A shift in media attention

"Building a safer MySpace" in Business Week this week represents what looks to be a turning point – or the beginning of one - for MySpace. The corporate responsibility it has been showing is getting into the headlines now too. Joining all the coverage this week of the site's launch of Amber alerts, its new email-verification feature (requiring real addresses, not made-up ones), and the feature that's something of a firewall between users who register as under 18 and those who say they're 18+, Business Week focuses on chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam's child-safety efforts and the "perfect storm" of parental-concern creation I told writer Paula Lehman he and MySpace faced last year. The first major "storm condition" Paula didn't mention (I *think* I told her) – besides a flood of scary media coverage and a mid-term election - was that parents knew nothing about social networking (and their kids weren't inclined to fill them in). As for other safety measures implemented, see a brief rundown from the Associated Press this week. It doesn't mention MySpace's project to verify and block sex offenders by creating a national sex-offender registry and a supporting federal law in the works (see 12/8/06) or the parental-notification software tool I mentioned last week. Meanwhile, international expansion continues, with news of the launch in a few months of Spanish-language MySpace Mexico. CNET reports.