UK porn use: Milestone study

It's Britain's "first major study of online pornography" use, The Independent reports. One in four UK adults – 9 million men, 1.4 million women - downloaded pornographic images last year, "making Britain the fastest-growing market in the world for the booming £20 billion [about $37 billion] adult Web site industry." The Independent says the 9 million figure – up from 2 million in 2000 - is about 40% of the UK's male population. Some questions come to mind…. Would the numbers look much different in a similar study in the US? Is there something to be learned, here, about the impact of convenience and accessibility?

WindowsOneCare goes live

Microsoft's new PC security aid, which it describes as "all-in-one protection and maintenance service for your Windows XP PC," is now yours for $49.95/year (for up to three family PCs). Some may balk at paying that, but "there are plenty of users who will and probably should avail themselves of this product," according to Washington Post PC security columnist Brian Krebs. One plus: "Microsoft has said it will offer free phone, online chat or email support to all customers, a feature that is mostly lacking at the moment for consumer anti-virus products." According to the BBC, OneCare "is aimed at consumers and small businesses which currently have only the most basic protection against net-borne threats. Microsoft said up to 70% of consumers either have no security software on their PC or have programs that are no longer updated."

Martha's social-networking

Martha Stewart's next big party is a social-networking site for women 25-45. Scheduled to launch second half of 2007, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia's "space" will "allow members to share photographs, scrapbooks, recipes and similar projects with one another and home design experts," Reuters reports. It'll be interesting to see how a company so much about taste and esthetics will handle giving up control over said in a Web 2.0-style, user-driven Web site – or will it not really be just like MySpace? Washington Post columnist Frank Ahrens had some fun pondering similar questions: "Why do I have a feeling it will be a lot more like Martha's Space than MySpace?" and "I bet a couple smart guys in a garage could set up a decent-looking social network site in about a month. By the time Stewart hangs her site, social networks could be so 2006. We may be into anti-social networks by then, which is what I'm looking forward to, as in, KeepOutOfMySpace.com." Of course, many others are looking to capitalize on MySpace's success. I just received an email about MyGoodFriends.com, a family social-networking site.

Turning kids into 'pirates'?

That's one of the concerns of Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig – that "this age of [copyright] prohibition" may be turning kids into "pirates," the BBC reports. Lessig - also founder of the Creative Commons, a system of copyright licensing that allows creators to share and protect their work with allowances for non-commercial use - is seeking a balance between "the rights of the artist and the creativity of Web users for re-using material," he said in a talk at the Hay Festival in Wales. I think, in other words, he doesn't want all the conventional-media fears of copyright theft and the digital-rights management and litigation associated with them to shut down all the creative thinking going into "mashups" (see "The age of remixes, mashups"). Lessig said "a war is being fought with law and technology to eliminate piracy, likened to using 'DDT to kill a gnat'," according to the BBC. Meanwhile, the UK-based IFPI (umbrella for recording industry associations around the world), said it may sue users of Moscow-based music retailer AllofMP3.com, Computeractive.co.uk reports, adding that AllofMP3.com is the UK's No. 2 music-sales site (after iTunes), representing 44% of that market. All of MP3.com sells digital tunes at steep discounts and says it's all legal. And in other anti-piracy news, "more than 50 Swedish law enforcement officials raided 10 locations" associated with ThePirateBay.org, a site "accused of directing users to pirated films, music and software," the BBC reports. The site described itself as the largest BitTorrent (file-sharing technology) search index.

Police on MySpace

Police officers "consider MySpace one of their best resources," reports the Sacramento Bee in one of the first articles I've seen that lay out just *how* they use MySpace in investigations. "Whether officers are dealing with serious crimes or with youngsters whose worst offenses are inappropriate insults, they travel a similar investigative path. Start with a name or an event or an area. Find a person connected to it and then drill down, through friends and friends of friends, visiting their sites, riffling through their pictures, reading the correspondence they display publicly, and making printouts of anything incriminating." Bullying is what they expect to see at the middle school level. As for high school, one officer is described as keeping "an eye out for parties that are announced to the world, letting patrol officers know where the big bashes will be." That officer "recently spotted a photo of a bong that led to a student's arrest on drug and weapons charges…. Even when youngsters use aliases, their pictures, their friends' sites or other details often make them easy to track down. And even when a student's own site is fairly innocent, his or her face can still turn up in someone else's photo album of raunchy parties or worse, captured in embarrassing or illegal moments." But if teen MySpacers aren't yet thinking about police surveillance, they are responding to all the news reports about sexual predation. The Miami Herald reports that teens, "who often flirt with an adult world by pretending to be older than they actually are, are slowly stepping back into their teenage reality by revealing their true age and turning on [MySpace's] privacy filters. Anyone under 15 [actually 15 and 14, the official minimum age] automatically receives such filters." One 14-year-old told the Herald she doesn't even have an account "because of all the dangers that the Web site has." Other teens told Gannett New Jersey that media reports about the dangers are "overblown."

Users' Web

If anyone's still in doubt that the Web is increasingly what its users are making it, the latest Pew Internet & American Life study might add some clarity. "User-Generated Content and Interactivity at the Cutting Edge" is one of the headlines, and another is "Home broadband adoption is going mainstream and that means user-generated content is coming from all kinds of internet users." Thirty-five percent of all Net users have posted content to the internet," the study found. For most of these (26%), it's something they've created – artwork, photos, stories, or videos; next it's their own Web page (14%); then a blog or Web page for friends, groups belonged to, or work (13%); finally, it's one's own online journal or blog (8%). In all, about 31 million people have posted content to the Internet, and this "user-generated" Web is driven by "young home high-speed Internet users" – people under 30. This highly creative, interactive Web 2.0 is clearly thriving and growing.

Your very own virtual tunes

The idea is that we keep our music in a "central" virtual "CD case" on the Internet, rather than in a music player or case we carry around. Michael Robertson, founder of Oboe, one of these Web-based music "lockers," told CNET it's like the difference between "carrying around a pocketful of nickels" instead of accessing your money anywhere with a debit card. But "the concept isn't quite as simple as those trying to sell it might like. Music wrapped in certain types of digital rights management (DRM) technology - such as Apple Computer's Fairplay - can't be streamed from these lockers. Neither can tethered downloads acquired from subscription music services like Napster or Rhapsody," CNET adds. It mentions another music-locker company, Navio, that has deals with content companies (Sony, Fox Sports, Disney) that allow people basically to buy the rights to a song or program rather than the content itself. So the consumer "can get a new version of the still-copy-protected song [and play it on a player that recognizes different DRM] without having to repurchase it."

Wrong kind of support

Depending on a user's intent, MySpace is "as wholesome as cheerleading and baseball, or as troubling as guns, sex and drugs," reports ABC's Primetime. It zooms in on 12-year-old Sarah, a middle school student in the Midwest, who was "desperate to belong, trying to cope with the typical insecurities and growing pains that come with being a preteen." She told Primetime she was friendless and wanted to be like the stoned kid in the back of the bus who didn’t even care about what was going on around him. So she went online and "found plenty of outsiders like herself." She had "started experimenting with drugs before joining MySpace but getting online created a whole new world of possibilities. A simple search by ABC News on MySpace came up with tens of thousands of people talking about marijuana. Many more were in groups where sex was the topic, and nearly 55,000 people belonged to an online group called Drunks United." But this is not new to the Web - for years, bulimics and anorexics have found "support" in "pro-mia" and "pro-ana" community sites (see this New York Times article of 9/02). In fact, the sheer visibility of Web 2.0's version of socializing (and the way social-networking sites aggregate like-minded people so visibly) maybe actually help bring these communities out in the open more.

'Video-snacking'

Short, lightweight, tightly shot – maybe the McDonald's of TV programming, or moving eyecandy. That may be what TV on cellphones will look like. At least, the $64,000 (or $64 million?) question conventional TV programmers are looking at right now is how to do their thing on teeny screens and make money in the process. So far, "there are only about 3 million people out of the almost 200 million cellphone users in the United States who now watch video on their phones," the New York Times Magazine reports, but everybody knows that's changing fast, and video-enabled cellphones are already ubiquitous in Europe and Asia (with shows like the UK's "SeeMeTV"). The Times took an in-depth look, particularly at MTV's thinking and development process. MTV may be "most likely to succeed," as the youngest of the lot (at 25), but of course it's looking over its shoulder at young but popular "TV" aggregators like YouTube.com and Heavy.com (the other hot story these days, beginning to nudge aside social-networking). The thing that's interesting, here, is that - while TV producers are watching the competition to see how it does programming for mobile TV - they also need to watch what "regular people" (aka teen homemade video producers) are creating for YouTube.com and other video-sharing (or social-producing or media-networking!) sites. The kind of programming that results will probably be a lot more like the "video snacking" some observers are calling it. The Times says MTV looked at some of the competition's European programming, at best crude and in some cases downright pornographic, and knew it'd have to do something a little different – so far it's pretty much talking heads in the music world. It'll be interesting to see how PBS does mobile TV!

In other video-of-the-people news, Yahoo looks to be pointedly taking on YouTube and maybe going one better with "Yahoo! Studio," where "everyone can feature their work alongside some of the most well-known names in television and movies … share a single video, or create a whole channel full of your work and be discovered by like-minded, artists, businesses, and fans," says Yahoo. "We'll be watching!" The San Jose Mercury News reports on this. See also the BBC on "viral video" – looking specifically at YouTube.com, Break.com, and GetDemocracy.com, and how do-it-yourself video on the Web is taking off. And the San Jose Mercury News earlier in the week looked anecdotally at how teens and 20-somethings are using YouTube (as both consumers and producers).

Financial firms help fight child porn

We now know a little more about how credit card companies and banks will help in the anti-child porn fight (find coverage of the announcement in my 3/17 issue). The Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography "will report child porn sites they discover on the Web to a central tip line, slated to expand next month to receive the information," USATODAY reports. That's the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's CyberTipline that's expanding for this type of reporting (it has been accepting reports and talking with parents and other individuals since its inception). The coalition members - Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Bank of America, Chase, Citigroup, and PayPal – will also "block transactions for online child porn or, if law enforcement opens an investigation, help track sellers and buyers," USATODAY adds. All this is in addition to the reporting that Internet service providers such as AOL do. "Visa, MasterCard and American Express say they will identify sites accepting their cards to sell child porn but won't reveal customers unless subpoenaed."

Social-networking with a purpose

This is a sign of things to come – purposeful online socializing, or *niche* social-networking. In this case, it's software that looks for expertise within a social group. According to the New York Times, each friend in a group installs the Illumio software on his/her computer. Then, when someone has a question about anything – e.g., "Who knows John Smith?" or "Who know the lyrics to (a particular song)?" – the software searches all the hard drives in the group with either MSN or Google desktop search technology, looking for the person who has the most references to that subject in email, documents, etc. Then it asks the person with the most info on the subject if it's ok to tell the group s/he knows the most. If the person says, yes, the questioner gets the results, if not, the software asks the next most knowledgeable person for permission, and so on down the line in what's called a "reverse auction systems," the Times reports. The other types of niche social-networking already in place revolved more around specific subjects (a genre of music, SN for a particular age groups like teens) rather than specific purposes.

It all seems to be moving toward what the MIT Media Lab and other academics have long called the "constructivist" approach, as in collaborative learning. "Web 2.0" is now making collaborative everything more possible than ever (it's also very quantum – *flat* collaborative – rather than Newtonian / top-down / hierarchical collaborative learning, production, publishing, communicating, etc.). A fascinating shift to be watching.

Porn on dot-mobi

It's another sign that the mobile Web is really taking off and will soon be on a phone used by a teenager near you. "The .mobi domain is aimed specifically at websites designed to be viewed on mobile phones," the BBC reports. "The name was approved by Internet regulatory body ICANN last year, but businesses have not been able to buy one until this week." [The BBC adds that the Web's creator, Tim Berners-Lee, doesn't think it's a good idea. He says dot-mobi will have the effect of fragmenting the Web. He'd rather see sites designed so they can "recognize" the kind of device on which they're being viewed.] Another sign the cellphone Web is going mainstream is porn. With the porn industry increasingly targeting its content at cellphones, "many technology companies have begun developing real-time monitoring and filtering applications to block adult content from being viewed by underage cellphone users," the Wall Street Journal reports. It's not easy, though, the Journal adds. "Experts in blocking software say identifying porn on cellphones is much more difficult than on computers because wireless Web sites usually have very little text and the images are much smaller." So, although all the major US carriers offer some basic parental controls, none can actually offer real-time filtering as on computers. So far, parents have two choices: allow or disallow Web access on a kid's phone.

Teen MySpace hackers

In this case, MySpace was one of the victims. Two teens, 18 and 19, on Long Island (N.Y.) have been charged with felony counts of illegal computer access and extortion, Playfuls.com in Romania reports. The two operators of MySpaceplus.com allegedly "threatened to distribute a foolproof method for stealing [MySpace user personal] information unless MySpace paid them $150,000." If convicted, they could face more than four years in jail. As Newsday (on Long Island) quotes a Georgetown University law professor as saying, the two represent a long tradition of hacking into systems to point out their flaws, but they get "points off" for extortion. The story was picked up throughout the US, and a number of other countries, including India, at Techtree.com, and Australia (here's the Sydney Morning Herald).

Boston-area teen arrested

A freshman at Winthrop High School on Boston's North Shore was arrested for compiling a "hate list" and making threats in MySpace against "a number of students and at least one adult," the Boston Globe reports. " None of the written threats directly targeted the Winthrop school community, Superintendent Steven Jenkins said, but the incident was enough to shake parents in the oceanside town." Threats were also found in notebooks in the boy's home.

Tech 'whiz kids' help pols

There were some tech-savvy 20-somethings helping out during the 2004 election, but during this next one they'll be everywhere. In fact, high school-age interns will probably be doing a lot more than running for coffee on campaigns or Capitol Hill. "Veteran politicians more familiar with turntables and typewriters are enlisting twentysomething computer whiz kids to help them brave the digital world of blogs, podcasts and the Web as they look to connect directly with voters," the Associated Press reports. "The way politicians and their staffs view blogs and other Internet tools is dramatically different from just two years ago," the AP adds. It points to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R) of Tennessee, who answers posts to his blog "on a weekly basis" and has recorded podcasts and downloadable online videos.

Spyware worse

PC security is not getting better. Where spyware's concerned, using the Net is getting *more* dangerous at home or work, the New York Times reports. "Spyware" is a broad term that can mean anything from harmless cookies to Trojan horse software that can take over your PC. One of the riskier kinds is the growing problem: keylogging software, the kind that logs and sends your every keystroke to someone interested in credit card numbers, passwords, and other information only you should know. Make sure your kids know (they probably do) that this kind of code can get installed by worms/viruses in email and IMs and by malicious Web sites people click to from search engines (see my "Risky Web search" last week, which deals with the most-risky-Web-site list). Here's an example in The Register of a "creative" new worm carried by IMs – it loads a "rogue browser" that pretends to be Internet Explorer but replaces its personal home page, sending you to a page that downloads all kinds of spyware to your PC.

District: Students accountable

If this news doesn't have a precedent-setting effect, certainly other public school officials are watching. A school board in Illinois unanimously passed rule changes so that students will now be "accountable for what they post on blogs and social-networking Web sites," the Chicago Tribune reports. "All students participating in extracurricular activities, including athletic teams, fine arts groups and school clubs, will have to sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of 'illegal or inappropriate' behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action." Those student participants represent about 80% of the district's 3,200 high school students. Interestingly, only one parent commented during the meeting's public-comment period. She said the district was overstepping its bounds, that monitoring what students are doing online is parents' job. Something else that occurs: They'll probably soon be changing the rules for middle-schoolers too, because online socializing (and pranks and harassment, etc. certainly don't just occur at the high school level. [People, do post in our forum if you agree/disagree!]

State game laws: Update

At the state level, legislation about videogame sales to minors appears to be gathering momentum – even though a Tennessee bill was recently withdrawn by its sponsor, Gamasutra.com reports. Louisiana is working on such a law (see ArsTechnica.com, and one in Maryland just got signed by its governor. Interestingly, in Maryland's case, the Entertainment Software Association, which has successfully fought similar state laws in courts around the country, says it won't fight this one. "The law is narrowly written to cover the kind of content that would only be seen in a pornographic movie or magazine, and as such, can be seen as an extension of current laws barring minors from purchasing pornographic DVDs to video games," Ars Technica reports.

Games getting serious

While videogame violence grabs a lot of headlines, there's something else parents of gamers may want to know about: the "Serious Games Movement." The movement has even had its own summit. It's all about "creating games that play roles in areas such as education, health, public policy, science, government and corporate training," USATODAY reports. One source called it "stealth education." The most well-known example is America's Army, with about 5 million registered users. Originally designed as a recruiting tool, its really viewed as a game (which gives people a pretty good feel for what combat's like). But there are more "serious" examples. One is a project at University of Washington looking at whether game technology can "help adolescents and young adults manage chronic diseases like diabetes."

Oh yeah, MySpace's music!

Lest we forget, amid all the media attention to a different topic and besides the general teen-socializing part, there's another whole "world" in MySpace – a major attraction to members of all ages. That would be music. Garage and indie artists of the pre-Internet era are envious of today's bands' accessibility to fans worldwide and vice versa in this online very interactive space. It's "American Idol" for countless musicians, giving them instant, broad feedback and support, even a chance to develop a significant fan base with no money, even literally to become famous fairly quickly. "Now fans of extreme metal or any other underground genre can discover more new music pointing and clicking in one afternoon than in a year of scanning zine pages and independent record store shelves in the not-so-long-past days of yore," reports the Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph. "For New Hampshire bands far outside the bright lights of big cities with their avant garde underground scenes, the scope and reach of MySpace is invaluable." To me, another indicator that social-networking is here to stay and growing.

Word to the wise MySpacer

One feature of MySpace considered very cool to some of its young users is that they can customize their spaces not only esthetically but also functionally. They can add free software code (downloadable from sites out on the Web or from fellow MySpacers) to "enhance" it. One type of code people are adding "spies" on people who come to their profiles. Here's where a heads-up is needed, according to the Washington Post. "Be sure to read the fine print when a product like this says 'free,' and don't be surprised if the software is used to spy on you." Also, I'd add, sometimes there's no fine print (only legit code providers would have credible fine print), and there are malicious providers taking advantage of this popular feature of MySpace. Case in point from the Post: "Take, for instance, the latest scam being passed around like a digital disease on MySpace: a message advertising software that promises users the ability to track who is viewing their profile pages. This thing, brought to my attention by the folks at Fortinet, arrives as a Myspace bulletin (bulletins allow Myspace users to send messages to all of their 'friends' simultaneously) and directs users to visit www.myfriendspy.com [don't go there!], which claims the visitor can download the software after clicking on an icon that automatically posts the same bulletin to their friends." What Friendspy does is install spyware on the MySpacer's own PC. If you have someone at your house smart enough to play around with software code, maybe just have him or her read the whole Post piece – s/he'd probably find it interesting. There's a whole new industry of MySpace-related third-party software developing, both legitimate and very shady.

Critical thinking challenge/opp

Here's the challenge many librarians have these days: You're a research specialist, but you're also a "digital immigrant" instructing "digital natives." They're extremely familiar with *one* research tool (for socializing and entertainment), which is where they reflexively go for all information. What smart media-literacy specialists are saying now, though, is that's not all bad. As one information-studies professor told the Hartford Courant, it's not whether they use Web search engines that's the issue it's *how* they use them (and whether they know when to use other valuable resources too). In fact, librarians are using kids' Internet fluency as a teaching tool too: "The trick," the Courant says they've found, "is to get students to approach school research with the same zeal with which they pursue leisurely information" – like cheats for videogames and friends' comments in social-networking sites. Not just in terms of enthusiasm, but also in terms of critical thinking. As then-9th-grade teacher Marel Rogers in Connecticut told me way back in 1997, she teaches critical thinking by telling her students: "Start out with your favorite things - a sports team, a music group, a friend who's moved to a different city, and go to those Web sites. You already know a lot about those subjects, and this will make you more discriminating." [See also "Critical thinking: Kids' best research (and online safety) tool".]

Social-networkers' protests

Students are starting to agitate for their free-speech rights, starting in San Bernardino. "Zach Fuller, 18, held up a sign recently in front of Etiwanda High School proclaiming 'We don't need no thought control'," reports the San Bernardino Sun. Zach "was protesting the school's decision to suspend five of his friends for profane online postings made off campus." The Sun quotes the executive director of the Nashville, Tenn.-based First Amendment Center as saying that social-networking technology, or the user-driven Web, is opening up a whole new area for the free-speech issue. But the San Bernardino students' postings weren't just profane. Apparently, defamation might've been an issue too: "The five students suspended last month had posted profanity-laden comments about a teacher on MySpace from their home computers. Vulgar language and photos of the teacher accompanied other pictures of Nazi images." Here's an item I posted last week about school policymaking and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "FAQ on Student Blogging" and free speech.

Risky Web searching

Tell your kids not to search for "free screensavers" in any search engine. Of course, secure Web searching goes much deeper than that, but those are the "most dangerous words to search" in terms of bad stuff that gets downloaded from bad Web sites, the BBC reports. The BBC is referring to a new study on this sponsored by PC security firm McAfee. "It is well known that visiting sites offering porn, gambling and free MP3s leaves users at serious risk of falling victim to spyware and adware," according to the BBC. "However, the research by Ben Edelman and Hannah Rosenbaum reveals that those carrying out searches for innocuous subjects are at risk too." Searchers should be very careful when searching for any free downloads like ringtones and screensavers. The results from searches for file-sharing sites like "Bearshare" and "limewire" are also extremely risky. The other two terms on the most-risky list are "WinMX" and "download Yahoo Messenger." The danger we're talking about here is that the sites these searches lead to might download to the family PC something else altogether: software code that logs your every keystroke (and thus captures user names, passwords, credit card numbers, etc.) or enables malicious hackers to take control of your PC (in a way that's tough to detect). [Here's my earlier coverage on "SiteAdvisor," the software the study's authors used to tell them whether it's safe to click on links to specific sites.]

Kids too plugged in?

The bottom line of CNET's article on whether too much tech use can harm kids' necks, thumbs, backs, etc., is that there is way too much we don't know about it. "Some physical therapists and pediatricians are already citing cases of RSI [repetitive stress injuries] in children as young as 8 years old" and "a study from 2000 in Australia on the effects of laptop computers in schools showed that 60% of students aged 10 to 17 complained of neck and back discomfort while using the PC," CNET reports. On the other hand, "a theory called the 'Healthy Worker Effect' supposes that when someone performs a repetitive task for a long time, like lifting heavy boxes or surfing the Web, the person can develop a resistance to problems associated with the activity." So another "bottom line" comes to mind: Until we know more, moderation is a good thing. Meanwhile, a reality check: The San Francisco Chronicle describes in detail the tech-related life of Daly City, Calif., high school senior Nathan Yan, adding that "if the amount of time Nathan spends on the computer seems unusual, it's not.… Young people reported spending about 6-1/2 hours per day occupied with various media" from the Net to TV, with TV use losing out to Web use among teens (here's my coverage of the Kaiser study last year).

Schools: Control or communicate?

The article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin leads with two examples of high school students videoing and posting fights on YouTube.com. But the story's about a deeper question schools are grappling with in the face of something school administrators admit they don't fully understand: how to deal with out-of-school online behavior that can affect school safety. "Critics say [social-networking] sites are a superhighway for spreading harmful content and bad blood much faster and wider than word-of-mouth, and that Department of Education security policies haven't kept up," according to the Star-Bulletin. It says one school board member in Honolulu is interested in a term used in a proposed school-safety policy in Utah: "substantial disruption." The policy would allow schools "to react to off-campus situations earlier, especially if they cause 'substantial disruption' to school operations or infringe on student or staff rights." A private school in the Honolulu area that "has had its share of cyber-situations" told the Star-Bulleting that school-parent-student communication is key – "acting quickly to show students and parents the harm caused has shown good results." And here's a story at Chicago's NBC5.com about how a suburban school district in Illinois is "considering new rules that would make students more accountable for what they post on sites like MySpace.com.... School officials said [the rules are] more about prevention than punishment, and what they hope to do is open the lines of communicating between the parent and the student."

Gameplayer porn

A mom in Osceola County, Fla., is warning other parents about "pocket porn," WFTV reports. She's referring to porn that can be downloaded from the Web to Sony's PlayStation Portable gameplayers, which connect to the Internet wirelessly. They have parental controls, but the PSP manual explains how to reset them, and they're reset automatically when the players' batteries wear down, the mom discovered after she'd set the parental controls, then caught her 13-year-old viewing pornography. Her son also taught her that, "with one click, the history [of sites visited] becomes history." He told her it's a feature "all the kids know about." Elsewhere on the porn front, people can now buy adult movies online and copy them to DVDs that will play on any screen, including a TVs, the Associated Press reports. "It's another first for adult film companies that pioneered the home video market and rushed to the Internet when Hollywood studios still saw it as a threat."

Gamer view worth notice

"Morality in video games is not uncommon," writes a reader of the Los Angeles Times. "Even in the much-reviled Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the main character deals with stopping a corrupt police force and trying to halt the sale of drugs in his city. The idea that gratuitous violence is the major factor that drives game sales is preposterous. In fact, games that are rated 'M' for mature make up only about 12% of video game sales. Of these, only a handful feature violence or sex without some kind of moral context, and these usually sell abysmally."

Net good & bad for teens: Study

The results of an important set of studies in the American Psychological Association's journal are not surprising but useful confirmation: "Some youth [75-90% of whom use the Net in the US] benefit from Internet use while for others it can exacerbate self-destructive behaviors." The study is presented in six articles in a special issue of Developmental Psychology, edited by Patricia Greenfield in UCLA's Department of Psychology and Zheng Yan at State University of New York, Albany. Some of the positives mentioned: "essential social support for otherwise isolated adolescents" and "the improvement of academic performance and health awareness." Key negatives in the study included: "the sharing of self-injury practices" and the potential online communication has for normalizing and encouraging "self-injurious behavior." The six articles are available in full. Links are provided at the bottom of the APA's press release.

'Predator panic'

Could we be in the middle of a bit of a panic? Dateline's now weekly "To Catch a Predator" sends a certain message. Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, told Reuters that we have "a complete culture of fear." Benjamin Radford, who "wrote about Megan's Laws and lawmaking in response to moral panics in his book Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us, writes in science magazine Skeptical Inquirer that "Despite relatively few instances of child predation and little hard data on topics such as Internet predators, journalists invariably suggest that the problem is extensive, and fail to put their stories in context." He adds that "the issue is not whether children need to be protected; of course they do. The issues are whether the danger to them is great, and whether the measures proposed will ensure their safety…. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 'based on what we know about those who harm children, the danger to children is greater from someone they or their family knows than from a stranger'."

Radford zooms in on the constantly cited "one in five children approached by online predators" statistic from the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center's 2000 online victimization study. He writes, "Not a single one of the reported solicitations led to any actual sexual contact or assault. Furthermore, almost half of the 'sexual solicitations' came not from 'predators' or adults but from other teens. When the study examined the type of Internet 'solicitation' parents are most concerned about (e.g., someone who asked to meet the teen somewhere, called the teen on the telephone, or sent gifts), the number drops from 'one in five' to 3 percent."

I called Janis Wolak, a co-author on the 2000 study (the Center will be releasing an update next month), and asked for her view of all the stories about online predation in social-networking sites, and her response was, "Overall, there aren't that many cases that seem related to these sites, given the millions of teens on them…. Basically, what puts kids at risk is when they talk about sex with people they meet online, and the vast majority of them don't get involved in that kind of situation." These perspectives are worth parents' consideration, as are teens' views shared in the BlogSafety forum that maybe parents need to "chill" about social-networking. There's a lot of great stuff going on in MySpace and other such sites too, some of them say (though others say they find it "boring" or "too much of a popularity contest"). Certainly the picture's a lot more granular than the news media make it out to be. But what do *you* think? Email your thoughts anytime to anne@netfamilynews.org.

MTV's new music store

MTV's got the Urge to take back the music scene, it appears. Urge is its new online music store, offering 2 million songs (Apple's iTunes has about 3 million). Like iTunes, Urge sells "individual songs for $0.99. But unlike iTunes, Urge also offers unlimited access for $9.95 per month," reports Internet News. So people can both buy and rent their music for "everything except iPods," The Register points out. That would be "more than 100 digital music players," the BBC reports. It's actually a Microsoft/MTV deal. "URGE will be the default setting in the next version of Windows Media Player," The Register adds. This may actually have an impact on young people's holiday wish list this year, as we consider the impact on online families. For "More on music," see the Washington Post, reviewing Last.fm and lala (see also my "Swapping tunes, supporting musicians" about lala and my slightly more sweeping "Creative online music communities").

Online socializing: Latest data

The Top 10 social-networking sites now reach a whopping 45% of active Web users, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which just released its latest figures on the phenomenon's growth and popularity. Together, the ten sites have grown 47% in the past year (from 46.8 million unique visitors in April 2005 to 68.8 million last month). "The two biggest surges came from MySpace, which grew from 8.2 million users in April 2005 to 38.4 million last month, and MSN Spaces, up from 1.9 million to 7.1 million over the same period," reported the Washington Post. The study illustrates how new and loosely defined this user-driven part of the Web is – some of the Top 10 are more about blogging, or creating your own Web page (MSN Spaces and Blogger), some more about media-hosting (YouTube), and others more about socializing (MySpace and MSN Groups) - though all have aspects of each, and the lines keep getting more blurry! Nielsen's Top 10 are: MySpace, Blogger, Classmates Online, YouTube, MSN Groups, AOL Hometown, Yahoo! Groups, MSN Spaces, SixApart TypePad, and Xanga. [If this were about the top social-networking sites among teens, the list would include Facebook, MyYearbook, Hi5, and Friendster, as eMarketer reported in March (see "Teen traffic").] Here's WebProNews on the Nielsen report.

Beyond MySpace?!

Not all teens like MySpace, of course. Also reflected in our BlogSafety forum is the view that – to some teens – online social-networkers need to "get a life." The Fort Worth Star-Telegram cites the view of 18-year-old Summer Stoker, "disappointed" with MySpace "by what seemed like less of a social network and more of a popularity contest." Another factor that may cause some teens to move on is all the monitoring that schools and law-enforcement folk are doing in MySpace. For example, the Mississippi Education Department's director of school safety regularly cruises social-networking sites "looking for anything that would threaten students, school officials or the general safety of a school," the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger reports (and two Maryland teens were charged with setting fires after police saw them bragging in MySpace, the Associated Press reported Sunday). The Star-Telegram article looks at the history of social-networking as well as where it's headed, ending with the idea that maybe teens are looking for all-inclusive, immersive virtual worlds like SecondLife.com. The Fort Worth reporter may be on to something, if the "online nightclub for the global teen market" that launched yesterday takes off (here's the press release). BTW, Second Life is not for minors. See more on this in my items "Lively alternate lives" and "Second Life for teens."

New front in child-porn war

That would be child traffickers in child porn. The arrest yesterday of a 28-year-old computer consultant in Detroit "signals a new front in the [US] government's response to the revelation that minors have been using Webcams to run their own child pornography Web sites," the New York Times reports. The Times adds that the arrest could have a crippling effect on this once-burgeoning business. The man was accused by Justin Berry, 19, of "luring him to Michigan when he was 13, molesting him and setting up a Web site that charged a monthly fee for videos of him performing various sex acts." Berry testified about his child-porn business in congressional hearings last month, after going public in a front-page New York Times story last December (see "Kids & Webcams" and "Porn revolution & teen girls").

France's teen tech lobbyist

The US social-networking scene (not to mention the music file-sharing one) needs an Aziz Ridouan, 18. The New York Times quotes the economic director of one of France's largest consumer advocacy groups as saying Aziz "may still be in high school, but [he] has a more profound understanding of copyright law than most lawyers and members of Parliament." I'm sure, actually, that we have a lot of people like Aziz, but US adults - including lawmakers - need to listen to a lot more teens before we pass any laws. That's what the French Parliament is reportedly doing (or some members of it and the government) where legislation about P2P file-sharing is concerned. "Mr. Ridouan, who began lobbying with protests against America Online when he was 12, first came to the national media's attention in 2004 as the founder of the Audionautes — which roughly translates as 'the audio surfers.' The Audionautes is a nonprofit association that provides legal assistance to those accused of illegally downloading music, many of whom were taken to court by the Civil Society of Phonographic Producers, the French equivalent of the Recording Industry Association of America." Aziz is missing some school because of his lobbying, but "he has a note from the French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, excusing him from class when he meets with government officials." Perhaps Britain has a similar need – at least its version of the RIAA said "the issue needs discussion" after the release of a study showing that 59% of Britons said they'd copied music from their own CDs (55% saying they thought it perfectly legal). The Register's headline, though: "Poll: 55% break copyright law."

Sex info via text msg

The San Francisco Department of Public Health launched cellphone-based sex and health information for the city's "sexually active 12-to-24-year-olds," USATODAY reports. Called SexInfo, "the service focuses on everything from what to do 'if ur condom broke' to whom to call 'if ur feeling down ... like u wanna xcape ur life'," according to USATODAY. It's based on a similar service of that name that launched in London in 2004.

'Dollhouses' & other digital games

When you were a kid, did you ever play a role-reversal game with your parents at the dinner table? My brother and I did, and apparently the game hasn't gone away. It has simply gone virtual. The New York Times depicts Francesca, 9, and Richard, 6, "hard at play in Pelham, N.Y., renovating the four-bedroom house they share and picking up after the wayward family they look after." Only that 4BR house is virtual. It's in The Sims. Please check my newsletter this week for more on this and the highlights of all the gaming news from the E3 extravaganza (annual gaming inudstry conference and show).

Teen social-networker 'tethered'

A 13-year-old in Detroit who lied about her age online and ran off with the 25-year-old man she lied to, was charged this week with "home truancy," the Detroit News reports. "Home truancy is considered a "status offense," or an offense where a crime is not committed, but where behavior of a minor warrants court action," the News explains. In this case, the court action includes requiring the 13-year-old to wear a tether (a GPS-enabled ankle strap) and stay off the Internet until her pre-trial hearing later this month. This is the first case I've seen in the news where tethering was applied to a Net-related runaway case. The Indiana man whom the girl "met" in MySpace "was freed Thursday morning from the Macomb County Jail after officials decided he did not commit a crime by driving the girl across Michigan." The girl had given his number to a girlfriend, who got worried and called the girl's mother, who called the police. Here's the Detroit Free Press's coverage. Cases like this certainly contribute to the "culture of fear" Reuters refers to in in "As freedom shrinks, teens seek MySpace to hang out" (also in the Washington Post).

Female screennames riskier

Tell online girls you know that if they choose screennames that give away their gender, they're much more likely to get "threatening and sexually explicit messages," the Associated Press reports. The AP is citing a study by Michel Cukier, a professor at the University of Maryland's Center for Risk and Reliability. "In the study, automated chat-bots and human researchers logged on to chat rooms under female, male, and ambiguous screen names, such as Nightwolf, Orgoth and Stargazer. Bots using female names averaged 100 malicious messages a day, compared with about four for those using male names and about 25 for those with ambiguous names. Researchers logging on themselves produced similar results." Professor Cukier told the AP that writing software code that can tell the difference between male and female online shows the offending messages weren't automatically generated.

Federal social-networking law proposed

Rep. Fitzgerald (R) of Pennsylvania has just proposed the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), a law that would require US schools and libraries to block social-networking sites and would require FTC and FCC involvement in public education and regulation of "commercial Web sites that let users create public 'Web pages or profiles' and also offer a discussion board, chat room, or email service," CNET reports. "That's a broad category that covers far more than social-networking sites such as Friendster and Google's Orkut.com. It would also sweep in a wide range of interactive Web sites and services, including Blogger.com, AOL and Yahoo's instant-messaging features, and Microsoft's Xbox 360, which permits in-game chat." CNET adds that the bill "is part of a new, poll-driven effort by Republicans to address topics that they view as important to suburban voters."

The new Netiquette

It's developing organically, has both online and offline elements, and – as you can imagine – is complicated. As you would expect from any representation of multiple relationships. Of course I'm talking about social-networking Netiquette. It is taking shape among millions of teens and 20-somethings as I write, and it's growing out of a formula that looks something like this (thoughtfully boiled down and reported by the Los Angeles Times): "First, name the eight most important people in your life - friends, family, rock stars. These are your Top 8. Now rank those people in order of importance. Finally, send a copy of this list to everybody you know, including people who didn't make the cut. Be careful not to hurt the wrong feelings, or you may end up getting bumped from other people's Top 8s. Go ahead and bite your nails. Realize the magnitude of these decisions." This is the kind of thinking the social-networkers at your house or school are going through. It just might interfere with homework. ;-) But isn't it great to know that etiquette rules are developing? Example: "Number of friends: Too many, you're deemed a 'MySpace whore,' too few, a loser. (Caveat: If you're in a band, or you're a middle-school kid who lied about your age to get on MySpace and are competing with friends to see who's most popular, 'too many' is a good thing [but then that would mark you as underage, right?].)" The article's a great read, and - for people who think "kids have no manners these days" - essential reading. Wasn't etiquette always based on civilization's social realities and necessities? Social-networking is a fledgling but real part of civilization now, and good behavioral thinking is in process.

FTC's social-networking advice

The US Federal Trade Commission this week unveiled its "Safety Tips for Social Networking Online" for parents and tweens and teens. If all your kids do is absorb and act on the "Quick Facts" right at the top, they'll go a long way to doing their own good protective work online. Because the Web is now so accessible in so many places and on so many devices, increasingly we need to empower our kids to think for themselves online – stay alert in public social sites and situations, think before they post, and protect their privacy and reputations. Here are our own 6 tips for teens at BlogSafety.

Mobile uploads

Just as social-networkers soon won't need computers to use MySpace, video and photo uploaders won't need computers either. Now young video producers can upload their homemade films to YouTube.com with their cellphones, CNET reports. "A growing number of handheld devices are capable of recording video. YouTube wants to disconnect users from their Web cams and computers," according to CNET, which is likely to spell "greater numbers of spontaneous and candid clips." Something for users and their parents to think about. Spontaneity is a two-edged sword, with a big potential downside for the subjects of spontaneously uploaded video clips. The Register in the UK mentions a fairly graphic example involving a phone-distributed still photo: "Teachers at a school in Newcastle upon Tyne are being balloted on strike action after a pupil who snapped a picture of a female teacher's cleavage on his mobile phone was allowed to return to class. The snap was taken as the teacher leaned forward, and subsequently sent to other pupils." It's not a great leap to think about videos posted to a Web site.

Next social-networking issue

To my mind, the big three concerns where young online socializers are concerned are predation (by adults), bullying (peers), and marketing (marketers and peers). Predation has the highest fear factor, of course, but probably the lowest across-the-board impact; it's also where most of the media attention is stuck at the moment. Bullying, which covers everything from gossipy meanness to harassment to threats of school violence, is definitely on schools' radar screens (so it's the No. 2 SN topic in the media) and needs more parental mindshare. The media are only just beginning to look at the marketing piece. Today, CNET gives a great example of what social-networkers can expect on the viral marketing front. "Viral marketing" is the very cost-effective practice of marketers using users as "co-marketers" (instead of one-to-many mass-marketing, it's peer-to-peer, much more personal – a message from a friend is much more influential, the theory goes). The potential, in other words, and what we'll be hearing more about from psychologists and watchdogs, is impressionable kids being used to promote products. "Using special tools, marketers and people seeking fame on MySpace [for example] can game the system and take advantage of what experts call 'unintended features' allowed by the Web site," CNET reports, referring to techniques like data-mining people's profiles (to target ads and users) and automating messages to "Friends" lists. See CNET for details. Of course, politicians get this, too. California gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides has a MySpace page, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

More Mac attacks?

Of course, it seems to be a bit of a conflict of interest when a computer security company says computers are at risk, but Macs are reportedly increasingly vulnerable. Antivirus provider McAfee "claims that Macs are 'just as vulnerable' as Windows PCs, but admits there is no significant risk to Mac users at the moment," ZDNET reports. McAfee now sells VirusScan for Mactel. To back up its announcement, "McAfee cited the release in March of a patch that fixed 20 vulnerabilities in OS X. But although a proof-of-concept worm that targeted the OS X platform was also discovered earlier this year, many more flaws were discovered in Microsoft products over the same period," ZDNET adds. Here's coverage from Internet News. Adding this May 12: Later in the week, Apple issued a patch that fixed "some 25 different vulnerabilities," Internet News reported.

Safe search for kids

The Washington Post says "the next target for fed-up parents" after parental-controls software is "Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo," but I think parents have been thinking about what young Web researchers can stumble on with search engines for a long time. Before social-networking and blogging came along, that was a big reason why there were (and are) parental controls – especially for kids and tweens. Certainly it's true that "the upside of the modern-day search engine - an index of Web sites on the Internet - is also the downside": the bad stuff that's accessible along with the good. The Post features NetTrekker, "a child-safe search engine featuring 180,000 sites that are regularly reviewed by 400 volunteer teachers" and being used in some 12,000 schools. A home version is now available. The Post doesn't mention Kidsnet parental controls (described in this newsletter a couple of years ago), also drawing on a database of only human-reviewed Web sites and with its own kid-friendly search engine, Hazoo.com. But there's also something to be said for a simple, one-task product like NetTrekker that can work with any filtering software (the company says). For other options, see "Kid-friendly search engines."

For kids who just want to get their homework done – find some sites that describe black-footed ferrets or list all the native American tribes in English a 4th-grader can understand - these safe search engines' biggest selling point is relevance. Even filtered Google turns up *way* too many results irrelevant to kids in K-6.

MySpace passe?

Hardly. But young interests do move on, and here's an early sign: "MySpace is just so last year" in the Wichita Eagle. The Eagle leads with the experience of high school sophomore Lula Larios, who has moved on to Bebo.com, a more closed social-networking site along the lines of Facebook.com. The key is that her peer group appears to be at Bebo too. Teens don't switch services individually, it appears – it's a group migration, which makes any social-networking site, including MySpace "stickier" than your typical Web site. The Eagle looks at other such sites, including Buzznet.com (though for people 18+, its Terms of Service say) and FriendsorEnemies.com (which looks more like an online party, or social, game than mere social-networking). Further evidence, too, of how amorphous social-networking is – it's sprouting all kinds of offshoots, and getting grafted into media-hosting and social-bookmarking or -tagging sites like YouTube.com and TagWorld.com (which the Eagle also mentions). The one concern about the more closed sites that's just beginning to surface is whether they provide a false sense of security – I'll address in more detail soon.

99-cent tunes

The price holds. After a long negotiation, "Apple Computer and four major record labels have renewed their deals to sell songs on iTunes for 99 cents," CNET reports. "Record labels would like to charge different prices for more popular or newer songs," CNET says, but "a New York investigation into whether record labels have worked together to set the prices for digital music is expected to keep the 99-cent model intact for the foreseeable future." On the illegal side, the RIAA is targeting 12 "hot spots" (e.g., Austin, Chicago, Miami) where "multi-state criminal operations are producing and selling bogus CDs," Internet News reports . On the file-sharing front, the RIAA and MPAA have sent letters to 40 US universities saying "they want the colleges to filter traffic to stop what they describe [the] an 'ever-evolving problem'" of the illegal sharing of music and movies, the BBC reports. In other music news, British music producer Mark Vidler may be taking mashups mainstream, the Christian Science Monitor reports. "One of Mr. Vidler's recipes goes like this: Take a dash of Lionel Richie's piano from 'Hello,' sprinkle in the vocal from The Police's 'Wrapped Around Your Finger,' pour in the melody line of Elvis Costello's 'Watching the Detectives,' add a slither of Peggy Lee singing 'Fever,' and garnish with a pinch of back-up vocals from The Hollies and Led Zeppelin." Meanwhile, two popular '70s and '80s bands – the Allman Brothers Band and Cheap Trick – are suing Sony BMG for a bigger piece of the royalties pie, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Converting virtual cash to real

Ok, parents of gamers, wrap your synapses around this: an ATM card that allows you to withdraw real money from your cache of virtual money in your favorite online game world. It's here, and it's not a huge leap when you consider that people are paying real money for virtual weapons, artifacts, and real estate in online games (see "Virtual real estate mogul" and "Games' shadow economy"). The New York Times reports that "today the makers of Entropia Universe, a popular online science-fiction game, plan to introduce a real-world A.T.M. card that will allow players instantly to withdraw hard cash automatically converted from their virtual game treasury. So a player with, say, 2,000 spare P.E.D.'s (Project Entropia Dollars) left over after purchasing a new laser rifle in the game could withdraw $200 and take a date to a real-life ballgame." Sweden-based Project Entropia has about 250,000 players, the Times mentions. BTW, this is the kind of game (alternate-reality) that attracts more equal numbers of male and female players. For a female game developer's perspective check out this piece from the Detroit Free Press. As for games' breaking news: "In a highly unusual move, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board changed the rating of a popular Xbox 360 and PC game [Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion] from T (Teen) to M (Mature) based on hidden and not-so-hidden blood, gore and nudity built into the game," the Detroit Free Press reported, adding that Elder Scrolls IV is "a critically acclaimed role-playing game."

Students' free speech online

If it's illegal offline, it's illegal on the Web, says law professor Anita Ramasastry at the University of Washington in a thorough commentary at FindLaw.com. She refers to threats, harassment, defamation, libel. In fact, blogging and social-networking sites actually help law enforcement gather evidence on illegal activity and can prevent dangerous situations from playing out. An example being the recent case in Kansas in which teens appear to have been prevented by police from carrying out an attack on their school (see "Shooting rampage avoided due to MySpace" in ArsTechnica.com). But what about when student online activities are not illegal but upsetting to school administrators or faculty? "In such cases … the First Amendment will protect many student postings, as long as they do not 'materially disrupt' school activities - and as long as the students attend public, not private, schools." She looks at cyberbullying and defamation, as well as cases where postings or pictures can be "instrumentality of crime" (as when a pedophile grooms a child with his posts), evidence of violating the law (such as the posted video of the fire-bombing of an old Air Force hangar by two California teenagers), or crimes themselves (e.g., comments that constitute criminal threats). She also comments on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "The Student Blogger's Legal FAQ." Also this week: the Associated Press's "Legal questions rise as schools punish students for using MySpace" and CNET on how some schools are dealing with students' generally superior tech literacy.

AOL's S-N site: Sneak peeks

AOL's soon-to-be-unveiled social-networking offering will be called AIM Pages, probably bringing more visual effects and customization tools to the socializing that its 47.6 million AIM instant-messaging users do. "It's a way to marry AIM with MySpace by offering customizable pages that teens and others can use to create their own world while also instant messaging," says USATODAY in its snapshot of how the Internet giant's doing. USATODAY says that, with AIM Pages, "you could tape your own music video countdown show with a webcam or video camera, using your own intros and AOL's library of music videos. AOL will provide the tools to merge the homegrown video with, say, videos from Shakira and Madonna, and post the show online for the world to see." Here's an earlier Business Week peek: "AOL: MySpace invader." Later this week, AOL announced it was adding free phoning to AIM by the end of this month, CNET reported. AIM Phoneline will allow AIM users "to receive incoming calls from any phone."

In other social-networking news, Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly this week called on MySpace "to strengthen protection of children against sexual predators, including raising the minimum age for users to 18 from 14," Reuters reported, and Knowledge@Wharton goes broad and deep about the whole business.

The wrong kind of support

Buried in a CNET article about students' filtering workarounds is an aside about the kind of support parents don't want their kids to have. Under the apt heading "Scarier than MySpace," writer Stephanie Olsen reports there are some 500 discussion boards on the Web about self-mutilation (up from 400 a year ago). Young people who cut themselves "are increasingly turning to the Internet to vent and commiserate with others about their secret affliction, according to a new study from Cornell University psychologists." Olsen adds that "of the 3,200 messages analyzed, nearly a third of the comments [mostly from girls 14-20] were supportive in nature," another 15% were about "sharing methods for cutting or burning oneself or concealing the behavior," and 20% "about triggers and motivation for self-hurting practices." These boards tend to support the behavior by making it seem "normal," Olsen cites the Cornell researchers as saying. An example she gives is Teen-moods.net, "a Web site for depressed teens … who 'self-hurt'." In the same category are pro-anorexia sites (see this Associated Press report).

Social-networking untethered

Now MySpace can be wherever its users are – as close as their cellphones. On their phones, actually. Earthlink and Korea-based SK Telecom just launched a joint-venture mobile service called Helio, the Associated Press reports. Targeting "young, connected consumers," the service includes text, photo, and video messaging; a "presence" feature that lets MySpacers know when friends are online; multiple personalization options like "Animated Screens and Rings from major music labels"; the ability to post directly to their MySpace profiles; and – for fashion-conscious users (e.g., "sleek, black Hero, or pearlescent") - the option to sync their address book over the air from phone to phone if they're going for a different look every day. All that and 1,000 anytime minutes for $85/month (the cheapest package). The phones themselves, "Hero" and "Kickflip," "will cost $275 and $250, respectively," the AP says. Downloads are additional – games $5.99 each, music videos $2.49. Gives new meaning to the message, "talk is cheap." Parents will also be thinking about how this very mobile social-networking affects "parental controls."

Online vigilantism

It seems all those NBC Dateline sting operations against online sexual predators have caused a lot of people to want to "help." The problem, some law-enforcement people point out, is that "sloppy civilian investigations will push predators further underground, and that civilians may be endangering their own safety," the Associated Press reports. Perverted Justice, "an organization that's dedicated to outing online predators [and helps Dateline with its stings], expects to double its volunteer corps, to 100, by year's end," according to the AP. Then there's Corrupted-Justice.com, dedicated to exposing "the dangers of the vigilante actions being perpetrated by the Web site Perverted-Justice.com and its members."

Your child as co-marketer

Though MySpace has barely begun turning users into viral marketers, the New York Times reports, advertisers are creating their own social-networking sites to make that happen for themselves. They want to turn teens and 20-somethings into co-marketers, USATODAY reports. What does that mean? For as long as I've been watching this scene (nine years), I've been hearing marketers say the Net makes word-of-mouth or viral marketing a reality – an exciting prospect for marketers, because young influencers (e.g., "popular kids," gearheads, music fans, etc.) do the marketing for corporations in a way that's hugely more influential than a 30-second TV spot designed for the ultra-impersonal, very blah lowest-common-denominator. USATODAY describes some of their plans in the teens-as-co-marketers space and explains the tricky part of this (e.g., "Chevrolet recently saw the dark side with its make-your-own ad site for its new Tahoe SUV. A number of visitors created ads criticizing its fuel use and circulated them on the Internet. The company did not try to censor such sentiment"). Meanwhile, this is just further evidence that social-networking site are multiplying like rabbits - except that I can't imagine entire peer groups migrating from Xanga or MySpace to socializewithpepsi.com (or something much more cool-sounding Pepsi's interactive ad agency would come up with). This trend too will probably pass.

Self-made celebrities

Remember how we used to say that people like to see themselves in print? Well, it's still true. And it's true of our kids. Only now they can see their comments, photos, and self-produced and -edited songs, podcasts, and ski and skateboard videos "on the air" (in Xanga, MySpace, YouTube, etc.). And some of them are becoming self-made celebrities (because their celebrity draws traffic, spawns viral marketing, and sells videocams). Today's Washington Post gives an example: "David Lehre, a 21-year-old college student from Washington, Mich., a small town north of Detroit. Lehre and his friends edited and starred in a short film called 'MySpace: The Movie'." Of course, hundreds of thousands of teens and 20-somethings are doing that - another example is 17-year-old "Bowiechick" (her screen name), who inadvertently sold a lot of Logitech Webcams because of the overnight success of the 75-sec. video "Breakup" she uploaded to YouTube, according to CNET. As for David Lehre's MySpace video, the Post reports that it "became an instant viral video hit and spread rapidly through emails and links from other sites. It also helped push YouTube into the lexicon of Internet users, especially among the MySpace.com crowd. Lehre now says he has a talent agent, an attorney and a pending deal with Fox to create a new comedy show that will compete with NBC's "Saturday Night Live." And of course corporations are noticing there's big business, here. Fox, with the same parents as MySpace (New Corp), just announced it has acquired Newroo and kSolo, CNET reports. Newroo helps them "scour the Internet for relevant information from Web sites and blogs that can be used on their own Web sites, and kSolo "lets users sing, record and share their own karaoke recordings by using a database of songs.