korea University student Park Hyun-A, who watches satellite TV, reads e-books, plays games, snaps and sends photos, and – oh, yeah – text messages her friends on her mobile. The article doesn't mention that she connects to Cyworld or some other social site by phone, but she probably does that too (Cyworld's used by 90+% of South Korea's teens and 20-somethings and last summer launched in the US). Business Week goes on to take a very thorough look at just how fast-developing all the services for smartphones are. And the Washington Post looks at the American female fashionista, who "wants her technology to cut a stylish and up-to-the-minute profile" ("we're not being sexist," its sources say, just accurate). Meanwhile, CNET zooms in on a new phone service called Phling that says it can sync up the music libraries on your phone and your computer. It's "the first to offer this capability over a wireless network, which streams the music from the PC to the handset." And USATODAY reports that mobile music could be the recording industry's saving grace. At $3 a pop, the new, richer-sounding master ringtones (or "mastertones") are slated to represent $6.8 billion in revenue by 2010. "Labels are thrilled not only with the fat revenue stream but also with promotional potential," according to USATODAY.

Eating-disorder 'ed' on the Net

Young sufferers of eating disorders are getting the wrong kind of reinforcement on the Web, according to a new study in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Not only are they learning about "new weight loss or purging methods from Web sites that promote eating disorders," but also from each other on "Web sites aimed at helping them recover," Reuters reports. "The survey by researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford showed a third of patients [aged 10-22] also visited pro-recovery sites, and half of them learned new weight loss and purging methods." Here's Newsweek's coverage.

Those who play together...

…have more fun in videogames these days. Washington Post games columnist Mike Musgrove reports that in even (or especially) in shooter games, it's more fun for his friend Daniel and him to "fight the alien bad guys together" than to shoot each other. "This cooperative-play buddy feature has been catching on in action games lately and is starting to show up in other genres, as well, from the kid-friendly Lego Star Wars II to the rock 'n' roll title Guitar Hero 2." They're still fun "when played solo, but they're a lot more compelling if you can get someone to drop in and play along," says Mike. He explains how cooperative play works in Gears of War, the latest action game for the Xbox 360 and the latest versions of Guitar Hero and Lego Star Wars.

Online-child-protection law proposed

There is logic to this legislation, announced by Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Charles Schumer (D-NY) yesterday. Among other measures that strengthen anti-child-exploitation law, it requires sex offenders to register their online contact info too – "their email addresses, as well as their instant messaging and chat room handles and any other online identifiers they use," says Senator McCain's press release about the Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act. The law would also require social-networking sites as well as ISPs to report child pornography, and would more clearly define what should be reported, create stiffer penalties, make failure-to-report a crime, increase recommended sentences for sex offenders, and require Net companies to preserve data 180 days in case it's needed as evidence. If the bill passes, MySpace will be able to include the required online identifiers in the national sex-offender database it's building (see this 12/5 item), and sites that use the database (which I imagine MySpace will make available to them) will be able to check it for the email addresses and screennames people use to establish accounts - another tool for keeping pedophiles off social sites. The two senators said they will introduce the bill at the beginning of the 110th Congress in January.

Chaucer in MySpace?

Now here's a boy-bites-dog story: "How the Internet Saved Literacy" at Forbes. The Internet isn't making reading go away; rather, it's turning it from a solitary experience to a collective one – not just interactive (as in person interacting with Web page), mind you, but collaborative (as in digital class participation). An example Forbes gives is a literature class's collective interpretation of "Jenny," "a poem by the 19th century British poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti," whereby students assume the roles of characters in the poem using a software program the professor helped develop. "Students are free to change their characters' actions, add stanzas and delete others. As long as they provide substantive justification - historical and psychological - all changes to the text are justified and encouraged." Picture students creating MySpace literarily correct profiles for the characters of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Could be serious fun! Forbes reports that, though "a number of studies have been released that suggested a negative correlation between Internet use and reading … [they] are now considered to have been unduly alarmist."

'Cell-veillance' & instant infamy

USATODAY tech reporter Janet Kornblum calls "cell-veillance" in "the age of citizen journalism," referring to the way comedian Michael Richards's "racist rant" could be seen nationwide within minutes because of a little videocam someone in the nightclub made a quick decision to use. She also refers to on-the-spot footage of police using a taser gun on a student in a library and teachers yelling in classrooms. Law professor Michael Geist tells in the Toronto Star of two 13-year-old students in the Ottawa area posting on YouTube.com "classroom video taken with a cellphone of their teacher yelling at a fellow student." On the one hand, transparency can be good - we're all more accountable. On the other hand, it can be badly abused. For certain, we all will be increasingly on guard knowing someone might be around wielding a digital camera of some sort. [In a sidebar, USATODAY links to the infamous videos Janet refers to.]

Etiquette for the e-connected

A teenager reading this New York Times article would probably just roll her eyebrows. But we grownups tend to move slowly enough in our tech adoption to reflect on things like proper email signoffs. While young people are indeed struggling with the social implications of who's in the "Top 8" of their MySpace friends lists and their friends' friends lists, we're trying to figure out whether to use "Warmest regards," "Yours truly," or just "Best" in our email sign-offs. Some people don't even bother with a signoff, which Letitia Baldridge told the Times is not good, too "abrupt." And in a thoughtful piece, the Wall Street Journal's Jason Fry considers the social implications of buddy-tracking and socializing on cellphones – how technology can be "subtly coercive," incipiently changing the norms by which we live and socialize. He's not talking about youth safety so much as how mobile social services just may eventually affect even us socializers who are above loopt's targeted age range of 14-25. While we're on the subject, here's Business Week on "the device formerly known as the cellphone" – a phrase it got from Motorola CEO Ed Zander.

MySpace safety news: 3 items

Popularity definitely has its downside, as MySpace well knows. Its 130 million+ profiles tend to attract the attention of all sorts, including malicious hackers and pedophiles. If the latter are registered sex offenders, though, operating on MySpace will soon get harder. "MySpace is partnering with Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. to build a database containing names, physical descriptions and other identifiable details on sex offenders in the United States," the Associated Press reports, very probably beating the establishment of the national database mandated by the Adam Walsh Child Protection & Safety Act that was signed into law last July (see Wikipedia on the law). MySpace will develop technology to check profiles against that database. The site's popularity also makes it the target of malicious hacks. The latest is a worm in the form of a malicious video that "changes people's profiles when played, embedding itself [in the page] and adding links to fraudulent Web sites" that try to trick people into giving up personal info," CNET reports. Tell your kids to check the html code associated with all links on their pages and to be really careful about clicking on links in other people's pages. CNET says infected pages include a blue navigation bar that isn't on real MySpace pages. On the positive side, MySpace has established an Impact Awards program, recognizing individuals and organizations on the site who are making "a positive impact on our culture" in the areas of poverty, environmentalism, health & safety, international development, social justice, and community building.

'Mom cams' on campus?!

When I first glanced at this story, I was almost as depressed as I imagine a college student would be. Thinking it was about Webcams on campus for parental surveillance, I thought to myself, kids' lack of privacy and parental fears really have gone to extreme! But when I actually read this story in the Christian Science Monitor, I realized it's not quite the imposition on students I thought it was – at least not in the Monitor's lead about Mom calling kid and saying, "I'm on the Web site now - could you just look up at the camera atop Barnes Tower [on the Cornell University campus] and wave?" Used in this way, there's an element of free will on the kid's part. Whew! (And I was all ready to recommend The Blessing of a Skinned Knee to the Monitor writer and any parent who reads the piece!) But some of the Web cams/Mom cams shoot a little more close up, and their use can definitely be abused, as we all work out the boundaries between child protection and privacy. "The [Mom cams] trend coincides with a crop of students who are in far more frequent contact with parents than earlier generations," the Monitor reports. What got us here?, one wonders. Maybe it's the fact that many kids start having cellphones in elementary and middle school, so kids and parents are used to being in constant touch (see this about MIT professor Sherry Turkle's thoughts on "the tethered self"). The Monitor also cites the view that some parents may be monitoring their investments in expensive college educations! I'll leave that one alone. But tell me your view on this latest form of parental monitoring. You know where I am.

Models or exploited kids?

Are so-called child modeling sites legitimate businesses or child porn? Some are, some aren't, but the law is very unclear, indicates an in-depth CNET article on the subject. The FBI and the US Postal Inspection Service investigation are currently conducting an investigation "of so-called child modeling sites, which have been the subject of a series of critical congressional hearings and news reports in the last few years." CNET looks at a range of examples and perspectives, as well as the cases that helped establish the less-than-definitive definition of "child pornography" being used in law enforcement.

Virtual community, real engagement

Online community has a "direct impact on civic activism," reports education technology expert Andy Carvin in his review of the Annenberg study, which I linked to last week. In fact, the authors led with this, among more than 100 other issues covered in their 2007 Digital Future Project. So I thought parents, especially those with concerns about kids' online socializing, would want to know that – besides the informal learning that's going on, highlighted by MIT's Henry Jenkins - young people are also engaging in social activism on the participatory Web as well (e.g., see my item about Rock for Darfur in MySpace). As Andy points out, the USC-Annenberg researchers found that "just over one-fifth of online community members - 20.3 % - take action offline for a cause related to their online communities at least once a year. Nearly 65% of online community members say they now engage in civic causes that were new to them when they started going online, while an additional 43.7% say they participate in social activism more since they’ve joined their online communities. This may explain why 43% of online community members feel as strongly about their virtual life as they do about their real-world life." In his last paragraph, Andy explains why this data leaped out at him. Meanwhile, the anti-poverty World Development Movement is trying to encourage just such real-world activism, The Register reports. The WDM has put a digital counter in the Second Life virtual world of 1.5 million members. The counter provides a real-time tally of "the number of preventable child deaths since [Second Life] was first opened in 2003. A child's life is lost every three seconds."

Social Web: Picture less foggy

We digital immigrants have, I think, often mistaken the Internet for a single medium like television or film, even as our children the digital natives have been using it for so many things – communications, news, research, entertainment, self-expression, social activism, etc. To them it has long been multiple media in one convenient "package" and meant to be produced, mashed up, and socialized with as much as viewed. Of course we adults have used the term "multimedia," as in "multimedia Web site," but we've somehow seen all those Web sites as media we consume, like television. And "interactive" meant "click here" or "download this" more than using media to connect with the people behind the pages - that's what communications tools like phones and email were for.

Social networking is the biggest mash-up yet of all the media and creative and social tools the Internet represents to young people. Its huge popularity with kids has brought the participatory Web to life for us. But all the hype in the news has presented a largely negative picture of it. It's great to see a growing body of research on *all* that's happening on the social Net, reflecting the full reality – positive, negative, and neutral. We're just beginning to get a wider-angle and more granular picture not only of what the Internet is to youth but also of what means to them and all of us raising, educating, and supporting them. Pls click to this week's issue of my newsletter to see what I mean.

Socially mobile: Yahoo's version

We'll soon be remembering "the good ol' days" when all we had to worry about was what pictures our kids posted of themselves on MySpace. Now Yahoo has "quietly launched" a new mobile social-networking service called Mixd that gives groups of friends a Web site "where all the pictures, videos and messages sent through the phones will be posted for viewing later," InformationWeek reports. Like other phone-based social services, Mixd is "centered on making it easy for groups of friends to use text messaging as a way to organize a party, meet in a restaurant, attend a football game or arrange any other social activity. Yahoo expects users to form a lot of ad hoc groups around particular events, and use the service's 'reply-to-all' feature as way to communicate collectively." InformationWeek adds that Yahoo plans to market Mixd on college campuses around the country.

Videogame effects: New study

Watching the brain activity of a group of teenagers playing violent videogames and a group playing nonviolent ones, researchers at Indiana University found some differences, InformationWeek reports. "The groups didn't differ in accuracy or reaction time, but those who played the violent game showed more activity (brightly colored scans [using MRI technology]) in the amygdala. That is an area of the brain connected with emotional arousal. They showed less activity in an area associated with executive functions such as planning, shifting, and controlling and directing thoughts and behavior, according to researchers." Psychologists not involved in the study are saying it's "significant," according to InformationWeek, which looks at the difference between this study and others attempting to resolve the long-standing debate about violent videogames' impact on youth. Here's Reuters coverage. And in yet more videogame news this week, the Associated Press tells of a videogame that teaches teens the consequences of using drugs; and in another First Amendment case involving states restricting game sales, a federal judge "issued a permanent injunction barring the State of Louisiana from enforcing a controversial law that would have banned the sale of violent video games to minors," ArsTechnica.com reports.

Online, offline student 'melee'

A St. Louis-area school board this week voted unanimously to expel 12 students – 11 girls and one boy - involved in an in-school fight over who did or didn't get invited to a party. Three of the students will be excluded from graduation next spring. The superintendent said "the board had little choice but to expel the students because school administrators had tried to mediate differences between the two student factions before the melee," the Associated Press reports. "Madison County prosecutors already had charged three of the students - all 18 or 17 years old - with felony mob action in the fight, which produced no serious injuries." The fight reportedly was planned by the students via messages and bulletins in MySpace, just two days after "parents of seven of the students accompanied their children to school [of 2,500 students] to sign nonaggression pacts." Besides being one of the planners' communications channels, MySpace probably also played a role in identifying the fight planners, because it works closely with law enforcement and, more recently, schools. In September, with the help of the National School Boards Association and Seventeen magazine, MySpace began distributing online safety brochures to some 55,000 schools nationwide (see this 9/29 item). Not only is the line between students' online and offline lives going away, so is the line between what happens on and off school grounds, putting schools in quite a quandary. For a bit of case-law history on students' and schools' rights, see the Electronic Frontier Foundation's FAQ on student blogging.

Videogames' 'report card'

American kids need to be put on a media diet, said David Walsh as he unveiled his watchdog group's 11th-annual "Video Game Report Card" in Washington today, the Associated Press reports. The Minneapolis-based National Institute on Media and the Family "urged parents to take a stronger role in safeguarding their children from games that glamorize sex and violence. Game industry news site Gamasutra reports that "the two major topics highlighted in the report concerned 'parental ignorance' and the 'public health crisis' of obesity and gaming addiction.... While the Institute's surveys found that two thirds of parents said they had house rules over game play, only one third of surveyed children reported the same." The institute says this year's report card "focuses less on the flaws of a complex [$13 billion] industry and more on what all of us can do about the real risks posed by some types of video games [ignorance, obesity, game addiction]" and points out that nearly half of "heavy gamers" are 6-17 years old, even though gamers' average age is in the high 20s. Meanwhile, the video game industry won another victory in its battle against state laws "designed to criminalize sales and rentals of violent or sexually explicit games to minors," CNET reports. A federal appeals court affirmed a lower court decision declaring unconstitutional an Illinois law restricting sales of violent videogames to minors. The law's wording was apparently too broad. Similar laws in Louisiana, Minnesota, Michigan and California, and others face pending challenges.

Parents on Net vs. TV

That kids watch too much TV is still the view of more parents than that kids spend too much time online. In a just-released study at the University of Southern California, "21% of adult Internet users with children believe the kids are online too long, compared with 11% in 2000. Still, that's less than the 49% who complain their kids watch too much TV," the Associated Press reports. Losing TV-viewing time is also still a more widely used disciplinary measure at 57% (of parents who say they impose it) than losing Internet privileges (47%). I think this is smart, because we're really comparing apples and oranges: TV is a single, very passive medium; the Net is many media and, for youth, far from passive; parents are increasingly getting this. Other key findings:

At least 74% of all Americans under 66 are online (only 38% of people 66+), and 99% of people 18 and under are.

"On average, users spend 14 hours a week online, compared with 9.4 hours in 2000" (when USC first started researching this).

37% of US Net users have dial-up accounts, 50% high-speed ones, and 11% access the Net via mobile devices.

22% of Americans are unconnected, more than a quarter of them former Net users who "dropped out" (mostly because their computer didn't work).

Marketing, social Web-style

Parents may want to know what "brand integration" means. It's the buzzword social-networking companies use when they talk about how they're going to make money on the millions of profiles and blogs on their sites ("going to" because, despite their enormous popularity, few of these sites have really figured out profitability). The kid version of "brand integration," for example at Neopets.com, is also called "immersive advertising," as in a game sponsored by Lucky Charms cereal. Two clever examples in teen social networking are Tagged.com's advertiser-sponsored "tags," which MediaPost.com describe as "graphic icons that kids can trade à la online friendship bracelets." A Tagged executive likens them to logos on clothing – they tell friends you think this brand is cool. Bebo.com "is working with advertisers to sponsor home pages' 'skins' [such as a Web page's "wallpaper" and other elements that give it a certain look and feel] and other branded content so kids who are attracted to a sponsor 'will make it their own, and spread it virally, becoming brand advocates'," MediaPost quotes a Bebo executive as saying. Scheinman says. From T-shirt statements to Web page ones. Marketing is increasingly about self-expression, and social networking and virtual worlds/online games are capitalizing on that reality (see also "Embellishing their pages").

Smartphones like hotcakes

Those phones that are more like connected computers than telephones are "going mainstream," USATODAY reports. This means two things to parents: 1) They'll be hearing, "But *everyone* has one, Dad"; and 2) our kids' online communications will be even more mobile and beyond home supervision. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, but it's unnerving to some parents. "Unlike regular cellphones, smartphones have a PC-like operating system and download and run computer programs," USATODAY explains. "Most include advanced data features such as e-mail, instant messaging and word processing. Some, such as the Palm Treo and Samsung BlackJack, have small typewriter-style keyboards." Sales of these phones jumped 50% the first half of this from 2005, it adds. Another sign: YouTube's coming to a smartphone near you. It just struck a deal with Verizon, the New York Times reports. Meanwhile, at least in the UK, "the online video boom is starting to eat into TV-viewing time, the BBC cites a new study as finding. Back to smartphones: Even though prices are coming down (to around $100 with a service contract), you really don't want one if you're just going to talk and text. Smartphones are all about music, video, and the Web, which is what makes them very attractive to youth. But watch out, that downloading can add $10-$50/month to a phone bill, USATODAY says. [Speaking of downloading, Jupiter Research found that "adult content on mobile devices will be worth $3.3 billion by 2011, up from $1.4 billion this year," with Europe the biggest spender, followed by the Asia-Pacific region, Silicon.com reports.]

'Grey goo' & Web 2.0

Second Life's recent attack of the "grey goo" shows it has something in common with MySpace: the more creative freedom an online community allows its users the more trouble as well as user creativity it invites. Trouble in terms of both virtual-world security (against malicious hacks) and content controls in the context of child online safety. What happened recently in Second Life was basically a denial-of-service attack that looked like annoying golden rings spinning and flying around everywhere and slowed the game down for everybody, The Register reports. Second Life's creators Linden Labs had game life back to normal in a couple of hours, but among the "side effects" were "unreliable account balances, disappearing clothes, and shutting down in-game teleportation, which digital inhabitants use to get around quickly." The rings were "self-replicating objects" created maliciously - the downside of Second Life users' ability to have pets that reproduce and gardens that grow. Other virtual-world games, such as World of Warcraft, have had similar problems. However, a competitor of Second Life, There.com, requires its users to get approval for digital objects before they're allowed in the game. A parent's upside, possibly, is that "by instituting an approval process, the company can prevent X-rated content from entering its PG-13 world, keep out objects that may infringe on others' intellectual property and stop security threats from entering There," The Register cites There.com's CEO as saying. But it's just those controls that can cause players, including teenagers, to flock to the freer, potentially more lucrative experience of Second Life. One Lifer, "Lioncourt," told The Register that "the freedom to make his own content without an approval process has led to a part-time income of hundreds of dollars a month" (income that can come from selling virtual objects, advertising, and real estate for real money). This is the conundrum of the social Web: the safer or more controlled an environment is the less attractive it is to young people, who have unprecedented freedom on the social Web to move on to *less* controlled environments. This is why, I think, one tech educator, Wesley Fryer, recently suggested that, in working with young social networkers, the question shouldn't be "how do I control" but rather "how do I manage?"

Mobile trespassing?

If you look out the window and find people you don't know in your front yard talking on their phones it could because you have an open wireless network in your house and they have Internet cellphones (though not many people are using these phones yet). They're designed to make free or low-cost calls over the Net by taking advantage of "the hundreds of thousands of wireless access points deployed in cafes, parks, businesses and, most important, homes," the New York Times reports. Neat idea, yes, but one that raises ethical questions: "walk-by talkers" stealing other people's bandwidth. As for the phones, an example the Times gives is a "Belkin phone that works with the Skype calling service costs about $180; calls to Skype users on computers are free, as are outgoing calls to domestic phone numbers, at least through the end of the year. Incoming calls from phones cost extra." Other catches: lots of dropped calls (which makes regular cellphone service look a lot better) and the power-greediness of wireless calls (which means batteries lasting only 1-2 hours). This is definitely early-adopter territory, where learning about the technology adds value.

Shopping season gift lists

Lists of this holiday shopping season's hottest gifts are all over tech news right about now. One of the more reliable sources (for its independence) is the San Jose Mercury News with its list of "what's hot" for all ages this season (basically listing the newest electronics products). For zoom-ins on specific ones, there's PC World on the Nintendo's Wii, targeting the family market more than any videogame console in recorded history, and the Washington Post on PlayStation 3 and Wii (see my earlier item on Zune, with links to the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post). For help on the software side – specifically in games – don't miss Common Sense Media's holiday videogame roundup. And the St. Petersburg Times offers its picks of kid-friendly videogames for specific players.

Social-networking burn-out?

I doubt social networking's just a passing fad, as some say. In fact, it's still in growth mode (MySpace has just passed the 130 million-profile mark). But according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the novelty is wearing off. One of its examples, though, is a 44-year-old guy who established accounts at 15 difference social sites and is finding it hard to keep up! I doubt many teenagers, the most expert multitaskers, maintain profiles on that many sites. The Chronicle cites Nielsen/NetRatings figures showing that "between August and September, traffic to almost all popular social networking sites fell," but social-networking sites say the August/September traffic dip is perennial because of summer holidays and back-to-school. MySpace, for one, told the Chronicle it's growing by 320,000 new profiles a day worldwide, and Web traffic measurer comScore Media Metrix says MySpace traffic for September/October went up "on a weekly basis." Then there's the generational thing, which the Chronicle points out: New social networkers keep coming up (I wonder how many people turn 13 around the world each year). The Chronicle has a sidebar (at the bottom of the article) that lists and links to nearly two dozen social sites.

University presidents blogging

In this age of digital public exposure, I've been thinking (and blogging) that parents will soon need to teach their kids spin control – or at least have family discussions about it. It appears public figures are already blogging for that reason. "While some colleges and their presidents have seen their reputations shredded on student blogs, and others have tried to limit what students and faculty members may say online, about a dozen or so presidents, like Dr. [Patricia] McGuire [of Trinity University], are vaulting the digital and generational divide and starting their own blogs," the New York Times reports. Another example the Times gives is Towsen University Robert Caret, who has "Bob's Blog." But he doesn't seem to approach his blogging quite the way his students would. An assistant types in his posts, while he dictates; and he didn't respond to one comment a student posted, he just forwarded it to a provost. The questions occur: Does he get it? And if he doesn't, why blog? As for teens, here's what social-media researcher Danah Boyd told me in our book, MySpace Unraveled: "Kids are getting all these messages saying, 'Expose, expose, expose.' If you don't, your friends will expose you. We're all living in a superpublic environment, getting the message that you have more power if you expose yourself than if someone else exposes you."

Cellphone as tracking device

People's thinking about the pluses and minuses of using phones to track their locations is changing. GPS (Global Positioning System) on phones has been around a while, but so far the significant privacy concerns have outweighed the upside, according to a thoughtful commentary in the New York Times, as attractive as the latter can be: "Maps on our phones will always know where we are. Our children can’t go missing. Movie listings will always be for the closest theaters; restaurant suggestions, organized by proximity. We will even have the option of choosing free cellphone service if we agree to accept ads focused on nearby businesses." But then there's the hypothetical 16-year-old customer described to the writer by a Verizon spokesperson, who "said it was one thing for the customer to imprudently send out her e-mail address to a stranger, and still another for her phone to reveal her home’s location." Yes, we may be able to track our kids when they're carrying these phones, but so can others. And mobile social networking targeted at youth (e.g., Boost/Loopt, Dodgeball, and a new Dallas-based one called ublip) further complicates the discussion, while increasing the attraction of GPS-enabled phones for young people. The New York Times article goes into the unregulated realities of this business, offering great background for parents trying to get a handle on what mobile tracking and socializing means for children's (and everybody's) privacy. And moving beyond mere socializing, here's the BBC on yet another application toward the all-purpose cellphone: phone as "smart wallet," carrying around our financial info, to be transmitted over the phone, at a concert ticket office, etc. (yet another reason to be scared about losing my phone!).

Virtual worlds on phones

First there was cellphone access to social sites on the Web (e.g., MySpace Mobile). Then there was social networking on phones themselves (e.g., loopt.com, dodgeball.com, hookt.com). Next: whole virtual worlds on phones – sort of SecondLife meets MySpace meets loopt. A San Mateo, Calif.-based company called Gemini Mobile plans to provide cellphone companies like Cingular and Verizon software that allows their customers to interact in virtual worlds. The first company to bite is Softbank Mobile in Japan, which "created the S! Town online village community," InsideBayArea.com reports. "In S! Town, users [using a phone with the Gemini software] move in a 3-D world as avatars, and chat online as well as talk to each other through the voice connection of the phone. They share photos with other S! Town visitors and shop at retailers posting on S! Town." Just as kids see no border between online and offline socializing, soon there will be little distinction between social environments or virtual worlds (pick your favorite terminology) on phones or on the Web.

'Second Life,' 2nd campus?

Educators are beginning to explore the idea of virtual worlds like Second Life as learning environments, CNN reports. People socialize, buy and sell products, advertising, and real estate, build stores, design clothes, and even operate news bureaus (e.g., Reuters in Second Life) in alternate-reality games like Second Life and Entropia – why not take classes? "More than 60 schools and educational organizations have set up shop in the virtual world and are exploring ways it can be used to promote learning. The three-dimensional virtual world makes it possible for students taking a distance course to develop a real sense of community," CNN cites one educator as saying. The article is referring mostly to educators at the college level, it appears, which is probably good, because virtual worlds often include red light districts. Second Life's parent Linden Labs created an ostensibly safer Teen Second Life for that reason. Who knows? They may also see some virtual (or real) regulation at some point, at least where minors are present (see "Lively alternate lives" and "Games' shadow economy"). [One thing's for sure: virtual worlds and gaming community need to be part of the online-safety and -privacy discussion.] Back to education: In the K-12 area, a writer at Wisconsin Technology Network considers the question: "Is it realistic to expect educators to adopt video games in the classroom anytime soon?"; the article has all kinds of links to in-depth discussions on this. And here are a teacher's thoughts on where teachers can social (and professional) network right now.

France: Skyrock's social ambitions

Not surprisingly, Skyblog.com taught its parent Skyrock (a hip-hop radio station popular among French youth) the power and "universal potential" of the social Web, the International Herald Tribune reports. Now Skyblog – which gets 11.1 million visitors a month and gained "a measure of notoriety when some of its young bloggers urged French youths to revolt against the police in the midst of disturbances in the Parisian suburbs last year" – is expanding linguistically to include communities in German, English, and Spanish. "Skyblog is unusual in its global ambitions to target a multinational youth network," according to the Herald Tribune. I'm not so sure this isn't what MySpace has in mind too, with its goal of being in 11 countries by next April 1, but it is possible that Skyblog plans to mash up the cultures and languages it embraces more than other social sites, something that one of the Herald Trib's sources said will not be easy. The French company does have a leg up, though, because it has appealed to the French diaspora, from primarily French-language countries like Belgium to French speakers in Spain, Germany, the US, Morocco, and most probably other French-speaking countries in Africa. On the online-safety front, interestingly, Skyblog has "a team of 30 people [who] do screening with a 'cybercop' icon on every page allowing users to complain about violent or hateful speech." The icon on every page is something the New Jersey attorney general is calling for in US-based social sites (see GovTech.net).

Schools' dilemma: Block or educate?

Student social networking has schools in a bit of a quandary, a new survey suggests. Thirty-six percent of school officials polled recently said students' use of social sites is "disruptive" at school, but at least half of school districts don't yet have policies addressing student use of such sites, eSchool News reports, citing an email survey the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent out to people attending its annual Tech + Learning Conference in Dallas earlier this month. "Only 35% of the educators, administrators, and school board members who … responded said their districts had policies to address the use of social-networking sites by their students"; 50% said their districts had no such policies; and 15% weren't sure. In schools where there is one, the most common policy appears to be simply blocking access to social sites, according to eSchool News. In this and various news reports, I'm seeing a growing number of educators and legal experts saying that not only is merely filtering ineffective (with all the workarounds students are aware of), but it spells missed opportunities to teach students safe, responsible use of the social Web. Among the experts saying this who are cited in this meaty, in-depth article are Anne Bryant, executive director of the NSBA and Harold Rowe, associate superintendent for technology at the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District in Texas. This view seems to be based on a certain realism expressed by Jeff Hunt, director of instructional technology for the Indian Prairie School District in Illinois: "By their very nature, explained Hunt, schools themselves are social-networking sites," eSchool News reports. "Just as students congregate on the Web to chat with friends on popular Web sites, they gather in schools in the hallways and cafeterias to socialize. It's only natural that the Internet would become an extension of that interaction, he said. For schools, the challenge is finding a way to harness that power, without compromising the safety and integrity of their students."

Participation: Key opp for our kids

The nature of interactivity is changing – in fact, our children are changing it. They moved beyond interacting with computers, games, and information on the Web to interacting with *each other*, as enabled by the Web, Net-connected devices, and media. And now they're moving past mere social interaction and individual self-expression to collaborative production and social action, online and offline. I've used various terms to describe this fascinating development here and in our book, MySpace Unraveled: instead of "social networking," a more accurate "creative networking," "social producing," or "collective self-expression." This development isn't about technology, though, it's about culture - "participatory culture" - suggests MIT Prof. Henry Jenkins and his co-authors in the first paper of the MacArthur Foundation's just-launched $50 million Digital Media & Learning research program. Participatory cultures involve being a part of online communities, producing digital media, problem-solving collaboratively, and shaping the public discussion (via blogs, podcasts, etc.). And access to these is becoming key to young people's ability to succeed, the authors write. Pls click to my newsletter's feature this week for more.

Revisiting 'Net addiction'

Have to say, I've tended to lean to the opinion of a Welsh researcher of online community who told the Washington Post that the Internet is an environment, and one can't be addicted to an environment. But I do think there's content and community on the Internet to which people can, in a way, get addicted, and the Post reports that "there are signs that the [Internet addiction] question is getting more serious attention," for example in a new study "published in CNS Spectrums, an international neuropsychiatric medicine journal." It found that "about 6% of respondents reported that 'their relationships suffered as a result of excessive Internet use' … about 9% attempted to conceal 'nonessential Internet use,' and nearly 4% reported feeling 'preoccupied by the Internet when offline'." The Post article led with a 47-year-old woman in Washington state who was spending 15 hours a day online, "but it took near-constant complaints from her four daughters before she realized she had a problem." The in-depth Post article includes names of various Internet-addiction support groups and discussion boards, a list of Internet-addiction trouble signs, and links to a sidebar with tips for unplugging.

Searching social sites

Searching for social networkers just got a little easier – at least for those at MySpace, Bebo, and LinkedIn. Wink.com – which, until recently was more a media-sharing site – just added people search, reports Mashable.com. More social sites soon will be added to the service, the

US joins Virtual Global Taskforce

With the participation of US Customs, the US is now becoming a full member of an international police unit it helped design. Operating in London but now to be monitored by law enforcement in the Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US, the Virtual Global Taskforce's Web site "responds to reports from youths and others about suspected predators," USATODAY reports. "Investigators can immediately trace a suspect's location through his Internet connection and contact a local police agency to further investigate the case or make an arrest." As other law-enforcement people do, VGT investigators will also work under cover in chat rooms and social sites "where pedophiles are likely to be."

Youth pastors, rabbis on MySpace

MySpace says 14% of its users are under 18, and that's likely why youth-oriented religious leaders are there. Some are there just to monitor young people's activity, some to keep in touch and be a presence in their online lives. All the above seem to understand that social networking can be used positively and negatively, and a mom and theology professor at Princeton University told the Religion News Service that she feels it's "more helpful" for adults to be aware of both positives and negatives than to "spend all our time railing against it." A regional youth minister in the southern US who's registered on MySpace said she gets messages about everything from what school dances were like to "I hate my life, I want to die," and she acts on the latter immediately. Other examples: "Reform Jewish teen leaders from the North American Federation of Temple Youth recently adopted their 'OurSpace Recommendation' in which they pledged to be conscious of their actions and urge their peers to integrate Jewish values into online communities." And a youth consultant at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops advises youth ministers to "get on MySpace for information but not communication."

ReputationDefender.com

"You can't take it back" was the basic message when I wrote about "Protecting teen reputations [and future prospects] on Web 2.0" last spring - because once you've uploaded text, photos, videos, etc. to the Web, you've pretty much lost control of that content. People can cut and paste it into a Web page, an instant message, or an email or share it via the global file-sharing networks. That's still true, but now there's [i]some[/i] help. "A new startup, ReputationDefender.com, will act on your behalf by contacting data hosting services and requesting the removal of any materials that threaten your good social standing," Wired News reports. For $10 to $16 a month, "we scour the Internet to dig up every possible piece of information by and about your child [in social sites, media-sharing sites, online game sites, and on "the open Internet"], and we present it to you in an interactive monthly report," says ReputationDefender.com. If there's something embarrassing or damaging in the report, you can flag it and, for an additional $30, the service will "use an array of proprietary techniques developed in-house to correct and/or completely remove the selected unwanted content from the Web." If they can, that is. If the offending info is on the Web page of an ex-friend of your child or a bully, the service may not be able to deliver on that promise. If you're interested in trying the service, be sure to talk with them about that. In any case, knowing where and how our kids are represented online is a good thing; it can be a great parent-child discussion point to have a "visual aid" – with the help of monitoring tools and services like this, BeNetSafe, and others (see "Monitoring MySpacers").

As for future prospects, a recent Harris Interactive study found that "more than one-fourth of hiring managers said they had used Internet search engines to research potential employees," and 10% said they'd searched social sites to screen applicants, according to a story on this in the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., where ReputationDefender is based. KIRO in Seattle reported findings from a similar study conducted at Seattle University. See also "For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Resume" in the New York Times last June.

Your child an 'influential'?

"Social Networking: A Boost for Brand Buzz" in E-Commerce Times offers some insights into how marketers are viewing online kids. They are really interested in reaching "influentials," who are generally the starting points of viral marketing campaigns (if you can even call them "campaigns" anymore – "viral" and "campaign" being a bit of an oxymoron). The article distinguishes between "classic influentials" (a surprising 24% of all Net users) and "new influentials" (17%) and throws in a third "combination influential" (6%). The old kind is likened to Sherlock Holmes, the "recognized expert," and the new kind to Watson, who "spreads the buzz," tells everyone about his buddy Holmes. Of course, every marketer would love to influence a "combination influential." I think I'd like to meet one of those too.

Very mobile social networking

You might call it real-time, real-life social networking. Today Silicon Valley start-up loopt launched a new mobile social-networking service with Boost Mobile, "one of the nation's biggest youth-oriented wireless phone companies," the San Jose Mercury News reports. "Boost's 3.8 million customers - who are mostly under 25 - will be able to create groups of friends and keep track of them using a combination of text messaging, pictures and the GPS technology embedded in most new mobile phones today." Let's make that crystal clear: young people using this service will be able to know their friends' exact physical location so that they can socialize with them offline, in what we digital immigrants call "real life." This is new territory for online safety, which loopt's 17 employees are well aware of (they've already reached out to us and other online-safety specialists). "Loopt has strict privacy and security safeguards, including requirements that friends must be invited and accept each other," reports the Mercury News. Other services in this vein are Google's Dodgeball (see InformationWeek) and Microsoft's SLAM tech (see the Gizmodo blog). It's different from MySpace Mobile, which provides phone access to one's MySpace profile and keeps the socializing online.

To me, this is yet another sign that online safety is more and more about social engineering and less about safety technologies like filters. In other words, we need to teach our kids how not to be tricked or "engineered" to add undesirable people to friends lists and click on undesirable links. The other "next big thing" for online safety, I think, points to the same educational need: the social scene in virtual or alternate worlds such as SecondLife.com, Teen.SecondLife.com, EntropiaUniverse.com, and Xbox Live chat-enabled videogames (see this item on Entropia and Wikipedia on the Second Life games).

COPA in court again

The Web is actually not teeming with X-rated content, according to research by a University of California-Berkeley statistics professor. "A confidential analysis of Internet search queries and a random sample of Web pages taken from Google and Micrsoft's giant Internet indexes showed that only about 1% of all Web pages contain sexually explicit material," the San Jose Mercury News reports. The findings were presented in a Philadelphia federal court last week, where COPA - the Child Online Protection Act passed and almost immediately blocked by a federal judge in 1998) - is again on trial. On the surface the case is about online porn, but it's really a long, drawn-out case about free speech, and its latest arguments – between the Department of Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union - are being heard in a federal court in Philadelphia. [A federal appeals court and the Supreme Court both upheld the original injunction, but the latter sent the case back to the Philly federal court in 2004, ordering a new trial to determine whether less-restrictive ways to protect kids than those provided in COPA can be found, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.] As for the study of online porn, according to the Mercury News it "found that only 6% of all queries returned a sexually explicit Web site, despite the consistent popularity of queries related to sex. It also found that the filters that did the best job blocking sexually explicit content also inadvertently blocked lots of content that was not explicit [and the study also concluded that a lot of adult content got through the filters]. Government witnesses argued that while the percent of sexually explicit Web pages was small, it still amounted to a huge number." In related coverage, the two sides of the debate are clearly represented in this Wall Street Journal discussion, "Are More Laws Needed to Protect Online Kids." For views on parents' role, see BlogSafety.com co-director Larry Magid's "What Can Parents Do about Web Safety?" at CBSNEWS.com and "Parents are kids' best protection from online porn" in South Florida's Sun-Sentinel.

Game consoles' latest epic battle

Brace yourselves, holiday shoppers, the next wave of game console wars hits the US this weekend. Nintendo's new Wii console goes on sale here Sunday. Microsoft's Xbox 360 gained its beachhead a year ago. The PS3 launches in the US this Friday and sold out in Japan over the weekend, the BBC reports (it doesn't hit European stores till next spring). Some of the 8,000 older PlayStation games aren't working perfectly on the PS3, the Associated Press reports (mostly sound and image issues). "Users can punch in the name of the PS or PS2 game on the Web page, and a list will pop up, telling you if the game can be played without problems or not. As for Nintendo's console, with which the company is more than ever focused on the family market, the Seattle Times reports that "the $250 Wii is expected to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, must-have toys of the season." Nintendo will have "only 4 million units to sell worldwide. Even if it sells out, future competition will be brutal against Microsoft and its year-old Xbox 360 and Sony and its PlayStation 3," the Seattle Times adds. Meanwhile, here are fresh, rated game reviews at the Detroit Free Press, including one for the very controversial "Bully" from Rockstar Games (the Free Press says "those overly concerned should not be about this game"), and here's an in-depth review of Bully (for PS2) at the University Daily Kansan.

Talking to friends on Orkut - literally!

Google's social-networking site Orkut just changed enough to really distinguish itself from the pack of popular social sites. Orkut users can now "talk on the phone" with their friends. Orkut added Google Talk to its features and, at about the same time, opened itself up to everyone (Orkut users used to have to be invited in by existing members), according to the Mashable.com blog. With Google Talk, Orkut users can do both voice and text chat, or instant messaging, with people on their friends lists, Google explains on its own page about this . Yet another reason for parents to remind any Orkut users at their house not to put people they don't know in person on their friends lists. [Some parents have a rule that only people Mom or Dad knows are on friends and buddy lists in IM services and social sites.]

ID theft often begins at home

Most of the 9-10 million Americans who have their identities stolen each year don't know who did the stealing, but "half of those who do say the thief was a family member, a friend, a neighbor or an in-home employee," the New York Times reports, citing a Federal Trade Commission survey. The Times gives examples of an ex-spouse using the social security numbers of her underage children; a grown son tapping into his parents' credit; and a housemate and friend who had known the victim for more than two decades. "Identity theft involving family members takes many forms," according to the Times article. "A child steals a parent’s identity to buy drugs, one sibling steals another’s identity to try to avoid arrest or debt."

Social Web growth unabated

"Doubting the popularity of MySpace? Don't," suggests Digital Trends News. Citing new findings from Web traffic measurer Hitwise, the article says MySpace is getting 82% of visits to the top 20 social-networking sites and experienced 51% growth in visits between last March and this past September. Visits to social sites over all grew 34% those six months. In its report on the study, MediaPost cited other fast growers in social networking: "Other social sites making big gains in share of traffic include Bolt, up 271% [see this heads-up from a Bolt user]; Bebo, 95%; Orkut, 63%; and Gaia Online, 41%." In terms of average session time at the sites, Gaia Online came in first at 47 min., 1 sec., followed by CrushSpot (30:31); MySpace (30:22); Bebo (25:39); and Tagged (20:33). And of course MySpace's high traffic is spurring use of media-hosting sites (that MySpace users link to from their profiles) and sites that provide bells 'n' whistles for MySpace profiles. For example, "the top photo hosting site, PhotoBucket, increased market share by 43% from March to September, while Flickr grew by 49%. Visits to YouTube jumped 249% during that period [MySpace Videos grew 253%]. Slide, which lets users create slide shows of their photos and paste them on social networking sites, was the fastest-growing site in the category with a 1,300% gain in traffic" (see also "Embellishing their pages"). In other MySpace news, the service has serious international ambitions. This week MySpace launched in Japan (where indigenous social site Mixi just had a $1.85 billion IPO) and, "with a presence already in Britain, Australia, Ireland, Germany and France, the company plans to add 11 other countries in the coming year," the New York Times reports.

Movies on Xbox360

The media-downloading scene is not getting less complicated, in terms of what is and isn't legal and what rights various downloads come with. But the number of choices is growing. People who have Xbox 360 consoles will soon be able to download movies and TV shows via Microsoft's Xbox Live online service, the New York Times reports. "Microsoft has negotiated the rights to rent or sell more than 1,000 hours of material from CBS, MTV Networks, Paramount, Warner Brothers and Turner Broadcasting." The online store will work a lot like Apple's iTunes but with a few key differences: "While users will be able to keep television shows, movies can be rented for only a limited period. The videos will not be playable on other devices and cannot be burned onto DVDs, but the online service will keep track of purchases so that users can log in to watch their videos on a friend’s Xbox." Here's the BBC's coverage.

Parenting & profile deletion

Some parents will be relieved to read that every week MySpace deletes the profiles of about 30,000 people under 14 (14 is the minimum age under its Terms of Service). In an article about parenting MySpacers, the Boston Globe leads with that factoid. The thing relieved parents need to know, though, is that a deleted profile is far from the resolution of any parent's social-networking struggle, especially if his or her child is a determined online socializer. For a teen, getting one's profile deleted - after putting significant time and effort into cultivating page esthetics and friends' comments - is a major pain. But a new account can be set up, in stealth mode (set to private and harder for a parents to find), very quickly, after which the development period starts anew, usually with friends rallying around the effort. So account deletion by MySpace is never the ultimate goal. Parent/child communication and learning are more realistic ones, often with parents learning about both the technology and their kids' social lives and with kids learning about how to protect and present themselves better in public places, not to mention why their parents have concerns. I appreciated the points made by a psychology professor and a middle-school administrator quoted by Globe writer Barbara Meltz. Meanwhile, some fresh statistics from Harris Interactive (as reported in Media Life): 75% of teens and 43% of tweens have an online profile in a social-networking or community site, and teens have, on average, 75 friends on their friends lists in such sites.

'Music detective' tech

The music business is still suing individual file-sharers (see this latest example, reported by the Associated Press), but the newest front in its war on copyright theft is social networking – not just in tunes downloaded and shared, but in the background music of videos upload to YouTube, MySpace, and other social and media sites. To help music fans at your house understand how these companies are using technology to detect pirated music, see this article by CBS tech writer (and SafeKids.com publisher) Larry Magid. Halfway down in the article there's a link to Larry's audio interview with Jim Hollingsworth, an executive at the company, Gracenote, that provides MySpace with that copyright-detection tech. He explains how it works.

Newest music player

If you have music lovers at your house and are curious about the MP3 player options this holiday season, there's help from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg looks at the new kid on the block - Microsoft's Zune music player and its own music store – and finds some positives over the iPod. Walt likes its "larger screen, the ability to exchange songs with other Zunes wirelessly and a built-in FM radio," but he concludes it "has too many compromises and missing features to be as good a choice as the iPod for most users." The Times's David Pogue likes some things about the Zune too, but his bottom line is "this game is for watching, not playing. It may be quite a while before brown [one of the three colors Zune comes in] is the new white." Meanwhile, apparently in an effort to make sure all the major record labels are represented in Zune's online music store, Microsoft signed an unusual deal with Universal Music Group in which Universal gets "a payment for every Zune player sold" in return for more access to artists and music rights for Zune, the Associated Press reports.

Video sites like rabbits too

"Nichefication" is happening in Web video now, just as in social networking, where social sites of every possible narrow niche are multiplying exponentially (in the past week I've seen one for people who want to lose weight, one for alcoholics, and one for mobile social-networkers in India – see also "Social sites multiplying like…"). YouTube is "so last month," according to a Washington Post writer covering the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, because it's so general. Maybe it's the MySpace of Web video. "Already, users are finding the sheer volume of videos available on the Internet too difficult to digest and are looking for new ways to pick through them." One panelist, "Mary Hodder, chief executive of Dabble, which helps users search and organize online videos, estimated that 200,000 videos are uploaded onto the Web every day." She said video uploads to PhotoBucket, Metacafe, and AOL add up to 25,000-30,000 videos a day. Dabble wants to help users get to the content that matches their interests. Another new service, Jumpcut, helps users create their own video playlists. As for online video growth, MediaPost cites new findings by traffic measurer Hitwise showing that between March and this past September, visits to YouTube grew 249%; to MySpace Video 253%; to Google Video 170%; to Metacafe 133%; and to Yahoo Video 13%.