Social 'scrapbooking'

It could also be called multimedia blogging. Facebook's new "Share" feature "allows its 11 million users to collect scraps of published content from affiliated sites -photos, news, videos - and paste these items on their own … pages," Reuters reports. It's an easy way to do what so many of us do – link to and comment on what we see on the Web, except many of us adults just send URLs in emails so someone has to take the extra step of clicking to the Web page and finding what we're emailing about. Any site that links to Facebook can participate, but to kickstart the "scrapbooking," Facebook has partnered with the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, NBC Sports, PhotoBucket.com, StupidVideos.com, GameSpot.com, The Onion, CollegeHumor.com, etc. Another new product in the social scrapbooking category is Vox.com. It makes multimedia blogging much easier and offers lots of privacy levels. In a single blog or online journal, you can choose what post or even "asset" (a photo, a video, a chunk of text, etc.) can be for family only, for a wider group of friends, totally public, etc. So if you're on a trip, and you want everyone to see your amazing shot of pictograph on a canyon wall but only family to see another shot of it with 4-year-old Sally staring at it, family will see both and the Web public only the former. One blog, several publics. It was just launched by SixApart, creators of LiveJournal.com (popular among young bloggers) and TypePad (a favorite of online pundits and professional bloggers).

Messy time for music

It's messy and confusing on all fronts, it seems, from not knowing what player tunes will play on to not knowing what is and isn't legal. In "simpler times," one pretty much knew the file-sharing networks were virtually all illegal. Now sites like MySpace and YouTube are both threat and opportunity to the music industry, the Washington Post reports. MySpace, on which more than 3 million bands and musicians have profiles, announced this week it would now "identify and block copyrighted music from being uploaded" by users, CBSNews.com reports. "If an infringing file is found it will be removed and if the user is a repeat offender, he or she could have their profile deleted." Meanwhile, "the CD is dead," a music industry CEO said in a recent speech, the CBC reports, and the Washington Post ably illustrates. EMI Music CEO Alain Levy said the control over content that the industry once wielded by virtue of controlling the means of distribution is rapidly slipping from its grasp" – into the hands of consumers. So the consumers are being educated. Take the Boy Scouts, for example. In the Los Angeles area, Boy Scouts now have a "Respect Copyrights" activity patch, the Associated Press reports. Then there's litigation education, which continues. Earlier this month, the IFPI, the London-based umbrella organization for the recording industry worldwide, launched 8,000 more lawsuits in 17 countries, "including its first legal forays into South America and Eastern Europe," the AP reports in another article.

The legalization of YouTube?

Apparently being acquired for $1.65 billion is good news and bad news for YouTube. As for the latter, there's the ongoing copyright battle, apparently leading to the deletion of tens of thousands of video clips from TV shows, the next challenge being X-rated video, no doubt. But the big news at this point is YouTube's purging of video from Comedy Central, including clips from "YouTube stalwarts like 'The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,' 'The Colbert Report' and 'South Park'," the New York Times reports. "A week earlier, nearly 30,000 clips of TV shows, movies and music videos were taken down after the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers cited copyright infringement." Who knows what these purges will do to the "People's Republic of YouTube," as the Los Angeles Times recently put it in an in-depth article on this "great leap forward in the democratization of pop culture." Will the Google acquisition shut down this latest iteration "people power"? Examples from the L.A. Times: "The best-known gotcha YouTube post came from an Indian American student tailing U.S. Sen. George Allen (R-Va.). The student recently captured an irritated Allen pointing him out and telling his supporters, 'Let's give a welcome to macaca here - welcome to America.' The slur prompted a tsunami of media coverage that sent Allen's campaign into a tailspin. Another popular series of clips shows U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) on the campaign trail, joshing about his Guatemalan gardener and struggling to stay awake during a Senate hearing." Or does it not even matter, as Steve Maich (I'm thinking the next Clifford Stoll-style Net critic), a senior editor at Canada's Macleans magazine, suggests at length in ""Pornography, gambling, lies, theft and terrorism: The Internet sucks." BTW, Comedy Central clips reappeared on YouTube after their owner Viacom signed a deal with YouTube, a media blog reported two days after the Times piece appeared. [MySpace, too, is cracking down on copyright infringement. It announced this week it would block copyrighted music and videos from being uploaded to user profiles, the BBC reports.]

'Ads' on the social Web

Remember the old AT&T Friends & Family program, where you got a better rate if you get others to sign up? Well, the concept, a form of "viral marketing," is now used in social-networking sites. One example, cited by the New York Times: "Chase has a promotion on Facebook that implicitly uses a person's friends to endorse its credit cards. When people join the Chase '+1' group on Facebook, they see a list of their other friends who have joined the group. The program gives members points when they do things like apply for a card and get others to sign up." Another Web 2.0-style "ad" is for Axe deodorant on MySpace – part of a campaign about "Gamekillers" – "people who get in the way of a seduction, like a guy with a British accent who gets all the attention. The pitch is that Axe helps men stay cool in the face of the Gamekillers," the Times says. People could post complaints and tips about Gamekillers on the Axe profile whose "online host was Christine Dolce, a busty model who was already a celebrity thanks to MySpace, where she has accumulated more than a million friends." The Times says 74,000 MySpacers have added the Axe profile to their friends lists. I wonder how many teenagers identify with the cool guy undeterred by Gamekillers or cultivate Gamekiller skills or who aspire to being the next Christine Dolce. In any case, it's probably all a big game to most teens exposed to these campaigns.

E-gambling ban questioned

Banning online gambling in the US is like the ban on alcohol during the Prohibition, said Britain's culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, in the run-up to an international conference on Internet gambling. According to the Associated Press, she said the ban "would make unregulated offshore sites the 'modern equivalent of speakeasies','' those secretive backroom bars of the 1920s. Congress tacked the legislation onto an unrelated law that was signed by President Bush earlier this month. The UK handles online gambling differently: "Under new British gambling laws, online operators have a 'social responsibility'' duty written into licenses and policed by the independent Gambling Commission watchdog," the AP reports. "It requires them to work to prevent underage gambling, give prominent warnings about addiction and inform users how much time and money they have spent on the site."

Game ratings debate

Debate has heated up recently over whether the videogame industry is qualified to rate games (the way the film industry provides movie ratings). At a "summit" held in Minneapolis by the National Institute on Media and the Family, the organization's president, David Walsh, pointed out that, even as people discuss how games are rated, the process is only getting complicated by the fact that games are moving from discs inserted in players to the Web – "users can join online role-playing games that aren't covered by the current rating system [and] many of these games are hosted in foreign countries, muddling the issue of jurisdiction, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports. The question has also been raised (in Washington and in the news media) over how the rating is done. Raters "just view an hour-long videotape of an upcoming title's most graphic content. Game companies pick the content and submit the tapes themselves to the Entertainment Software Rating Board," the Washington Post reports. "The board says there isn't enough time to play every game in full to come up with a rating. The average game today contains dozens of hours of action. If the board discovers content it objects to after a game is released, it has the power to re-rate a title and, effectively, get it pulled off the shelves." The Post doesn't mention the key issue of how to rate games that are becoming more online services than products. In other words, videogames are increasingly like social-networking sites – content comes from the users, so by its nature is increasingly tougher to rate or control.

Another student's unwanted 'fame'

Wee Shu Min, a sophomore at Raffles Junior College in Singapore and daughter of a member of Parliament, found herself in the middle of cybercontroversy (see last week's "Student hit hard by Web fame"). She "sparked a heated debate on the Internet when she derided another blogger … for his views on the anxieties of Singapore workers," the UCLA Asia Institute's news service reports. She apologized and shut down her blog (after her college's principal and her dad said she'd been "counselled for using insensitive language." The blogger she criticized, Derek Wee, who works for a multinational corporation, had written that he was "concerned about competition from foreign talent and the lack of job opportunities for older workers" in Singapore. The student wrote, "Derek, Derek, Derek darling, how can you expect to have an iron rice bowl or a solid future if you cannot spell? There's no point in lambasting the Government for making our society one that is, I quote, 'far too survival of the fittest...' If uncertainty of success offends you so much, you will certainly be poor and miserable." She later suggested he "get out of my elite uncaring face." According to the report, "her attack was criticised by hundreds of Internet users, who accused her of being elitist, naive and insensitive to the lives of Singaporeans from humbler backgrounds."

Free speech & student blogging

The clash between high school administrators and students over the latter's online free-speech rights is increasingly being worked out in courts around the US, USATODAY reports. It appears that the participatory Web is forcing everybody – school officials and boards, parents, and students - to know more about First Amendment law than we've ever had to. In some cases students have been expelled for venting about school personnel in blogs or social sites. In a case in Texas, a student "was kicked off her cheerleading team last year when a friend posted a derogatory statement about other cheerleaders on her blog. [School] officials … said the posting was a violation of the code of conduct for cheerleaders [requiring] 'high moral standards'," according to USATODAY. One problem there, it appears, was a misunderstanding of how someone else can post in a person's blog. Anyway, "school officials say students are increasingly crossing the line from innocent rants about teachers to harassment or worse." But an American Civil Liberties Union attorney told USATODAY that punishment is appropriate in cases where students "post admissions of illegal activity - such as high-schoolers who post pictures of themselves drinking, doing drugs or committing other criminal acts … [or] racist remarks or postings that promote or predict violence should be punished." The Associated Press looks at educational and punitive activity at the college level. On a global scale, "bloggers are being asked to show their support for freedom of expression by Amnesty International," the BBC reports. Here's the Electronic Frontier Foundation's FAQ on student blogging and free speech . Meanwhile, blogging's not going away. Chicago Tribune Internet writer Steve Johnson blogs that, "with 175,000 new ones created every day, blogs [are] about to join the mainstream."

Big social sites in decline?

The Wall Street Journal reports there is "a fringe of Internet users now renouncing MySpace and other social-networking sites – not in spite of their popularity but because of it." Because of that, and because the Journal reported that traffic at MySpace and Facebook's fell 4% and 12% respectively in September, a blogger at MediaPost asked, "Are kids getting sick of MySpace and Facebook?" and a blogger at MarketingShift wrote, "MySpace will become like the mall to a teenager on Friday nights. It's too crowded so nobody goes there anymore." I don't think it's that simple. Growth on MySpace and Facebook had to flatten out, but I don't think we're going to see anything like a mass exodus to niche sites any time soon. I think geographically-based social sites or YouthNoise.com or sites for new-school skiers or skateboarders are just another arrow in teens' social quiver. It's hard to move entire peer groups from one social site to another, and - until all the niche sites are interoperable with email and IM, there will always be a need for one that aggregates friends, potential friends, and even ex-friends who might come back into the circle at one's school. That's my impression of this latest development.

Dicey video-sharing

Yes, video copyright owners have issues with YouTube, Grouper, and Bolt, but they may have even more litigious feelings for TVU Networks. The Shanghai-based video P2P company provides a downloadable media player that "transmits TV shows [much less grainy than streamed video], including pay-for-view broadcasts, from U.S. and international broadcasters such as ABC, HBO, the Disney Channel, The Comedy Channel, Al Jazeera and Telecapri Sports of Italy," CNET reports, adding that TVU could be the next Napster. CNET cites copyright experts as saying the company "can't legally rebroadcast the shows" without the copyright owners' permission. In addition to distributing a player, TVU is different from YouTube because it doesn't let users upload videos and doesn't appear to be signing licensing agreements with copyright owners (aka media companies). Canadian online legal expert Michael Geist looks at the legal ins and outs. Parents, it might be interesting to see if your kids know about TVUNetworks.com and, if so, whether they've downloaded TV shows from it. CNET says "the TVUPlayer appears to have gained attention in the United States following the 2006 FIFA World Cup tournament in Germany. Thousands of soccer fans downloaded the software in order to watch matches not available on US stations." The TVU story reminds me a little of the one about AllofMP3.com in Russia (see this item on the latter).

Families that play games together...

…are the sweet spot for console makers, the Washington Post reports. Some companies, e.g., Microsoft, *say* they want to sell more game players to little kids and women but keep selling action games that appeal more to teen an adult men. Nintendo is a different story, according to the Post. "So adamant is the company about reaching families who don't consider themselves game fans that it has taken to showing up on doorstops with its new system, called the Wii (which rhymes with 'me'). Seriously. Last month, the game company rented a moving truck and drove to the home of a Southern California mother of two girls, ages 8 and 3. Inside the truck were large-screen televisions and four units of the new console." The mom blogs about motherhood (this is a story about online marketing, too), and her family doesn't own any game consoles. Nintendo is thrilled that she wrote in her blog that she's now a fan of Wii. For its part, Microsoft told the Post "family-friendly" games are on the way. We'll see how it's looking for the PlayStation 3 when it becomes available next month. For a closer look at the three consoles, check out HowStuffWorks.com's reviews of Wii PS3, and Xbox 360. Meanwhile, MS has launched a campaign to teach parents how to use Xbox 360's parental controls, ArsTechnica and the BBC report (here's Microsoft's page about the safety settings).

Fighting child porn: Update

Some 30,000 Web sites containing child pornography have been taken down in the past 10 years, Britain's Internet Watch Foundation announced, citing a study marking its 10th anniversary. "Although the number of UK websites providing such content has fallen [from 18% to 2%], the severity of the images has significantly increased in the last 12 months," the BBC reports. IWF chief executive Peter Robbins "blames this on pay-per-view sites that use sophisticated means to avoid detection." In a thorough update on anti-child-porn efforts, USATODAY summarizes the significant law-enforcement work going on while reporting that all these efforts on the part of credit card companies, Internet service providers, the Ad Council, and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) can't keep up. "In the past 24 months … the task forces have identified 6.5 million pornographic pictures of children online, up from 3,600 three years ago. Forty percent originated in the USA," USATODAY reports. A key reason for this flood of illegal content, it adds is that "much child porn isn't about money but pedophilia…. Many images are traded free like baseball cards." In releasing its CyberTipline reporting figures, the NCMEC said few of the report come from the victims. "Of more than 800 online child porn victims identified by the National Center, [Michelle] Collins [who runs the Tipline] says only about 30 blew the whistle. She says some are too young to describe what happened. Others are afraid. More than a third, 36%, were abused by a parent, 10% to 15% by another relative and 30% by other people they know. About 10% are enticed by strangers to post photos [such as in the case of Justin Berry – see "Kids & Webcams"]; 5% do it unasked."

Parenting social networkers

Even as social-networking sites multiply, so do articles about parenting their most avid users. This is great. It means the coverage is no longer just about sexual predation (there are other, non-criminal risks we all need to be discussing). So the reporting is getting more granular and helpful to parents. Here are some examples: The Sun-Herald in Mississippi led with the experience of 15-year-old Amanda Morris, who checks her MySpace profile about four times a day and whose mom checks it about once a month. In the same article, the Sun-Herald tells the sad story of another teenager who was expelled from school, she told school authorities, for having a handgun in her car because "she feared being physically attacked by a group of girls who recently posted threatening messages on MySpace" – a more extreme example of cyberbullying that we're probably going to hear more about in the coming months, as a risk of online socializing (in IM and phone texting as well as Web sites) which will affect a great many more kids than predators gets increasing coverage. Another good sign: The same day the Sun-Herald also ran a clear-headed, balanced commentary about social networking by Chloe Harvill, high school student and member of the paper's teen advisory board.

In other tech-parenting reports, Wall Street Journal Work & Family columnist Sue Schellenberger looked at "How Young Is Too Young When a Child
Wants to Join the MySpace Set?"; Business Week earlier looked at social sites for the "sandlot set"; and the Washington Post more generally considered "Mom vs. the Machines." In "Experts cite need for online parenting," the Cape Cod Times focuses on parents' general bewilderment with the social Web, and across the country the Tucson Citizen looks at teen socializing online from a southern Arizona perspective. The Vancouver Sun, in the land of what is reportedly western Canada's most popular social-networking site, Nexopia.com, in July went very in-depth on the social Web's attraction for youth and how grownups of all perspectives (parenting, law enforcement, advocacy, etc.) are handling it. See also Wired News's "Teens Online: Not a Freak Zone."

Web 2.0 in the classroom

Ever wonder how the social Web might be used at school (by educators as well as students)? An article by tech educator David Warlick in TechLearning.com provides a bunch of insights. Take social studies teacher Mrs. L, for example: She "scans through [Web] sites tagged genetics in the school's social bookmark service. Her students may need quick access to them as they discuss genetic engineering current events during class…. All assignments in Ms. L's class are turned in via blogs because she finds that their conversational nature encourages students to think and write in more depth than traditional formal essays or short answer assignments…. [She] crafts the blog assignments with an eye toward training students to think critically and to post informed, well-considered opinions. A common classroom activity, for instance, is to have students read the blogged entries of others and write persuasive reactions — one in agreement, another in disagreement — and post these writings as comments to their classmates' blogs." David Jakes, another tech educator, responded with what he felt was a needed reality check. In "Is MySpace Your Space As Well?" ed-tech expert Andy Carvin is among the first to look at what might be tricky about having students and teachers in the same social space after school hours (in his blog at PBS.org), and USATODAY covers teacher blogs as an opportunity to vent job dissatisfaction ("blog tracking website Technorati.com lists 848 teacher blogs"). See also the Seattle Times, for a more elementary-school-level view, and the Houston Chronicle's "Plugged in for learning."

Best 'search engine': Librarians!

I hope this doesn't come as a surprise: Librarians are even more irreplaceable now than before the Web came along. Why? Because we are increasingly awash in information, which requires increasingly critical thinking. Librarians are critical thinkers extraordinaire. They're media literacy experts. They can help you search the Web intelligently and also find books (remember those?) and other reference and media materials that just might have more than a Web site can offer. Besides, CNET reports, most Web researchers rely on the info they get in the top few search results. For example, if you search for "Martin Luther King" in three of the most high-traffic search engines, you get the site of a white supremacist group in the first or second results. So, if a librarian isn't handy, here are some resources that they'd probably recommend, CNET reports: Librarians Internet Index ("Web sites you can trust"), and The Internet Public Library, and Infomine ("Scholarly Internet Resource Collections") at the University of California, Riverside. BTW, here are CNET's "Top 10 Research Tools."

Mobile social networking

That would be social networking by cellphone. The trend is gathering steam, with Helio for MySpace users, Google's Dodgeball, Silicon Valley start-up Loopt, and Microsoft's SLAM (see ComputerWeekly. These services take advantage of the GPS (global positioning system) technology now in most new phones. So, in timely fashion, the New York Times looks at the related dilemma of parents: when to get them their first cellphones. The Times goes into that other, parental, reason for using GPS-enabled phones. "Most of the major wireless companies have introduced a Global Positioning System technology that allows someone (parents presumably) to track children using cellphones. There is, for example, the Chaperone Service through Verizon Wireless, Family Locator from Sprint and Wherifone by Wherify Wireless" – which of course only works when the phone is on the child's person (key consideration for kid-phone decisionmaking: how old are they when they're better about not losing their phones!). The Times writer thinks it's all a bit "creepy" – what do you think? (Email me your comments via anne@netfamilynews.org.) Here, too, is some school cellphone policy perspective from the Albany Democrat-Herald.

Social media research: Major funding

I doubt there was ever a faster-moving subject for research: studying digital natives! They will be constantly moving under the microscope. For that reason, the financial commitment, and the scope of the study, this is a significant milestone in our understanding how young people use the social Web and digital media. The MacArthur Foundation has just announced it's committing $50 million over the next five years for research designed to help "build the field of digital media and learning," the foundation announced. Now the public discussion can get both more granular and broader, moving beyond the incessant message to parents that they need to fear social networking. I'm also excited to see the MacArthur researchers will be paying particular attention to how to teaching media literacy and critical thinking in and out of the classroom, "ethical uses of digital media," and "engaging young people directly via Global Kids, a nonprofit youth development organization, and a University of Chicago effort to expand after-school media literacy programs in Chicago. Here's MacArthur's site on the project and researcher Danah Boyd's blog post on the announcement and an associated conversation.

Net addiction: New study

In their first-ever attempt to quantify "Internet addiction" in a study released this week, Stanford University researchers looked for signs of "compulsion," the San Jose Mercury News reports. That's not vacation planners who surf sites on travel destinations during lunch breaks. Examples they gave the Mercury News were more like when "social interactions" in alternate-reality games substitute for face-to-face interaction, deadlines at work are missed, sleep is lost, and – when online time is reduced - a person becomes anxious, irritable, or restless. Psychiatrist Elias Aboujaoude, who led the research team, "grew interested in the problem when he started to see a small but growing number of habitual Internet users visiting the university's Impulse Control Disorders Clinic," according to the Mercury News. In its "random survey of 2,500 adults," the team "found that between 6% and 14% of computer users said they spent too many bleary-eyed hours checking e-mail, making blog entries or visiting Web sites or chat rooms, sometimes neglecting work, school, families, food and sleep."

Student hit hard by his Web 'fame'

"Think before you upload" would be a massive understatement for Yale University senior and job applicant Aleksey Vayner. He didn't even upload his resume video and 11-page cover letter and resume for Swiss bank USB to YouTube – other people did the circulating and blogging about them. They "showed up on two blogs, and then quickly spread on the Internet," the New York Times reports. The video, entitled "Impossible is Nothing" and "staged to look like a job interview, is spliced with shots of Mr. Vayner lifting weights and ballroom dancing and has him spouting Zen-like inspirational messages. The video clip flooded e-mail inboxes across Wall Street and eventually appeared on the video-sharing site YouTube," according to the Times. The Daily Princetonian reports that he has "successfully petitioned YouTube to remove his video, but it's still at IvyGateblog.com, which the Princeton University paper says Vayner has "threatened to sue." But now the student, who has taken a short leave from Yale but plans to take his midterms, the Times reports, is "facing charges himself," according to the Daily Princetonian, for claiming to have launched a nonprofit organization that Charity Navigator, an evaluator of US charities, says doesn't exist. He has also been accused of plagiarism in a self-published book he includes in his resume. Certainly this story, "comic" for so many Net users but also tragic, is about a number of things, not least of which how the Internet turns up the volume on and perpetuates what people upload to it. What's hard for any parent to see is how the stories from which everybody can draw lessons seem to be getting harsher. The observer affects the experiment here too, it seems – as more and more people are party to people's messages on the participatory Web, the messages potentially harm their senders more.

India's online social scene

To read the Business-Standard in India, you could think India owns the social Web, or at least is second only to the US in this space. “Close to a dozen social-networking sites focused on India – yaari.com, minglebox.com, reddiffconxions.com, zhoom.com and humsubka.com to name a few – have sprung up over the last three to four months.” Then there’s Fropper.com, one of India’s first, Saffronart.com “for those interested in Bollywood and Indipop music, techtribes.com for IT corporates, professionals and engineering students, Memsaab.com, and even a business networking site siliconindia.com.” Memsaab.com is a social site for Indian women based in Hollywood, with “chapters” in Delhi, Mumbai, Sydney, London, Toronto, and Johannesburg, according to a press release about it. According to the Business-Standard, an Indian market-research firm found that Orkut is in the country’s Top 10 “online brands” for India’s 23 million active Internet users, 9-10% of whom are active on social-networking sites.

More trouble for Orkut

Parents, schools, and law enforcement in the US certainly aren't the only ones struggling with the user-driven Web. Google's Orkut is the social-networking site that has drawn the most visible fire in other countries. First it heard from Brazilian prosecutors, now from an Indian court. India's Zee News reports that "the Aurangabad bench of Bombay High Court has directed the Maharashtra government to issue notice to Google for the alleged spread of hatred about India by its social network service 'Orkut'.… A picture of burning the national tricolour, bearing anti-India message, has been put on www.orkut.com and a community 'We Hate India' has been created on the site, the petition said." Zee News added that the court also "appealed to the government to appoint a 'controller' under the Information Technology Act-2000 to regulate all such communities being in operation on the Internet." It appears that courts everywhere are on a steep learning curve about how much local, state, and national governments can control what's posted on social – the hate content could well have come from people of another nationality who somehow think they "own" the space. Humankind in the Internet age seems to be faced with a choice: Either the social Web devolves into just another channel for hate and discrimination or another tool for learning and teaching tolerance. Here's one such tool.

'Bully' not so threatening

Rockstar Games released its game Bully today amid an unsurprising swirl of controversy – including some legal flak. “This is Rockstar, the guys who dreamed up ‘Grand Theft Auto,’ a top-selling series featuring plenty of gore and guns,” reports the Washington Post. Calling the game a “Columbine simulator,” an attorney and prominent critic of videogames filed a complaint in a Florida court asking that the game be banned, the Associated Press reports. Miami-Dade circuit court Judge Ronald Friedman said he reviewed the game for two hours and concluded, “There's a lot of violence. A whole lot. Less than we see on television every night.'' He added it wasn’t violent enough for him to ban it. Here’s one psychologist’s view on the game. In other gaming news, a second-grader in Connecticut is competing against four other young game designers for a $10,000 scholarship, a CBS station in Boston reports.

Social-networking backlash?

Whoa. A young person deletes his account on a social site, telling the Associated Press the novelty had worn off and a "superficial emptiness" had set in. A sure sign he's thinking for himself and working through the risks and benefits. He's a 26-year-old graduate student. Across the campus at Iowa State University, a journalism professor suggests to the AP this is a sign of hope "that some members of the tech generation are starting to see the value of quality face time." He says social networking is reaching a "saturation point." I don't know. First, MySpace, the biggest social site, recently passed the 119 million-profile mark. Second, the number and frequency of press releases I get announcing new social sites are growing. Third, social-networking services are opening up shop in more and more countries – both homegrown services and US subsidiaries. Maybe this latest growth trend has to level off, but I'm not sure the professor is right about a general backlash yet. Certainly individual social networkers have reached the saturation point, and they have to be getting smarter about privacy and safety, with all the media reports on sexual predation. And if they're using a social site as a popularity contest, that'll get tiresome. But that's only one thing people use these sites for. Convenience tools for keeping in touch with friends will not lose their attraction, and then there's the rest of the spectrum of social and self-expression features these sites provide that reflect enduring interests (blogging, page-decorating, music-sharing, code writing, etc.). The AP quotes another grad student as saying she sees "faceless communication as a supplement to everyday interactions, not a replacement." That's more what I'm seeing than a downward trend. (See also "The embellishment biz" for the latest Nielsen/NetRatings numbers on teen social networking.)

Social networking in the car

This brings a little extra new meaning to the term “social networking”: Honda is adding this social feature to its next-generation GPS in-car navigation system, along with real-time weather reports, the DailyTech.com blog reports. “The SNS [social-networking service] will allow drivers to enter comments about a particular location or point of interest (POI). The information will then be relayed to other club members, and they can see your comments while approaching the destination. With services like this, Helio (MySpace’s social-networking mobile partner), a new cellular service coming called Loopt, and other untethered socializing opps launching all the time, soon we’ll all be socializing in the shower and every other point on Earth (come to think of it, Google Earth will probably soon be in on the act!).

We can virtually parent now

Shades of Nintendogs, only "Eccky" is "human" – sorta. Two people can now find each other, create a virtual baby (Eccky), and raise "him" on the Web with the help of IM and phone texting, reports CNET, leading with: "Technically, making babies is getting easier." Ha! It's a sim game and only in Dutch at the moment, but it "has spawned tens of thousands of unique virtual children and acquired 310,000 registered users since its debut in April 2005," and Microsoft's MSN Netherlands plans to help it launch in China and the UK soon. You win points by "raising a healthy, happy adult in a matter of six days." I'm thinking it'll be a killer app, though, if it helps one raise a healthy, happy real adult in 18 years!

Embellishing their pages

"Nine out of the top 10 teen sites either offered content or tools for social networking site profiles, or were social networking sites themselves," Nielsen/NetRatings reports. The No. 1 site for teen social networkers is PLyrics.com, providing punk and punk-related lyrics they can paste into their pages. No. 2 site is Snapvine.com (still in beta!), which lets social networkers send voice messages via phone to their Web page so friends can hit "play" and listen. No. 3 is WhateverLife.com, providing custom layouts for their social-networking pages. Three years ago, Nielsen, says, the cool sites provided smiley faces and other embellishments for instant messages, now it's all about embellishing social-site profiles. Of course putting all this thought and effort into one's self-image online takes time. The amount of time teens spend online has increased 27% over the past three years. In September they spent an average of 26 hours, 48 minutes, online, up from 21 hours and 4 minutes in September 2003 (interestingly, 2-to-11-year-olds' online time has increased even more - by 41% - to "nearly 9 hours and 24 minutes" during this past month of September). Here's coverage from International Business Times.

$11m to online libel victim

The full amount awarded by a Florida court was actually $11.3 million. It went to "a woman who suffered a campaign of abusive harassment on an online bulletin board," VNUNET in the UK reports. "The case got to court following a personal vendetta by a former acquaintance" of the victim. The "vendetta" was in the form of "malicious accusations" on the discussion board. USATODAY reports that the award "represents the largest such judgment over postings on an Internet blog or message board," and in a separate article that "in the past two years, more than 50 lawsuits stemming from postings on blogs and website message boards have been filed" across the US. VNUNET adds that "the award may encourage web users to be more circumspect when posting comments on unmoderated boards and blogs," or social-networking sites, for that matter. This is not just about adults. I'm reminded of the Texas high school principal suing students for defamation. Parents need to be aware of what their kids are doing and saying publicly, which includes community Web sites.

The newest digital divide

There are a growing number of "digital divides." There's the one publicly discussed since the Web's early days (between tech haves and have-nots), the newer one between digital natives (kids) and immigrants (adults), the one between the social networks' commuters (the ones who use them every day) vs. tourists (adults looking in on them), and now indoors vs. outdoors. "Today's youngsters and their parents are more wired and more scheduled than earlier Americans, leaving less unstructured time to spend outdoors," the Christian Science Monitor reports. "For the kids, that can mean missing out on childhood bonds to nature. Alarmed, conservationists and government officials are looking for ways to reverse the trend." The Monitor mentions Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, who cites studies showing that "exposure to nature boosts attention spans, reduces stress, and could be an antidote to the rising problem of childhood obesity." Clearly a balance - between scheduled and unscheduled, indoor and outdoor, and tech-enabled and tech-free time – is needed. It's quite possible, though, that kids are all by themselves moving into a new phase in which the shiny-new luster of tech-enabled socializing fades into being just a part of blended in-person/virtual social lives – see "Some youth rethink online communications."

Microsoft's latest patches

This was patch week for October, and parents of bigtime Web explorers and downloaders deserve their monthly heads-up. Microsoft patched a record 26 security holes in Windows and software for PCs and Macs. According to Washington Post security writer Brian Krebs, they include 16 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office and Office components, including Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Six of this week's updates apply to "fully patched Windows XP systems" and two to Vista, the next version of Windows hardly any of us have yet. But Brian says the biggest problem is with the Office flaws, since they're "most serious (or 'critical') in the 2000 versions of each software title," which a whole lot of people have and which require people to do extra patching. "The must add a second stage … by heading over to the Office homepage and letting Office Update scan their machines." Usually patching's pretty automatic, or people could go to Windows Update.

Socializing all over the Web

This is something we've been saying in online-safety talks, and it's good to see other people making the point: Social networking is all over the Web, certainly not limited to the site your child's peer group hangs out in. "The trend tabbed 'social networking' is vastly broader than MySpace, and its components are quickly being incorporated into hundreds if not thousands of Web sites, ranging from autos to music and even shopping," reports PopMatters.com. "The sites are defined by content - photos, product reviews and the occasional rant - that users contribute, helping to build a sense of community and participation." In this article, refreshingly, you read about 55-year-old social networker (more a business networker, actually) Ralph Dahm, who prefers LinkedIn.com (see last week's item about how more than half of MySpace users are 35+). Where I differ with the writer, though, is where he suggests that for kids social networking's for amassing long friends lists ("so they can appear popular"). I think there are almost as many reasons kids use these sites as there are kids.

Contact with strangers: Study

About 900 US 14-to-22-year-olds nationwide were asked if they use social-networking sites, and about 60% said yes. About 40% of those social networkers, both male and female, said yes when asked "whether a stranger, not known to them or their friends, had ever contacted them online without their consent in order to get to know them." The researchers asked if they'd ever actually met strangers offline. "Only 3.3% of young people who use social networking sites reported such meetings. However, the survey did not ask about the purpose of these meetings, which may well have had nothing to do with sexual predation," reports the Annenberg Public Policy Center in its paper on the study, adding that "the rates of stranger contact are remarkably similar for males and females." Notable also: "The rate of such meetings [3.3%] was actually quite comparable to those who do not use social networking sites, 2.9%, a statistically nonsignificant difference. Given that online stranger contact is more likely on social networking sites, it appears that the contacts made on these sites are somewhat less likely to result in offline meetings than those that occur because of other Internet uses, such as instant messaging, chat rooms, or dating services," the researchers found.

Rock station that wouldn't die

The blend of Internet community spirit and music can be a powerful thing – witness Rock Safe, MySpace's Rock for Darfur (see Spin), and now LaLa.com's partnership with WOXY, an "independent alternative and modern rock station" that started up back in 1983 and keeps getting brought back to life. This time, LaLa.com – a CD-swapping and music community site – came to the rescue to put WOXY's DJs back on "the air" (in cyberspace) and allow members to, in effect, create their own virtual radio stations, a CNET blog reports.

Teen social networking at the library

Some public libraries aim to be teen hangouts too – the in-person kind that is. And they're doing so partly by supporting online social networking at the library. The ultimate goal, of course, is "to get teens into reading and writing," the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports, and a program called "Blog It" at Hennepin County libraries is one way to get there, librarians say, because blogging is "a literacy activity," as one librarian put it. Blog It encourages teen patrons to write and develop a voice in a safe way. Meanwhile, new social-networking sites for book lovers may turn out to be a support to libraries' embrace of the social Web. They're virtual book clubs – for example, LibraryThing.com, MySpace Books, and a Seattle start-up called Shelfari.com (where you set up your own virtual "bookshelf" instead a mere profile – your reading profile, in effect, maybe a little like a compilation CD representing all of one's favorite tunes). The site "allows people to list book titles, write reviews, recommend books to friends and find like-minded bibliophiles," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports.

Social networks: Powerful change agents?

A young person with a heartfelt idea and access to 100 million people on a social-networking site can help change the world now. Bich Ngoc Cao was an employee of MySpace, and it was because of her that the site (now with more than 100 million people and 3 million bands registered) launched its Rock for Darfur campaign this week, the Washington Post reports. Rock for Darfur, whose logo was designed by Cao's younger brother, an art major, aims to raise money and awareness for the situation in western Sudan, where "more than 400,000 are dead so far, and more than 2 million Sudanese have been displaced by the Arab Janjaweed militia in what the United Nations has called an ethnic cleansing campaign against black Africans." Bich Ngoc Cao had been interested in the crisis in Sudan, took a class on the history of genocide at the University of Southern California, and then last spring "traveled from her home in Los Angeles to Washington for the rallies on the Mall," according to the Washington Post. "When she returned home, she approached her employer to figure out if they could do something for the cause." Who knows what might happen in Sudan if other social sites join in, then join up with other activists pushing for an end to the genocide? Social activism on social networks is blossoming. Other projects include YouthNoise.com, a social network that's entirely about social consciousness and activism and was founded by Save the Children, and a new one: Stand Against Violence. It's a campaign of ROCK SAFE, the safety awareness and social activism arm of MyCityRocks.com, which is a network of city-based, arts-focused social sites that got its start as HoustonRocks.com. Performing bands and musicians are a big part of the Stand Against Violence campaign's local rallies. This is a trend to watch, people: social networks as agents for change and humanitarianism.

Videogame wars

The "war on terrorism" is being fought in the world of videogames too. First there was "Quest for Saddam," now there's a "Quest for Bush," which allows players to assassinate the US president. "Quest for Bush is a 'mod' - or modification - of the 2003 game Quest for Saddam by California-based Petrilla Entertainment. The company sold about 3,000 copies of the game," the Washington Post reports. The anti-Bush game, released by the Global Islamic Media Front, "a radical organization that has ties with al-Qaeda," is "the latest - and most extreme - addition to a small but growing list of Islamic videogames, monitored by the Defense Department and much blogged about in gaming circles." Both sides are probably presenting alternate realities in more ways than one.

Google + YouTube: A plus for kids

Google's planned acquisition of YouTube could be a step forward for youth online safety on the hugely popular video-sharing site. It'll probably take longer for YouTube to hire a full-time "online-safety czar," as News Corp. did not long after it acquired MySpace, because copyrights and intellectual property are the No. 1 controversy of this high-profile deal. "The purchase was announced after the two companies reached several licensing deals with media companies, which could help ease concerns about copyright violations on YouTube," the Wall Street Journal reports. But being acquired by a public company usually lends a measure of corporate responsibility, and children's online safety will probably be part of the equation at YouTube too. YouTube does not screen the thousands of videos people upload to it daily, and Google Video says it does (see Google's page on video content). The Wall Street Journal reports that YouTube's purchase price is $1.65 billion, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt indicates in the article that the social-networking aspect of YouTube (users create their own profiles) was part of its attraction for the search giant. The other part, of course, was growth and traffic. YouTube's traffic grew "nearly 2,500% from August 2005 to August 2006, from 2.8 million visitors to 72 million," according to comScore Media Metrix. Google and YouTube together "had a combined worldwide reach of 477 million visitors" aged 15 and up in August, the latest figures available.

IM scandal: 'Teachable moment'

The scandal over former Rep. Mark Foley's instant messages to congressional pages can definitely be used as an online-safety "teachable moment," for grownups as well as kids. It can help clear up some misconceptions a lot of us have about instant messaging and "stranger danger." First, although IMs aren't captured and archived the way email is, obviously what people say in instant messaging can come back to haunt them (see the Washington Post on how programs like AIM and Yahoo Messenger come with archiving features). However, a lot of confidential conversation can happen between IM-ers if that archiving isn't turned on and monitoring software isn't installed, so it's good for parents to ask their kids questions about who they're IM-ing with (and definitely ask first – it's a whole lot better for continued parent-child trust and communication than surreptitious monitoring). Second, the case has something to say about "grooming," how adults - very often people kids know – work to win young people's confidence with the goal of exploiting them. "While former Congressman Foley’s hasn’t been accused of physical abuse, his alleged sexually suggestive emails and instant messages to underage boys have all the signs of classic grooming behavior," writes SafeKids.com's Larry Magid in a CBS News commentary. For educating teens' on grooming and other influencing techniques, see "How to recognize grooming" and "How social influencing works." For some relevant research, see "Non-stranger danger" and "Net crimes against children: Reality check" (and here's the Associated Press on how the current scandal goes back further than we thought).

This, of course, is a national-level teachable moment. Over time we'll probably find that it's the smaller and sometimes tougher ones – involving our kids' own social lives – that will be most effective in teaching them smart, safe use of the Internet so that the lessons will stick. Safety tips and online-safety courses are fine but more in keeping with mainstream, mass media (the kind you just download); problems on the participatory Web need participatory, or interactive, solutions, parents and educators are finding (see also "Monitoring MySpacers"). It just seems logical that teen social networkers need to know that they're part of the solution. [For the full editorial in the 10/13 issue of NetFamilyNews, please click here.]

School fight videos: Good?

They are extremely disturbing to watch, but the fact that parents and school officials can now find and watch them may be a good thing. The question is, are the fights being recorded more (and posted in social-networking and video-sharing sites), or are there more fights? "Videos posted of violent and deliberately staged high school fights have been around for a while. The first surfaced from a school in Orangeville. But [Toronto's] CityNews has since found more - including one from Toronto and another from Barrie," CityNews.ca reports. It quotes one student as saying these deliberate, consensual fights are not "fight clubs" but "competitions."

Schools & student free speech

Schools in the Indianapolis area are wrestling with the tough Internet Age question of what to do with student behavior when it's about school but starts at home. They're "trying to punish students for Internet commentary they deem inappropriate … drawing outrage from teens and free-speech advocates," the Indianapolis Star reports. The Star looks at how individual schools and district are dealing with the issue and, in a sidebar, lists a few schools' current and potential Internet-use policies. Another sidebar highlights a few student-blogging cases around the US. Students in the Washington, D.C., area, recently successfully negotiated with the school to revise slightly its plan "to require students in all grades to submit essays and other assignments to the for-profit service known as Turnitin, which polices papers for plagiarism," the Washington Post reported.

Social sites for teens, others

A nice service for students and parents: The Fort Worth Star-Telegram's "Whatever Staff" of teens reviewed seven teen-targeting social sites: Bebo, Sconex, StudyBreakers, Tagged, Yfly, YouBlab, and YouthNoise. Only one, Tagged, did they consider better than MySpace (with some, the problem, they found, is that they're too small – social sites need critical mass, so it'd be hard to persuade their friends to join them). Admirably, they did single out YouthNoise, "a social network for social change" founded by Save the Children. Here's what they said: "This site is not better than MySpace, but it offers different things than MySpace. We liked that, instead of pictures and comments, this site encourages ideas and discussion." Meanwhile, another batch of press releases about "niche" social networks this week – Thoos.com for outdoor athletes (they mean runners, paragliders, cyclists, hikers, etc.; GayLooking.com for gay social networking and dating; G2Bay.com, "where people help each other make and save money" (out of Mumbai, India); and SportsDigger.com, connecting "sports fans, teams, and athletes.

Who's social networking?

If anyone thought social networkers were mostly teenagers, there are fresh numbers to clear that misconception up. Web traffic measurer comScore MediaMetrix looked at the top four social sites' traffic in August and found that MySpace and Friendster "skew older," and Xanga has the youngest users. ComScore led with the finding that more than half of MySpace users are now 35+, and I was interested to see that Facebook has just about as many users in the 35-54 age group as in the college age group (28-24) – 33.5% and 34%, respectively. As for the youngest users, 12-to-17-year-olds made up 11.9% of MySpace's traffic, 14% of Facebook's, just 10.6% of Friendster's (whose minimum age is 16), and 20.3% of Xanga's. "MySpace.com has the broadest appeal across age ranges," says comScore, with 40.6% of its users 35-54 and 11% 55+.

AOL's free 'ride' & parental controls

Actually, it's called OpenRide, but it's free, and it combines AOL's most popular features into one piece of software. Optimal for broadband Net users, it can also be used on dialup connections, OpenRide "provides access to email, instant messaging, Web browsing, online search and a digital entertainment media center in one application. The latter service lets users watch video, listen to music and view photos," InformationWeek reports. Each service has its own pane on a "four-pane screen that lets people, for example, check email while watching a video, or send an IM while listening to music." Longtime AOL users who've gone high-speed will probably like its familiarity, the Associated Press review suggests, but reviewer Anick Jesdanun wasn't that impressed as a non-AOL person. He doesn't mention the one feature that would probably add parents to the list of those who really like it: AOL's well-known and well-liked Parental Controls. Information Week reports on those separately. Here's AOL's page about them.

Malware on MySpace...

…and other social-networking sites. It's a growing problem, and of course the more traffic a site gets, the more attractive it is to the creators of deceptive bulletins and "poisonous banner ads," as PC World puts it. ArsTechnica cites a just-released study finding that "83% of adults on social networking sites … admit to downloading unknown files from user profiles, despite not being sure about their contents." The PC World report leads with the experience of MySpace user Robyn who got a bulletin from a friend inviting her to check out some new photos. "She new the friend in real life, so she went ahead and clicked the link." It took her to what looked like a site that downloaded spyware to her computer, and it turned out that the bulletin was from the infected computer of that friend. It had been hijacked to send out bulletins. So, just as I've been saying for a long time to tell your kids to be very careful about what they click on in IMs, the same goes for social sites. Another thing to be alert about is boxes that pop up saying "you have to sign in to do that," when people are already signed in. That's usually a hack that steals people's user names and passwords. PC World says that one in every 600 pages on the social networking sites "hosts some form of malware" (spyware, Trojan software code, etc.). PC World goes on to tell social networkers how to defend themselves and their computers from "money-minded malware authors."

Wal-Mart out of SN, Army isn't

It kind of goes to show you can't fool social networkers. Wal-Mart's stab at a social site called "The Hub" has ended. "The site, temporarily launched this summer as a promotion for the start of the school year, aimed to copy Myspace et al by encouraging ‘hubsters’ to set up their own personalised Web pages," e-Consultancy reports. "Apparently, features such as parental approval and photos like the one [shown on the e-Consultancy page] weren't as appealing as hoped." Maybe it means that if you're advertising, don't clothe your intentions in social-networking disguise. Maybe Wal-Mart should've established a profile at MySpace instead, as the Army and Marines have (see the Asia Times). It'll be interesting to see how military recruiting on the social Web goes. The Army plans to reach parents, too, according to the Asia Times commentary, through AOL, "where it will launch "a social networking site for parents."

New law against online gambling

It's interesting to note the degree of power US law has on the very international Web – at least on the gambling part of it. "On a Black Monday for the online gambling industry, companies that operate Internet betting sites and payment systems lost billions of dollars in market value after the US government moved to criminalize the processing of online wagers," the International Herald Tribune reports. Over the weekend Congress passed a law "that would make it a crime to use credit cards or online payment systems to make bets over the Internet. The US is "by far" online gambling's biggest market, according to the Herald Trib. And a San Jose Mercury News blog reports that "PartyGaming PLC, the world's biggest online gambling company, saw its stock price drop 60% since the market opened Monday, knocking a tidy $4 billion off its valuation." President Bush is expected to sign the law in a couple of weeks. In light of this, you may be interested in the story in Staysafe.org of a 19-year-old paying his way through college playing online poker. Later in the week a former New Jersey attorney general told an online gambling conference that this laws was "drafted haphazardly and risks driving millions of gamblers underground onto unregulated Web sites," Reuters reports. He said the US's 10 million online gamblers aren't going away because of the law.

The social Web & elections

This isn't exactly kid-tech news, but it's an illustration of how the largely youth-driven social Web can complicate things. There's a lot of campaigning – both positive and negative – on social-networking sites, this US election season, and it, like the teen social scene, can get messy. "Today, campaigns are heavily turning to the hugely popular post-it-yourself Web sites - YouTube, MySpace Video and Google Video - especially to upload damaging clips of political gaffes," the San Jose Mercury News reports, providing a bunch of examples. The Wall Street Journal and IDG News also report on the social-networking platform. MySpace just launched a voter registration drive called "Declare Yourself."

'Defriending': Tricky

It's a lot easier to friend than to defriend, young people are finding out (see this item for the friending part). A lot of people are nervously making it up as they go along because, as a 27-year-old social networker told the Boston Globe, online society really hasn't developed social norms yet for adding people to, positioning them on, and deleting them from friends lists, and the social sites aren't offering etiquette advice. Friendster.com, one of the oldest social sites, is sometimes also called "Acquaintancer" and "Dumpster" by users, the Globe reports. One user has 126 people on her friends list and doesn't entirely know if she knows them all. "Her Friendster account is part of a group called 'Somerville'," according to the Globe, "meaning that anyone in that group profile is connected to her as a 'friend' and has access to her page. [She] - who uses Friendster to keep track of former roommates, neighbors, and childhood friends who are no longer in her daily life - is thinking of sending a news bulletin on Friendster to let her contacts know she's going to clean up her friends list and explain why."

Explicit student gossip, threats

As of this writing, police in the Athens, Georgia, area were searching for the person who anonymously posted on a MySpace profile sexually explicit gossip about dozens of high school students. "The site, which was up on MySpace between Sept. 1 and 9, was a 21st-century version of a bathroom wall," the Athens Banner-Herald reports. "The writer - who claimed to be female in an online profile - posted a long list of relationships and supposed sexual encounters of dozens of students. The list was prefaced with a diatribe against rumor-spreading, and the writer claimed she was cataloging everything she had heard and not inventing new rumors." The Associated Press this week reported that "since gossip isn't a crime, the sheriff's report lists the offense as distributing obscene materials to minors." The police got the profile owner's email address from MySpace, but it was an anonymous Yahoo address with no name associated with it. They told the AP they plan to "subpoena BellSouth, the Internet service provider used to create the email address, to try to determine who paid for the Internet service." In a separate case and another Georgia high school, a freshman boy posted his MySpace page a "hit list" of people he wanted to harm, the Athens Banner-Herald reported. The 15-year-old boy "was charged early Thursday morning with making terroristic threats" and taken into custody.

Home PCs targeted

The war between criminal hackers and computer security firms is increasingly shifting to the home front. Because businesses, schools, and government agencies "now have effective barriers against direct assault by cyberthieves … the black hats are redoubling their efforts to get inside home computers, where security is often weaker," the San Jose Mercury News reports . In the "old days," when computer viruses were the main threat, a lot of the hacks were created by amateurs, many of them "adolescents and post-adolescents who sought bragging rights from one another through online vandalism." Now cybercrimials are usually professionals, and they're out to make money by taking control of home computers rather than vandalizing them. The Mercury News goes on to explain what they're doing and what family PC owners can do to protect their machines – look for the three bullets at the bottom of the article. I would add a 4th: Share these precautions with your kids! BTW, Washington Post security writer Brian Krebs reports that Microsoft has just warned PC owners of flaws in Internet Explorer, PowerPoint, and the Windows operating system which have been under attack. Brian tells you how to protect your PC at the bottom of his piece.

Games in school: UK view

Though the study of 1,000 UK teachers (elementary and secondary) and 2,300 students found "evidence of concern from both teachers and students about the impact of [computer] games on players," 59% of teachers would consider using off-the-shelf games in the classroom and 62% of students liked the idea. According to the BBC, there is still a generation gap between teachers' and students' views of videogames. "More than 70% of the surveyed teachers felt that playing games could lead to anti-social behaviour, while 30% of students believed that playing games could lead to increased violence and aggression." In addition to doing the survey, the authors also spent time with 12 teachers in four schools to see how commercial software could be used in the classroom. The study, sponsored by Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Take Two, and the Interactive Software Federation of Europe was released on the first day of the week-long London Games Festival.