Music downloading unabated

And I had thought file-sharing growth was tapering off. "Illegal music downloading is at an all-time high and set to rise further," The Guardian reports, citing the 4th-annual digital-music survey by Entertainment Media Research. Forty-three percent of respondents said they're downloading illegal songs, up from 36% last year and 40% in 2005. Meanwhile, fear of being caught has lessened. "This year only 33% cited the risk of being prosecuted as a deterrent against unauthorised downloading, compared with 42% in 2006."

Videogame tournament on TV

Watch out, Masters and March Madness. This week CBS Sports broadcast the World Series of Video Games, held in Louisville, Ky., last month. Reporting the day before the series aired (Sunday), the New York Times says that "viewers flicking channels looking for a ballgame or golf tournament may instead encounter a couple of young guys rocking out on plastic guitars, or some (literally) disembodied digital boxers throwing uppercuts, or a fanciful animated wizard casting a spell." Definitely a sign of videogames' mainstream-ization, but it is challenging making videogame play interesting on TV to people who don't play videogames. The show, the Times reports, consisted of highlights form the whole gaming series.

AG's spotlight moves to Facebook

An anonymous person who said he or she was "a concerned parent" contacted the New York Times about a fake teen profile he (we'll make it "he" to simplify) created apparently to check into the predator risk on Facebook, the Times reports. The "parent" had this imaginary teen join sex-related groups (ongoing discussions users can join) and add some of the members to "her" friends list. Since that made her screenname and photo visible to other members, the imaginary teen started getting sexual solicitations. Facebook's terms of use prohibit such activity, but it relies on a combination of staff monitoring and user abuse reports to take action, and, the Times article indicates, not everything can be caught, at least not right away. What's hardest to stop is when people, including imaginary ones, are looking for trouble, Facebook indicated in the Times article (for info on exactly this type of user and vulnerability, please see "Profile of a teen online victim"). Other pieces of this story include Facebook's own project for reporting registered sex offenders on its site, and Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's announcement that "investigators in his state were looking into three or more' cases of convicted sex offenders who had registered on Facebook." The Times adds that "Mr. Blumenthal said he was taking a particular interest in Facebook because his children use the service."

Juvenile sex offenders & Net registries

As if to punctuate an important New York Times Magazine article on juvenile sex offenders this Sunday, CNN reported that two 7th-graders in Oregon were charged with felony sex abuse after running down a school hall after lunch, swatting "three to four" girls in the rear end (the mother of one of the boys said in an interview that one of the girls had done the same thing to her son earlier but hadn't been charged). A student hall monitor took them to the principal's office, and they were later taken from school by the police in handcuffs. They were held in juvenile detention for five days, according to the CNN report, and they face up to 10 years' detention. Under Megan's Law, if they're convicted as sex offenders, they could be placed in a public sex-offender registry for life.

A decade or so ago, probably the harshest punishment immature, impulsive behavior like this would've received would be school suspension, maybe expulsion. But times have changed. Our children are living in a time when such behavior can lead not only to arrest and adjudication but also public notification via online sex-offender registries. And some parents – thinking minor's records are sealed, kids need to learn lessons - are unwittingly exposing their children to this new reality. The New York Times looks at all aspects of this in "How Can You Distinguish a Budding Pedophile From a Kid With Real Boundary Problems?"

Here's the current environment for kids deemed sex offenders:

"Juveniles are subject to the same [sex offender] registration requirements as adults without the benefit of a jury trial or similar protections."

"At least 25 states apply the sex offender community notification law to juveniles," which means "their photos, names and addresses and in some cases birth dates and maps to their homes" are in public Web sites for any school peer to find and ostracize them with (kids love to "stalk" each other - do casual background checks on each other - in social sites; see this).

"States that have excluded adolescents from community-notification laws may no longer be able to do so without losing federal money" - within about two years from now. So the other 25 states may follow suit.

Under the 2006 Adam Walsh Act, a teenager adjudicated for a sexual offense "will remain on the national [sex offender] registry for life. He will have to register with authorities every three months. And if he fails to do so — not an unlikely prospect for some teenagers, especially those without involved parents — he may be imprisoned for more than one year."

All this even though for more than 100 years minors' records have been sealed from public view by juvenile courts. That was long before we even knew that adolescent brains aren't fully developed until people are in their mid-20s. "The last part of the brain to develop is the frontal lobe, which is responsible for impulse control, moral reasoning and regulating emotions - the things that adolescents lack when they decide, if they make a conscious decision, to molest a younger kid," the Times reports, citing the National Institute of Mental Health.

Ninety percent or more of young people who have been through the courts for sex offenses won't become adult rapists or pedophiles, according to an expert the Times interviewed. The recidivism rate for juvenile sex offenders is "about 10%," compared to 25-50% for adult offenders (50% or higher is the rate for "the most serious offenders"). Not all, but many of these young people are "naïve experimenters," a term therapists use for "overly impulsive or immature adolescents who are unable to approach girls or boys their own age; instead they engage in inappropriate sexual acts with young children," sometimes because they have been abused themselves, the Times reports. And then some of these - "how many is unclear" - are in the legal system "for what some therapists would say is 'playing doctor' or normative 'sexual experimentation',” inappropriate behavior that has always been a part of teenage reality but is getting reported and adjudicated a lot more now.

A huge problem is the fact that we - society - know almost nothing about the impact on minors of placing them on public registries on the Web, at the same time that research is beginning to show that they are different from adult offenders in several ways. One thing we do know: Public humiliation tends to marginalize people, particularly adolescents, which in turn tends to harm more than help kids and society. Check out the article to see how they're different, to see how and why minors need different kinds of treatment from what adult offenders receive, and to read the stories of individual teenage boys and girls who have been adjudicated for sexual offenses.

Related news

Arizona's new sex-offender law. Starting in September, registered sex offenders in Arizona will have to disclose their social-networking and instant-messaging screennames as well as their email addresses because of a new law in that state, the Arizona Republic reports. "Anyone can go to the state government site and search an individual or screen name against its database" of sex offenders.

Professional & personal lives online

It's all getting kind of muddy online for grownups. For the pioneers of social networking - teenagers and 20-something just starting out their careers - it wasn't such a big deal. They didn't make the distinctions we make between "lives." They, especially teens, experimented with different persona, but that's just it. The persona were experimental, not established. Now that we adults are getting into social networking, and social sites are proliferating and specializing (or settling into niches), fortunately we have some choices: We can have our professional social networking, our extended-family social networking, our music social-networking, but we are also having social networking dilemmas. Take Washington Post tech reporter Rob Pegoraro's experience with Facebook, for example. For him, Facebook started out to be "purely recreational" and kind of solidified in his head as such. Then co-workers started friending him. Okaaaaay, he could maybe get used to that. But then p.r. people in his business circles but not personally known to him wanted to be "friends." Hmmm. The problem is, Facebook has become what you might call the hip LinkedIn.com (a "social-networking" site that has always been about professional networking), so plenty of people 30+ are now doing professional networking on it. Facebook does have "at least 135" privacy options. "Yet not one of these options allows you to categorize Facebook contacts as close or distant friends." It' getting a little tricky. See p. 2 of Rob's article for his conclusion.

Web video's hot

Web video is quite the trend, and not just for online youth, though young people are on the lighter side of video-viewing. Three-quarters of all 18-to-29-year-old Net users in the US have watched videos online, and 60% of all US Net users have, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, citing a just-released study by the Pew Internet & American Life project. A fifth of Net users watch videos online "any given day" (one-third in the 18-to-29 category), the Associated Press reports. "On a typical day, 19% of US Internet adults watch some form of video. News ranked first and comedy second overall." Younger ones go for humor, older Web video viewers prefer news. "Half of video viewers ages 18-29 watch clips on YouTube, and about 15% cite MySpace. Only 7% turn to a cable or network TV site," according to the AP. But in spite of YouTube's popularity and all the homemade stuff on it, most video viewers - more than 60% - still prefer professionally produced video. High-speed Net access is a factor - 74% of broadband users watch or download online video, Pew/Internet found. Here's the Pew study.

MP3 Barbie

Is it the Barbiepod? She has just as many outfits as the Barbie your mom knew and loved, but she's probably more appealing to the little female digital natives running around your house. Because she's a music player, and when her feet are plugged into the docking station, "she unlocks pages and pages of games, virtual shops and online chatting functions on the BarbieGirls.com Web site," the New York Times reports. This is kind of the tao of Webkinz, the new way to both market and sell "Web-enabled products" to Web-enabled kids. "Instead of asking young Web surfers to punch in their parents’ credit card numbers, BarbieGirls.com and other sites are sending customers to a real-world toy store first. Some of these sites (like the Barbie one) can be used in a limited way without purchasing merchandise — the better to whet young appetites - but others, like the popular Webkinz site, are of little or no use without a store-bought product or two (or three, or a dozen)." Then there's SpotzGirl.com, which allows users to design their own jewelry, picture frames, etc., with Spotz that are like charm-bracelet charms or buttons (the button maker can be purchased for $24.99 at a real-live store). Both sites are about personal expression - decorating oneself, site characters, and/or spaces.

People-tracking phones

If you'd like to know more about global-positioning-enabled phones, SafeKids.com's Larry Magid surveyed the scene for the New York Times. He looks at the various child-tracking phones and services from Verizon Wireless, Sprint, Disney, and Wherify, as well as social-mapping services by Helio and Loopt that are very cool but not really for kids because they actually map users' physical location (with the users' permission). But on the flipside of this tech marvel is a story out of Australia illustrating the privacy concerns involved in countries where consumer privacy isn't a top priority. Australia's national security agency and "law enforcement agencies will be able to track the movement of people through their mobile phones secretly, without obtaining a court warrant, under new laws, legal and civil liberty groups are warning," Australian IT reports. Meanwhile, in the US, on the Web, and as privacy concerns grow, search engine companies are tightening their privacy policies, the Washington Post reports.

Recommended kid communities

Izzy Neis has done parents a real service in publishing her list of about two dozen "Worthy Kid/Tween Communities" (emphasis on "community," she posted in our forum, ConnectSafely.org). "Community" is important because tweens and lots of kids like socializing online as much teens do, but they're too young for places like Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace. So it's good to know what the age-appropriate spots are. Underneath Izzy's list are more sites in her readers' comments (she'll check them out and add them to her list if she feels they're worthy too). She also provides another list of sites that are not for people under 14. Author, children's entertainment specialist, and blogger Izzy describes herself as "a cookie connoisseur, pop culture aficionado … and a zealot in the pro-kid movement." Meanwhile, the Associated Press recently look at the pre-tween end of the social Web in general, while the Pioneer Press zoomed in on Webkinz.

Social networkers worldwide

The social Web is completely global, and there's a map to illustrate at the ValleyWag blog. Some fascinating, sometimes surprising, patterns show up on this map:

Hi5.com is the most international, with a presence in 15 countries, especially Peru, Colombia, Central America, Tunisia, Romania, and Mongolia. A bit more on Hi5 from the Gigaom blog: It "started out as a social-network-plus matrimonial site targeting the Indian diaspora, but later morphed into a social network" that now has about 30 million members.

"Facebook," the map says, "is stronger, internationally, than Myspace, with surprising strongholds in the Middle East."

Bebo and Skyblog "follow colonial patterns," Bebo British and Skyblog French, with strongholds in France, Belgium, and Francophone Africa.

Friendster's huge in Southeast Asia

"Fotolog, a photo service defeated in the US by Friendster, has re-emerged as the dominant social network in Argentina and Chile."

Google's Orkut is big in India, Pakistan, Brazil, and Paraguay.

Studiverzeichnis is popular in Germany and Austria.

LiveJournal's hot in Belarus and Russia.

Rating teachers ok in Germany

Citing free-speech law, a German district court ruled that rating teachers on the Web is not illegal. The court overturned a temporary injunction that would have forced the operators of the site Spickmich [something like "your cheat sheet" in German] to prevent a female teacher from being graded by pupils online," Heise Online reports. Students had given her "an overall grade of 4.3" on a scale of 1 to 6." Spickmich.de is run by three university students, who had appealed the injunction. US-based examples of this kind of site include RateMyTeachers.com and RateMyProfessors.com.

Oxford fined Facebook users

The age-old UK university's disciplinarians - the proctors - are cracking down on an ancient tradition using Facebook against its Oxford student users. The tradition is called "trashing," whereby students douse each other with stuff like champagne, shaving foam, and flour to celebration completion of exams, The Times reports. "Staff at Oxford University are searching [Facebook], collecting photographs of students who they say have broken rules on post-examination celebrations, and handing down fines." The student union, in turn, called the move a "disgraceful” invasion of students' privacy "and has emailed every common room advising how to prevent [proctors from] viewing the photographs." The students are getting fined around 70 pounds, about $143, after "residents and police complained that the clean-up bill ran into thousands of pounds," although The Times reported several years ago that fines have done "nothing to prevent exuberance." Here's some coverage from this side of the pond at InformationWeek. In related news, CNET describes "the latest unpopular Facebook move."

Online victimization: Facts emerging

It was great to see the Associated Press's "Net threats result of kids' online behavior." It means newspapers and broadcast media worldwide just may run this story, and more parents will be getting facts instead of scary messages based on ignorance, politics, well-intentioned guesswork. Here are some facts we have now:

Fact No. 1: Posting personal info online isn't actually what makes kids most vulnerable to predators. "Rather, victimization is more likely to result from … talking about sex with people met online and intentionally embarrassing someone else on the Internet," the AP reports. The first form of aggressive behavior - talking about sex with strangers online - is about predation, the second about harassing or cyberbullying, which affects a great many more teens (about one-third of all online youth, according to the latest Pew/Internet study - see this).

Fact No. 2: "Online victims tend to be teens with troubles offline, such as poor relationships with parents, loneliness and depression" (see "Profile of a teen online victim"). The kids most at risk online are already risk-seekers and -takers in real life.

Fact No. 3: A lot of sexual-victimization cases happen at the hands of peers, not adults, the AP reports, citing the work of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center. It also cites a 2004 study by the CACRC finding that, even when offenders are adults, they "generally aren't strangers, and pedophiles aren't luring unsuspecting children by pretending to be a peer."

Certainly nobody's saying kids should completely relax about posting personal info about themselves. It's common sense that the more discreet they are the less info there'll be to use against them. But the reality is, sharing - thoughts, media, experiences - is what today's very social, user-driven Web is all about, and a lot of parents can breathe easier knowing that posting personal info online is not as high-risk as once thought.

So what we are saying is that it's time to look at the facts we now have and adjust our child-protection strategies accordingly at home, in schools, and in policymaking. We need to…

…think of our online kids less as victims and more as participants on the participatory Web, of which they are the key drivers.

…think more in terms of online citizenship than online safety. Good citizenship includes safety; knowing that aggressive behavior puts kids at risk, we see that ethical behavior protects them.

When Web participants become cybercitizens, with a sense of responsibility toward fellow participants and their collective space, the social Web will be a safer, better place for everyone on it.

Related links

• The study the AP refers to, published last February in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine: "Internet Prevention Messages: Targeting the Right Online Behaviors," by Michele L. Ybarra, Kimberly J. Mitchell, David Finkelhor, and Janis Wolak
  
• "New approach to online safety suggested," by SafeKids.com's Larry Magid, posted in BlogSafety.com 2/10/07
  
• "Cyberbullying in the US: Fresh insights"
  
• "Profile of a teen online victim"
  
• "Predators vs. cyberbullies"
  
• "Responsible social networking: Mounting evidence"
  
• "Net-related crimes against kids"

How teens use tech

Teenagers say they only use email when they're communicating with adults. To them, "real" email is a feature of a social-networking site. "To hear the teen panelists tell it … e-mail will be strictly the domain of business dealings," reports CNET's Stefanie Olsen, referring to panelists at this week's YPulse Mashup conference in San Francisco. They were Asheem Badshah, a teenaged president of Scriptovia.com, an essay-sharing site that launched this summer; Martina Butler, host of the [well-sponsored] teen podcast Emo Girl Talk; Catherine Cook, president of MyYearbook.com and soon-to-be freshman at Georgetown University; and Ashley Qualls, president of WhateverLife.com, creators of layouts and graphics for MySpace profiles. So how are they communicating? A whole lot by texting on cellphones. "In the last six to nine months, teens in the US have taken to text messaging in numbers that rival usage in Europe and Asia. According to market research firm JupiterResearch, 80% of teens with cell phones regularly use text messaging." Many teens also use multiple social sites ("Badshah said that to subscribe to only one social network means losing out on friendships with people who are active on other rival social networks"). [If a teen reads this, tell us if you agree/disagree with this or the article I link to here - sorry you have to use email (anne@netfamilynews.org)! ;-) But you're totally welcome to post in our forum, though: BlogSafety.com, soon to relaunch as ConnectSafely.org.]

Requests for teens' sex photos: Study

Four percent of US online youths have been asked to send sexually explicit photos of themselves over the Net, and about 1.5% have done so, the Associated Press reports, citing a new study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center. That's not just extremely unwise; those photos could be considered illegal child pornography, distribution of which is a federal crime. One of the study's authors, Kimberly Mitchell, told the AP that kids need to know this. "Mitchell said kids also may not be aware of how quickly such photos can circulate, mistakenly thinking the image is only for the personal use of the requester," according to the AP. Here are the conditions that she and her co-authors identified as making kids more likely to receive these requests for explicit photos of themselves: "having a close relationship with someone known only online; talking with someone online about sex or having a sexually suggestive screen name; and experiencing physical or sexual abuse offline." The study, which is being published this week in the Journal of Adolescent Health, is an analysis of data from a 2005 phone survey of 1,500 Net users aged 10-17, the AP reports (its authors said the numbers could be higher now, with greater use of camera phones, Web cams, and other digital-photo devices). The study's margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

The wrong kind of spin control

The term is "sock-puppeting," and its definition is "the act of creating a fake online identity to praise, defend or create the illusion of support for one’s self, allies or company," the New York Times reports. The CEO of the Whole Foods grocery chain engaged in sock-puppeting for eight years on Yahoo discussion boards. The Federal Trade Commission noticed and called him on it, and the case illustrates - for everyone, from cyberbullies to politicians to corporate executives - that online anonymity "is an illusion." And Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's actions could potentially destroy his company's bid to acquire another grocery chain, Wild Oats. The Times cites one business analyst as saying CEO sock-puppeting is "the tip of the iceberg." It's a good case study for cybercitizenship lessons in homes and schools, looking at the difference between ethical and unethical spin control.

'Falling rocks [teachers]'

Veteran tech educator David Jakes seems to have struck a chord in his blog post about technophobe teachers labeled as "falling rocks" by colleagues and students in many schools. There are a number of very substantive posts from other educators underneath his article in TechLearning.com. "They’re called rocks because they won’t budge, and you just can’t get them into new things, things like technology…. So," Jakes writes, "the most appropriate thing for people to do is to move on to those who are more open, more willing, more capable." *Wrong*, he says, then explains why. Then he offers five ways to "get these teachers on board. One commenter says there are good teachers who integrate technology and there are bad one who do, and vice versa, which makes a lot of sense. In our family's experience, one really fine language arts teacher didn't teach much with technology but used it as a peripheral tool to enrich communication with students, which they really appreciated. Her bottom line was to respect her students and do whatever it took to support learning and communication that worked for them; it was a very effective strategy.

Parents liking social networking too

Some parents are setting up accounts at sites like MySpace and Facebook to keep an eye on their teens, then finding themselves becoming avid social networkers too, KABC in Los Angeles reports. One mom told ABC she found MySpace a great way to find people she went to high school with, another said she was now "hooked" on social networking herself. "A recent survey shows 40% of MySpace users are now between the ages of 35 and 54. And Facebook reports its fastest growing age group is 25 and older," according to KABC.

Teens in Net prostitution ads

Two high school students and a 19-year-old "ringleader" advertised themselves as "party girls" available as a threesome in an online classifieds sites, the Pioneer Press reports , citing an FBI investigation. The 19-year-old "was arrested by the FBI last month and charged in US District Court with sex trafficking of minors, a federal offense." The Pioneer Press adds that the case is just the "latest in the Twin Cities involving sex rings" using free online classifieds to advertise; "but this time, the participants are minors." These teens fit the profile of online teens most at risk for sexual exploitation (see the profile). The Press adds that investigators are debating whether teen prostitution is on the rise because the Internet, but "the majority of juvenile prostitutes is still thought to be runaways, illegal immigrants and children from poor urban areas. But an August 2003 Newsweek exposé examined the increase of juvenile sex workers in suburbs. The story focused on a Twin Cities girl from an affluent home who relished the fast cash and picked up men at the Mall of America."

myNBC for TV fans

It's a social site for networking by fans of shows like "Heroes," "The Office," and "The Biggest Loser," a New York Times blog reports. Some analysts think it'll be successful, other think NBC should focus more on getting its content onto existing social networks - on "taking their programs to where people already are." I think, on this very fragmented medium called the social Web, both are right. I'm right now at the YPulse Mashup (conference) about "Totally Wired Teens" and hearing social media researcher danah boyd say that it's going more the way of "mobility" than "immersion" for online teens (fluid movement among multiple sites, media, technologies, and devices rather than immersion or brand/site/tech loyalty). I agree, so I think "mobility" means engaging with other "Heroes" fans in more than one place online. [For a great commentary on what happened at the Mashup, see PBS blogger Rob Glaser's report.]

Xbox: 'Family-friendly'

Could the Xbox be going the way of the Wii? Microsoft has announced "several efforts to broaden the appeal of their machine to families," the New York Times reports. The efforts include more Xbox games for children and families and "a deal to distribute films from the Walt Disney Company on Microsoft’s Xbox Live Internet service."

Social networkers: Future businesspeople

I know I’m telling you nothing you don’t know: Users of Facebook and MySpace will grow up to have careers. But what I really mean by that headline is that their social networking now is very likely preparing them for those careers, at the very least in the business world. John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, “the world’s biggest maker of data networking equipment,” told the Financial Times that “social networks, collaborative Web sites like wikis, teleconferencing and other technologies that allow interaction on a large scale” are “set to usher in a new phase of productivity growth that could surpass that achieved during the late-1990s Internet boom.” In an interview with the FT, he referred to a new phase of creativity as well as productivity - that will last a minimum of 10 but probably 15 years - enabled by many-to-many communication of photos and video as well as messages.

Young music fans choosing vinyl

Go figure. Just when we thought that music downloads had pretty much killed off CDs, The Guardian reports that, "in a rare case of cheerful news for the record labels" there's a "vinyl revival" afoot in the UK (and quite possibly in the US too). It says two-thirds of all UK singles in the UK now come out on in the 7-inch record format, "with sales topping 1 million. Though still a far cry from vinyl's heyday in 1979, when Art Garfunkel's Bright Eyes alone sold that number and the total vinyl singles market was 89 million, the latest sales are still up more than five-fold in five years." The Guardian adds that it's not unusual to young people to buy records even with nothing to play them on. It quotes an industry analyst as saying they'll buy the digital version to listen to and the record as art, something tangible in their hands, maybe as a memory of a great concert. Another sign that today's media sharers (as opposed to mere consumers) don't abandon sites, formats, technologies, etc., they just fold new ones into the mix.

Cyberbullying: Local view

A county official on Long Island made a public statement saying Suffolk County is working hard to "persuade parents to monitor for cyberbullying as aggressively as they would for sexual predators," Newsday reports. The county had pretty high-profile exposure to the problem late last year, when a video of a local teen girl being beaten up by three peers appeared on YouTube (see "Teens' fight video"), a case that Newsday says received worldwide attention. "No law in New York specifically addresses such online behavior, though 22 other states prohibit it," according to Newsday, which adds that "the Nassau district attorney's office, cyberbullying may be considered misdemeanor aggravated harassment, which can be punished by up to a year in prison." [See also "Acting out for the videocam."]

Grown up cyberbullying & spin control

We’re hearing more and more about the teenage, queen-bee-wannabe kind, but adults are certainly not immune to cyberbullying – not on the user-driven Web, where defamation can happen to anybody, whether a parent or a public figure. The Washington Post describes some particularly tough examples and the reputation-management providers they’ve turned to. “Charging anything from a few dollars to thousands of dollars a month, companies such as International Reputation Management, Naymz and ReputationDefender don't promise to erase the bad stuff on the Web. But they do assure their clients of better results on an Internet search, pushing the positive items up on the first page and burying the others deep.”

Of course these organizations help with teenagers’ reputations too, but let’s hope it won’t come to this potentially costly fix for them. What these services do is something a lot of people can do for themselves with a little bit of time – put a little positive p.r. out there on the Web about themselves (such as a blog or social-networking profile or two or three to which good friends can post supportive comments to) that search-engine crawlers can find too. I’ve mentioned this in the past, the perhaps unfortunate but growing need to learn and teach our kids how to do our/their own spin control. It seems the choices are becoming 1) stay very anonymous and private online, 2) be less private and more spin-savvy, or 3) be very public and either spend a lot of time spin-doctoring our own reputations or a lot of money paying professionals to do it. Most young people will probably fall somewhere around No. 2 or will be in denial, think they’re in category No. 1, and occasionally need a little spin-doctor help, whether amateur or professional.

Ethics & media literacy: Facebook in their yearbooks

Students at a Washington, D.C.-area high school found some of their Facebook photos published in their school’s yearbook, the Washington Post reports. There were pictures of everything from tailgate-party drinking to cellphone portraits to silly antics among friends. “Desperate and crunched for time, yearbook staffers resorted to filling pages with photographs downloaded from student Facebook pages. They did it largely without the permission of students and without crediting photographers.” The Post writer suggests the incident illustrates “how complacent the denizens of Internet vanity sites have become” about sharing their private lives. Maybe so. I think this just points to another piece of the cyberethics training that’s needed – the media-literacy piece. This piece of the training deals with issues like cut ‘n’ paste plagiarism and copyright theft. Here’s coverage from the Student Press Law Center.

Cyberethics training needed

“She was a little big for her age, her face still chubby and prepubescent,” writes ZooeysRoom.com’s Kaley Noonen in Edutopia.org. “She pulled me aside after the cyberbullying workshop I'd just given to a room full of 20 middle school girls. She looked as though she were hiding something. ‘Would you help me get my MySpace page shut down?’ she asked.” The girl explained to Kaley that an ex-friend had used her password to hijack her MySpace profile and proceed to bully her by posting “all kinds of malicious [sex-related] lies” about the girl on it.

As hard as that is to read, anecdotes like Kaley’s and so many others from teens, reporters, and other experts are not unusual. Then there’s…

The brand-new finding from the Pew Internet & American Life Project that some 8 million US 12-to-17-year-olds have been bullied (see this issue).

The recent finding from the Crimes Against Children Research Center about the fine line between bullying an victimization: “Youth who engage in online aggressive behavior making rude or nasty comments or frequently embarrassing others are more than twice as likely to report online interpersonal victimization” (see this summary), and…

All this points to a serious and growing need for ethics training. Kaley quotes a 2005 Pew/Internet study that found girls are “now considered the ‘power users’ of online communication tools. This kind of power needs to be tempered by ethics training. You wouldn't give a 16-year-old girl a chainsaw without warning her of its dangers, yet with a keystroke, many girls are capable of carving up names, reputations, even entire lives with cheerful indifference.”

At the end of his 10-part Internet-safety series, author, public-policy expert, and dad Adam Thierer writes that “one of the most important parenting responsibilities involves teaching our children basic manners and rules of social etiquette.” Helping them apply those basics in their online experiences is equally important, he suggests, offering eight “sensible rules” for online behavior. Rule No. 1 is “Treat others you meet online with the same respect that you would accord them in person.”

Kaley takes it a step further when she teaches middle-schoolers what empathy means – with a real-time demo of their own completely non-empathetic reactions to a photo of Britney Spears with her head shaved and dark circles under her eyes (see the article for those heartless reactions).

One thing is clear: If we don’t want our children to be victimized themselves, we need to talk with them about treating people online the way they would to their faces, and if someone else is cruel online, not to make the situation worse by participating. Note one high school student’s intelligent attitude:

"’I've heard of [cyberbullying] and experienced it. People think they are a million times stronger because they can hide behind their computer monitor.’ This student called them ‘e-thugs,’ while displaying his own maturity about the practice: ‘Basically I just ignored the person and went along with my own civilized business’.” [This is on p. 5 of the Pew/Internet report, also quoted in InternetNews.com’s coverage.]

More on this

The latest numbers: My summary two weeks ago of the Pew Internet & American Life Project's just-released study on cyberbullying in the US, based on both a survey of and focus groups with teenagers.

Cyberbullying's seriousness. In a commentary at MSNBC, Helen Popkin suggests we need to come out of denial about cyberbullying’s seriousness, especially when dealing with not-yet-fully-developed teenage brains. But we also need to acknowledge, she suggests, that this new/old social ill is certainly not “owned” by teens – and she’s right. There is a lot of ugly online harassment being committed by adult bullies too, male and female.

An adult’s-eye-view of social-networking etiquette at The Times of London: Note No. 8 in writer Jack Malvern’s “A Guide to Internet Manners” at the bottom: “The golden rule for Facebook Etiquette is the same as for manners generally. Manners mean how we behave in society. Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself. And this does not mean having to admit every unknown Tom, Dick and Harriet to your friendship.”

Mobile bullying across the pond – one in five 11-to-19-year-olds in the UK have been bullied either via phone or the Internet, the BBC reports.

Dad-created social site

Hmmm. I hope the Santa Cruz Sentinel does a followup story on this, because it’ll be interesting to see if a parent-created, parent-monitored site for teens – even with all the desirable features – will develop significant teen participation. Invitation-only Santa Cruz Teen Space – with “instant messaging, chat, online radio, Yahoo! videos, blogs, polls, games and event listings” – was created by 41-year-old computer programmer and father of two James Williams because he wanted his daughters and other local teens to have a safe alternative to other social sites, the Sentinel reports. “Members [so far there are 72] can format their own profiles as well as rate each other's attractiveness, send each other cyber high-fives and leave embarrassing face-to-face confessions behind by sending notification of a crush.” If people (under 18 only unless a parent) want to join but haven’t been invited, they can apply. Williams reviews the applications. The Sentinel doesn’t say how he verifies applicants’ ages or parents’ guardianship, unless by phone when he checks up on applicants (and people can lie on the phone as well as online). I suspect there will always be teens who make “safety” a priority (it’d be great if researchers could come up with a percentage in a future study), but I suspect that what MySpace and other social sites deliver is what I’d call social critical mass – e.g., everybody in one’s school (or one’s country, as with Lunarstorm.se in Sweden and Cyworld in South Korea) – and for most teens, having “everybody” there would be a higher priority. [Cyworld’s now has versions in the US and other countries, but the Korean one claims 90% of South Koreans under 20 – see this great blog post about it.]

Social sites focused on porn

I hope parents who are trying to keep their kids off MySpace and YouTube know about user-produced social sites that specialize in pornography, because they’re reportedly proliferating. One of the more disturbing things about them is the content that’s uploaded without the video subjects’ permission. This takes social-networking reputation concerns to an extreme. “There are over 250 ex-girlfriends currently featured among the tens of thousands of sex videos on [one such site],” Alternet reports. And how does this happen? “About 15% of women have knowingly made sex videos, according to a recent poll in Cosmopolitan magazine. If true, that’s how many are at risk of having an ex post X-rated files of them on a porn-sharing site.” The piece leads with the news that the video of one “ex-girlfriend” has been viewed by 138,629 people on one Germany-based porn video-sharing site (or “aggregator of amateur-generated porn”). The article goes in-depth on the tagging, rating, discussion groups, and other social elements of Web 2.0’s red-light district. It says “Every day, there are 266 new porn sites on the Net. Every second, 28,258 users are viewing porn,” the article says, adding that these sites that aggregate the homemade kind make it easier to find.

Monitoring kid phone use

Fifteen-year-old Joshua has a fairly pricey Blackberry Pearl. Why? Because it runs Radar kid-monitoring software, CNET reports. “Initially, the Radar software, which costs about $10 a month on top of a wireless plan, has worked only with BlackBerry devices and other smart phones, a factor that has limited growth.” But its makers have struck deals with Verizon Wireless and Motorola that will make it available on more phones. As for Josh, anytime he “gets a call from someone not on a call list approved by his parents, they receive a real-time text alert on their cell phone or online,” according to CNET. Now if the software can just monitor kids’ photo- and video-sharing activities. (See the reference to “happy slapping” attacks in the BBC, whereby “assaults on children and adults are recorded on mobile phones and sent via video messaging” and examples in “We’re all on candid camera,” which ran in the Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, and BBC.)

Stickam: Reported ties with porn biz

A former vice president at Stickam.com, a Webcam social site, told the New York Times that Stickam is managed and owned by a businessman who also owns DTI Services, “a vast network of Web sites offering live sex shows over Web cameras. “[Alex] Becker alleges that Stickam shares office space, employees and computer systems with the pornographic Web sites.” Becker also said he saw Stickam staff delete “thousands of email messages” that had been sent to the site’s customer-service and abuse-reporting addresses without reading them. For its part, the company told the Times it takes user security seriously and Becker was being “retaliatory” because of disagreement over his contract. The thing is, “several thousand of its mostly teenage members log onto the site each night to broadcast their own lives, often from their bedrooms. They put on makeshift talk shows, flirt with other members in video chat rooms, and often, if they are female, field repeated requests to take off their clothes.”

Kids' ed sites back in vogue?

I feel like I’m back in Web 1.0, the downloadable, professionally-produced-content Web, when I read about educational sites for kids in the tech news media. They’ve been around for a long time, but they certainly haven’t been in the news. I guess what’s new is that the focus really is now shifting from textbooks and educational software to educational Web sites kids can interact with. For example, Starfall.com, which “opens access to learning exercises for free online,” CNET reports - kind of like the seasoned PBSKids.org. “Like a Sesame Street program, the free Web site teaches kids their ABCs and the basics of reading through the use of audio and visual phonetics, games and animations. Exercises on Starfall include sounding out vowels (‘ah’), reading books like The Little Hen and decorating a virtual character.” The other new-old genre is education-related sites for parents, such as the longstanding FamilyEducation.com and the startup Education.com, recently reviewed by SafeKids.com’s Larry Magid for CBSNEWS.com.

Game console news

If you have an Xbox 360 player at your house, you may’ve heard of “the red ring of death.” Explains a Seattle Post Intelligencer blog, “when an Xbox 360 suffers an indeterminate major hardware failure, the normally green ring of power lights turns red and the system will not boot up. This is not a software crash but a total hardware failure, and the sad owner of the Xbox [used to have] to mail it to Microsoft and then pay $140 for them to service it and mail it back.” It’s not a problem for most 360 owners, MS says, but for those who have experienced it, good news: Microsoft is extending the Xbox 360’s warranty, saying it will devote $1 billion+ to the repair costs,” USATODAY reports. “Microsoft said it should take two to four weeks to repair damaged consoles.” Meanwhile, there’s good news for PlayStation fans too: Sony’s taking $100 off the price of its PS3, USATODAY reported in another article. The new price is $499, and Sony “plans to introduce a $599 package with a larger (80-gigabyte vs. 60-GB) hard drive and one game next month.” Analysts say PS3 sales have lagged a bit in the face of the Nintendo Wii’s success.

Alleged illegal plans in virtual world

It’s probably a one-in-a-million case, but it does represent a risk to youth in virtual worlds and other online game settings where people of all ages play. A 31-year-old Australian woman faces child abduction charges in North Carolina “after trying to bring her 17-year-old World of Warcraft boyfriend back to Oz,” TheRegister.com reports. She was arrested as she stepped off a train in Rocky Mount, N.C. She “allegedly had an online relationship with the boy for more than a year, which began in the online game World of Warcraft,” and had since “exchanged copious amounts of email and even discussed marriage.” She’s being detained pending a July 11 court date and could face two years in American jail. Online games and social networking on cellphones are the next frontiers for child online safety. Meanwhile, another virtual world, Second Life, is now seeing the first case of an avatar suing another avatar for real money. A Second Life entrepreneur “has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Second Life resident” for copying the former’s virtual product and selling it for a third of the price, the San Jose Mercury News reports.

Social networking at Arctic Circle

San Francisco-based Bebo.com, a social site hugely popular in the UK, Ireland, and Down Under, is also very popular among Canada’s northernmost youth. “A search on Bebo shows hundreds of young Inuit who are registered users from Kuujjuaq, Iqaluit, Cambridge Bay and Inukjuak,” reports the Nunatsiaq News. “The sites registered to users in Nunavik and Nunavut generally feature photos of family members and eye-catching decorations. The texts are peppered with English, French and Inuktitut written in roman orthography. Or sometimes there's a combination of languages – ‘I would like to buy a used car first so I don't have to bicykugaq around town,’ says one entry,” the News adds. Nunvut Territory is northwest of Hudson Bay (see this map at Realtravel.com).

Libraries as teen hangouts

Teens love creating and sharing digital media, and so it follows that teens increasingly love hanging out at the library, according to DailyHerald.com. Fourteen-year-old Liz and her friends love getting together, it reports, at the West Chicago Public Library, where they play video and board games, go online, and read. As media – books, movies, periodicals, etc. – get more digital, so do libraries, and “the library of the future, leaders say, will be a one-stop shop, offering community-center elements, including more hangout and group meeting spots, as well as tech elements such as training classes, Webcasts and downloadable video games.” Already, the Daily Herald says, 40% of all the Naperville (Ill.) Public Library’s checkouts are “non-book items,” including DVDs and CDs. Hopefully, in these locuses of media literacy, critical thinking - about online behavior, sources, copyrights, etc. - will become a norm in digital-media users' online lives.

Facebook's growth spurt

Christopher Beam of Slate calls Facebook “the Volvo of social networking,” the kind of “comfy, sturdy, and attractive without being showy” social site “you’d bring home to Mom.” But that’s all changing, at least the Volvo part, since Facebook “tore down its walls and opened its pages” to outside widget providers allowing Facebookers to add to their pages little features like a Graffiti widget that allows visitors to doodle on your page, an “Honest Box” that lets your visitors say what they really think of you (anonymously – watch out, concerned-citizens-against-cyberbullying), or the very popular iLike that lets people share their favorite tunes (“growing at the rate of 200,000 people/day,” as of Beam’s posting, and Graffiti having been downloaded 3.3 million times). He cites the Wall Street Journal as saying Facebook itself added 3 million+ users in the few weeks since its big opening (see “Facebook’s big plans”). In its just-released figures, ComScore says Facebook’s “most dramatic growth occurred among 25-34 year olds (up 181%), while 12-17 year olds grew 149%” and users 35+ 98%. The smallest growth, understandably was among college-age users (38%), which demographic may already be saturated where Facebook’s concerned.

Social stuff taking over Web - worldwide

Wherever you are in the world, parents, your teens’ social networking seems to be here to stay. Online video and social networking are outpacing all other uses of digital media worldwide, according to international market researchers Ipsos, and social networking “is quickly becoming the dominant online behavior globally." In terms of frequency of visits to social sites, South Korea leads the way, followed by Brazil, China, Mexico, US, UK, Canada, India, Germany, France, Japan, and Russia. “While 20% of regular Internet users worldwide had visited a social networking site in the previous 30 days, the figure was 55% in Korea and 24% in the U.S.,” according to MediaPost.com’s report on the Ipsos study, “The Face of the Web.” And this study was just of people 18+. As for the UK, Nielsen/NetRatings has a more granular picture: MySpace is “well in the lead with 6.5 million UK users, compared with 4 million for Bebo and 3.2 million on Facebook,” the BBC reports, but the latter two are growing there much faster and could quite possibly catch up to MySpace in the fall, the BBC cites Nielsen as saying. Then there’s time spent: MySpace users “spent an average of 96 minutes on the site in May,” compared to 152 minutes for Bebo users and 143 minutes on Facebookers.

Social Web's class divide

Facebook is more like the suburbs and MySpace the inner city, according to a Salon.com blogger’s interpretation of social media researcher danah boyd’s latest, fairly controversial paper on social networking. I think it’s controversial because, as an essay, it’s broad-brushed and uses teens’ own terms for their social groups, and because it’s based on danah’s qualitative research, not the quantitative kind of a sociologist (danah’s legal name is lower-cased). Note her liberal use of quotation marks: “The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other ‘good’ kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities. MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, burnouts,’ ‘alternative kids,’ ‘art fags,’ punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school….” Isn’t it interesting, danah and commentators point out (I think it is too), that people are categorizing themselves in cyberspace as well as in RL (“real life”)? Don’t miss what danah says about “good kids” vs. “bad kids” under “Thoughts and meta thoughts” at the end.

I actually think that the two social sites’ populations largely reflect their origins: Facebook was exclusive right out of the gate, having gotten its start at Harvard and then taking other college and university campuses by storm, only later broadening out. MySpace, which was about individuality and diversity from its start with 20-somethings, then teens, also reflected the inclusiveness of the music scene that it was so tied to. Facebook was about networking and limited in the customization it allowed; MySpace was whatever anyone wanted it to be, allowing almost any sort of customization (the two have moved closer together since and away from those very divergent starts). Here’s the BBC on danah’s essay.

Sibling found in MySpace

Hours after finding their 17-year-old sister on MySpace, from whom they’d been separated for 12 years, Josh (22), Jake (20), and their sister were reunited, ABC News reports. After all three had grown up in foster homes in Texas, the two brothers also found that their sister – who had been adopted by a different family - was now in Florida, as they were, and just 45 minutes away. The way they found her was, last August, “Jake had a revelation,” according to ABC. “Every 16-year-old girl he knew had a page on MySpace. But, he wasn't sure he knew his lost sister's name.” It was knowing their mother’s maiden name that helped him find her in MySpace.

Teens' videogaming time: Study

Teen boys and girls who play videogames spend less time on reading and homework than those who don’t play videogames, a new study found. The videogame players, however, “did not spend less time than non-video game players interacting with parents and friends,” according to the study in the July issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, ScienceDaily.com reports. The latter is *partly* good news for healthy development: "Particularly during adolescence, when social interactions and academic success lay the groundwork for health in adulthood, there is concern that video games will interfere with the development of skills needed to make a successful transition to adulthood." The survey respondents were given diaries in which they logged time spent playing video games, interacting with parents and friends, reading and doing homework, and engaging in sports and “active leisure.” Here’s Reuters’s coverage. Meanwhile, if you have an avid videogamer at your house, s/he may’ve already found this press release about how people can make $120/hour testing videogames: added incentive not to do one's homework?

Infected game mod

It’s a handy, cutting-edge form of social engineering using terrible, 1986-style graphics. The “Hood Life” mod (short for modification, a bit of code that enhances or offers an add-on to a videogame) for Grand Theft Auto is demo’d in a YouTube video, but the graphics are “crudely rendered, not up to the high standards of the GTA game itself,” CNET reports, but even so 54 people have downloaded the mod. “Watching the You Tube video is safe. The danger comes at the end when the video displays a site where you can download the game mod itself. Should you download the file and install, your computer will be compromised upon reboot.” There are also videos on YouTube that teach people how to write and distribute viruses, according to CNET.

Teen news editor

His screenname is Gracenotes and, “after his homework is done,” he works on cleaning up breaking news stories on Wikipedia for six hours at a shot, the New York Times reports. We all know how popular Wikipedia has become as a source for term-paper research (the Times article takes you behind the scenes at Wikipedia so you can see how viable this actually is, as long as other sources are in the mix). Wikipedia has also become a very viable news source, the Times article illustrates. It’s like compressed real-time news, a blend of encyclopedic summarizing that keeps up with news as it breaks. Its writers’ sources are usually the wire services (e.g., AP and Reuters) in Yahoo and Google News, and the difference is a “constantly rewritten, constantly updated” summary of a breaking story (as in Wikipedia) vs. “a chronological series of articles, each reflecting new developments” (as with conventional news on paper and the Web). Gracenotes and his fellow editors expand and correct a one-liner “stub” (almost like a headline) that someone posts about a breaking story (such as the Virginia Tech shootings). They almost compete for the greatest accuracy and “N.P.O.V.” (“’neutral point of view,’ one of Wikipedia’s Five Pillars,” the Times reports. Note this comment at the article’s end, something very impressive to a baby-boomer journalist: “The Wikipedians, most of them born in the information age, have tasked themselves with weeding [the current culture of proud] subjectivity not just out of one another’s discourse but also out of their own. They may not be able to do any actual reporting from their bedrooms or dorm rooms or hotel rooms, but they can police bias, and they do it with a passion that’s no less impressive for its occasional excess of piety. Who taught them this? It’s a mystery; but they are teaching it to one another.”

5 good tips for parents

…in a financial news site of all places - MarketWatch.com. It’s a good sign that intelligent tech parenting is going mainstream. I like these online-safety tips because they’re simple and smart, and they promote parent-child communication. Points worth highlighting: author and dad Adam Thierer’s “layered approach” to online parenting, layering tech tools (like Google’s SafeSearch and maybe filtering or monitoring software) with open communication; reaching out to other parents (tech parenting does “take a village”); and keeping up on kid-tech news (I’m showing my bias).