How legal is it?

That probably sounds like a strange question just about everywhere but in the world of digital entertainment. The Los Angeles Times takes a sweeping snapshot of current thinking on the part of music consumers and copyright law experts. For example, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll found that "among teens ages 12 to 17 who were polled, 69% said they believed it was legal to copy a CD from a friend who purchased the original. By comparison, only 21% said it was legal to copy a CD if a friend got the music free." In fact, the recording and film industry associations (the RIAA and MPAA) point to the ripping of CDs and DVDs and their biggest threat now, not peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing ("80% of teens surveyed in the poll said downloading free music from unauthorized computer networks was a crime"). Meanwhile, consumer and trade organizations are criticizing the RIAA's educational video about copyright law for steering viewers wrong. The video "suggests that students should be skeptical of free content and that it's always illegal to make a copy of a song, even if it's just to introduce a friend to a new band," reports CNET, citing the view of Robert Schwartz, general counsel for the Home Recording Rights Coalition, "one of the groups opposed to the video." Also in music news this week: a soon-to-launch free and legal music-download site called SpiralFrog.com, which will share ad revenue with the record labels that supply it. Reuters reported Universal Music signed on. According to the New York Times, "though the venture is not the first to try a free ad-supported approach, the backing of Universal, with millions of songs in its catalog from thousands of artists like Eminem and Gwen Stefani, Elton John and Gloria Estefan, Count Basie and Hank Williams, promises to give it instant credibility and scale."

Create-your-own social network

Almost. But it's only a matter of time. It started at the more professional, geeky level with online publishing tools. The same with Web publishing. Both got so easy that anyone could "publish" with no technical know-how. It's also happening with online "radio," or podcasting. And so it will go with social networking. Soon we'll be able to create our own social networks (we actually are now, sort of, in sites that provide tools for private networks for extended families, clubs, and other groups). But the latest step in this direction is a company called Small World Labs providing social-networking "hosting" – a service like the host of our BlogSafety.com forum, LiveWorld.com - providing a platform for organizations (perhaps school districts) to create dedicated social networks just for their constituents, clients, or members. Certainly, colleges and universities are already running their own Facebook-like social networks (see this news last week).

Social networking & suicide

Some see social networking about the death of a friend or family member cathartic. Some as a means of detecting suicidal tendencies. Others are concerned it might reinforce such tendencies. In any case, "the world’s first generation to double-click its way through elementary school is using the Web to stay connected — even in death," reports the St. Petersburg Times. Dr. Ilene Berson and other faculty members at the University of South Florida's Mental Health Institute are seeking funding to research that question, to see "whether social networking web sites create a suicide contagion effect." They'll analyze the conditions surrounding the deaths of MySpace members who committed suicide, as well as behavior on MyDeathSpace.com (see my earlier item on this), where the activity isn't all about eulogizing. "Anger, curiosity and bravado reign on MyDeathSpace forums, where strangers pick apart the writings of MySpace members who die," according to the Times. The positive side of such public display of death is suicide prevention. At a recent conference on social networking, representatives of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline said that referrals from MySpace users have become the largest source of calls to the hotline. During research for our book, MySpace Unraveled, Lifeline director John Draper told us, "Increasingly, kids are using their profiles "to in some ways convey that they had suicidal intent. There is very much the potential for saving lives because the first people to hear about kids at risk are other kids." The Lifeline is setting up federally funded suicide prevention profiles on MySpace, Xanga, and Facebook. Here's more coverage on grieving online in the Boston Globe and the Lexington Herald-Leader. As for online obituaries, go to the Washington Post.

Of cheats & other game news

How to explain to a gamer that cheating is bad, when in the world of videogames it's so good? Family discussions are definitely getting more nuanced these days! Some people say going to game sites and finding cheats is just a way to get more out of a game. Other gamers make it a little more questionable-sounding, as it was in pre-videogame history - that, as with lying, everybody knows it's bad but there are certain conditions under which it's ok. Even in videogame life the definition of cheating has changed, the Washington Post reports: "To cheat way back when was to figure out how to keep your character alive and finish the game. To cheat now is to unlock doors and expand the breadth of your game." As kids make fewer distinctions between online and offline, between this world and virtual worlds, teaching ethics is getting more interesting. Maybe the descriptor will become "situational ethics"! BTW, if you're interested in a detailed account of what life is like in a virtual world called Second Life, see Camille Dodero's fascinating account in Detroit's MetroTimes.com. You'll probably agree it's not for teens. For them there's Teen Second Life (see "Lively alternate lives").

La. game law nixed

A federal judge struck down a new Louisiana law that banned sales of violent video games to minors, saying the state "the state had no right to bar distribution of materials simply because they show violent behavior," the Associated Press reports. The law's language was less than clear. Games that would be banned "if an 'average person' would conclude that they appeal to a 'morbid interest in violence' … [or] if the 'average person' would conclude they depict violence that is 'patently offensive' to standards in the adult community, and the games are deemed to lack artistic, political or scientific value," the AP adds. Similar laws have been struck down in other states, including Minnesota, Illinois, California and Michigan. In Minnesota, the Pioneer Press reported later in the week that the state would appeal a federal court's decision against its ban on sales of violent and sexually explicit videogames to people under 17.

Apple's recall

Last week it was Dell, this week Apple. The latter this week announced it was recalling 1.8 million Sony-made notebook batteries that potentially could catch fire. The Seattle Post Intelligencer has all the details, including the serial numbers of eligible batteries. Here's Apple's battery recall Web page.

A mom writes: My own MySpace

A few months ago, Michelle in Idaho started getting up to speed on teen social networking, went on MySpace, and got engaged in her kids' use of the site. That led to starting her own account. After reading my feature last week, "Unsupervised online teens & other myths," she wrote me about how it's going. Please click to this week's issue of my newsletter to read her account.

Apple's recall

Last week it was Dell, this week Apple. The latter this week announced it was recalling 1.8 million Sony-made notebook batteries that potentially could catch fire. The Seattle Post Intelligencer has all the details, including the serial numbers of eligible batteries. Here's Apple's battery recall Web page.

Teens' new favorite 'channel'?

YouTube.com definitely seems to be the MTV of our kids' generation. "More and more viewers want to cook as well as dine [the site's tagline is "Broadcast Yourself"], which makes the TV story of the year the story of a website: YouTube," the Associated Press reports. The AP adds that – though YouTube is less than a year old – it plays more than 100 million videos a day, and 65,000 new ones get uploaded it each day (I've also read that its costs are $1 million/month to provide this service). Some of this "channel's" fare is funny, some sleazy, some completely inane, some just mundane, some favorite broadcast TV clips recycled by fans, but that range of possibilities and no-rules environment is part of the appeal (and soon the news media will pick up on the child-safety story in all this). And there is no denying YouTube's popularity. To compete with Yahoo Music, YouTube is "talking with record labels to post thousands of music videos online," Reuters reports. Newsday in New York recently ran an in-depth report on the YouTube phenomenon.

Views on social networking

Two very grownup views of social networking are presented as pretty much the only ones in PC Magazine this week, one more confirmation that few adults understand teens' attraction to social networking – that it's more than just socializing or self-expression. It's both: creative networking, social producing, or "collaborative self-expression." A new concept for those who think of the Web more as an information source than community, but for digital natives (teens) on the broadband Web we're all now using, socializing doesn't really happen without creating or producing, and vice versa, and the Pew Internet & American Life Project says young people are the drivers of the participatory Web, or Web 2.0 as it's often called (see its May 2006 report). In other social-networking news this week: Another niche network, TravelHiker.com, debuted this week; the Philadelphia Inquirer was able to interview and profile the elusive 16- and 18-year-old founders of MyYearbook.com about their online-safety plans for the site; and The Register reports on computer-security risks on the social networks.

Texting: Help for young Iraqis

There isn't much for young people to do in many parts of Iraq these days. Speaking of Baghdad, the Associated Press reports that, "in a city bereft of entertainment, text messaging and swapping ringtones are all the rage for young Iraqis trying to lighten their lives. Most restaurants, cafes and movies have closed due to the country's security situation." But entertainment involving ringtones, tunes, and text messages isn't the only reason for cellphones' popularity in Iraq. Twenty-two-year-old Abdul Kareem also uses his phone to text his mom "around the clock," letting her know he's ok.

Sony and Grouper mash it up

Here's a good idea: If you're a movie studio and you're worried about copyright theft, just acquire a site that could contribute to the problem, and come to learn and control its piece of the business of online video sharing, which is a piece of the future. That, it appears, is what Sony is doing in buying Grouper.com. It's a business story more than a family-tech one, but it will affect the aspiring videographers and digital film producers at your house and school, in some cases providing new opportunities. The Associated Press reports that "in addition to featuring short videos uploaded to the site by users, Grouper also provides software that allows people to place those videos on social networking sites such as MySpace and Friendster using its peer-to-peer network. The software also allows others to email the videos to friends and to download them to portable devices." Not only can Sony sell ads on the site, but also "discover new talent," the AP adds. "One of the most popular features on Grouper is 'mashups' which encourage users to create new videos from snippets of other videos." Mashups are what Web 2.0, the participatory Web driven by our children, is all about (see "The age of remixes, mashups").

Parents in the age of exposure

There's a high-traffic blog whose mission it is to expose what high-profile parents' kids have done on the Web, the Washington Post reports, but you don't have to be famous to be embarrassed by bloggers and social networkers at your house. The Post offers examples of children of state and federal lawmakers and media personalities acting out online, but also of a corporate executive defending his company's customer service before regulators while his son is blogging about customer-bashing policies in one of the company's retail outlets – one in which the dad got his son a job. There are so many roles in communities where teens' comfort level with the "age of public disclosure" and parents' discomfort with said could have an impact on family dynamics, not to mention professions, for example, teachers, police officers, and elected local leaders with kids in local schools. Increasingly, parents might find it pays to have a feel for what kids are uploading to the Web.

Tech, networking & back-to-school

You'd think MySpace and Facebook were enough. But many college-bound students can add another social network to their social networking: their own school's. Many universities are developing their own networking sites, at least for incoming freshmen, USATODAY reports. They vary in functionality - some trying to replace Facebook, others just adding stuff specific to the particular school - but the goals seem to be the same: promote the school's programs and ease the transition into campus life. More and more schools are setting up their own social networks, and increasing numbers of students are using them along with MySpace, Facebook, Xanga, and other "generic" ones, since they have to keep in touch with friends back home too, of course. Another USATODAY article looks at how colleges are "preparing for the onslaught of [gadget-wielding] students who don't know what life was like before chips, bytes and dot-coms." And for students of all levels (and their parents), there's the perennial coverage of gadgets and wearable technology "invading a school hallway near you," as the Washington Post put it, and the New York Times's article includes grade-school-level tech too.

Pedophiles' alternate reality

On the Net, they don't just swap pictures, they participate in "support groups," promote their interests, seek jobs near kids, and chat about their experiences, the New York Times reports on its front page today following a four-month investigation. Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald wasn't investigating specific cases so much as the group itself, and how it uses the Net to extend its reach. "What started online almost two decades ago as a means of swapping child pornography has transformed in recent years into a more complex and diversified community that uses the virtual world to advance its interests in the real one." Some of what happens online is pure fantasy, some is acted upon, but cyberspace definitely provides a base for alternate-reality experimentation, whether people are exploring anorexia, sexuality, drugs, etc. While providing a base for such experimentation, the Net also throws much-needed light into dark corners of human behavior and "places" online where insular groups reinforce their members' illegal and abusive behavior by rationalizing and justifying it. Pedophile groups, the Times points out, "deem potentially injurious acts and beliefs harmless. That is accomplished in part by denying that a victim is injured, condemning critics and appealing to higher loyalties — in this case, an ostensible struggle for the sexual freedom of children." As for law enforcement in this area, see the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for an in-depth look at how "FBI experts trawl Web for pedophiles."

Cyberbullying laws coming?

One in three 12-to-17-year-olds have been victims of cyberbullying, a recent survey found, and the anti-crime group that commissioned it wants something done about it, CNET reports. The organization, Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, also found that…

* One in six 6-to-11-year-olds have been cyberbullied.
* 10% of teens and 4% of preteens said they'd been threatened with physical harm online.
* 50% of the teens and 30% of the preteens never told their parents about the cyberbullying.

Fight Crime is urging passage of a bill introduced last February by Rep. John Shimkus, an Illinois Republican, that would provide funding for bullying and harassment prevention programs in schools. PhillyBurbs.com picked up the story, adding that Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett called on schools in his state to take action on cyberbullying. Meanwhile, the Christian Science Monitor cites the view of a sociologist that "social norms intervention" is needed to combat middle-school-level bullying: showing kids that, in fact, bullying is not normal. "Another key is for students to understand that there's peer support for seeking help from adults when bullying takes place," the Monitor reports.

Unsupervised online teens & other myths

There are a lot of smart parents (and online teens) out there, research is showing. The former are clearly transferring their parenting skills and policies into cyberspace, and the latter – teenagers – seem to be fine with that. "More than 70% of the adolescents said they'd feel comfortable having their parents look at their MySpace page," a recent survey of MySpacers and their parents in Los Angeles found. For some key take-aways from a study of MySpacers and their parents at Cal State University and from a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg study, please see this week's issue of my newsletter.

Teen 'predators' arrested at school

This story in the Nashville area is about the real "predators" of the social networks, if they could be called that. According to the Maryville (Tenn.) Daily Times, two Nashville boys (15 and 17) showed up at the high school of two girls they'd "met" online and were too young even to know that it would've been a good idea not to tell the police they were 18+. They were both charged with criminal trespassing, the 17-year-old also with criminal impersonation, and both were taken to a juvenile detention center, where they were later "released to the custody of their parents," with future court hearings in store. An officer on the case "said he was unsure how the [Maryville High School] students met the two Nashville teens on the Internet, but authorities suspect it was through a social networking Web site or through instant messaging. He said the girls may have also talked to the boys by phone." Research about sexual solicitations of online teens has shown for years that many, probably most, of the solicitations came from other teens. And the latest research (see last week's issue) shows that – while sexual solicitations are down overall despite the popularity of social networking – peer harassment among tweens and teens is up. Another thing we've seen over the past year is that the actual exploitation of teen social networkers (who agreed online to meet with "predators" offline) was consensual. In the Nashville case, two teen boys may well have taken the fall for a mutual arrangement made by both boys and girls, possibly resulting in a different definition of victimization.

Virtual worlds, real crimes

Where there is life, there is crime, it seems – even in the lives of avatars and game characters in the virtual worlds of online games. Called MMORPGs, for massively multiplayer online role-playing games, these games' players can be robbed just as we real-world folk can be. What happens is, players' game characters are robbed of their virtual property and money, which is then sold for real money "that can be used to buy new weapons, magic spells or other trappings to advance within the game," Reuters reports. "Using software designed to infiltrate a computer system, hackers steal account information for users of MMO games and then sell off virtual gold, weapons and other items for real money." Reuters adds that Microsoft warned game developers of this problem so they can build in more protections. For more on this, see "Virtual real estate mogul" and "Games' shadow economy."

Social Web's new headache

Worms have a new way into your house. Social networking is getting so popular (among adults as well as teens) that all those nasty virus and worm writers out there are starting to take advantage of it. Social sites - especially the big ones like MySpace, YouTube, Xanga, etc. – are the next wave for malware, the UK's VNUNET reports, citing research by computer security company ScanSafe. "One in 600 profile pages on social networking sites hosts some form of malware, according to an analysis of more than five billion web requests in July." And just what is that malware? Most of what ScanSafe identified was "spyware and adware, ranging from more benign programs that track usage to difficult-to-remove spyware that can redirect a browser." And even though everybody assumes this is just a teenager thing (which is certainly the concern of family PC owners), it may be comforting to know the malware issue is becoming a problem in the workplace too. Social networks now account for about 1% of all Web use at work, ScanSafe found.

Dell laptops recall

Some critics are saying, "It's about time." Dell is recalling more than 4 million laptop batteries in "the largest electronics-related recall involving the Consumer Products Safety Commission," CBS News reports. The batteries, which were made by Sony, are being recalled because they can burst into flame. Affected laptops include "Dell's Latitude, Inspiron, XPS and precision mobile workstation notebooks," according to CBS, but it's a good idea not to leave any laptop for long periods of time on upholstered chairs and other places where they can overheat. The New York Times printed a photo of a fairly extreme example of what can happen. For recall details, go to DellBatteryProgram.com.

For game auteurs

Microsoft's news about giving anyone access to its game authoring tools is good news for parents of "hard-core gamers." It just may be a career-development tool too. "Microsoft is trying to turn hard-core gamers into Xbox programmers," CNET reports. Expected to be available for free later this month in beta form, the software will make it easier for "college students, hobbyists and others create their own games for the Xbox 360 console, for a Windows PC or both," CNET adds (eventually it'll cost $99). A San Jose Mercury News blog calls this "the democratization of videogame development" and reports that Microsoft is calling it "the YouTube of videogames." YouTube promotes the clips of zillions of amateur videographers (often called Web 2.0's "auteurs"), just as MySpace promotes the tunes of zillions of indie bands. In related news, now there's a social network for game designers: Nightlife Interactive, a videogame advertising company, "has launched its own social network site to aid in the research, development, and marketing of its various game offers," according to the company's press release.

'Minimes' in mini rooms at Cyworld

Cyworld is South Korea's MySpace, and now it's here in the US. MySpace and Cyworld (which has reached the saturation point of its user base at 90% of Korean 20-somethings) "reach a similar proportion of their respective homelands. In South Korea, Cyworld captures about one-third of the country's population of 48 million. MySpace has 98 million registered users, roughly a third of the US population," the San Jose Mercury News reports. So now the question is, "Is it too late for a newcomer to crash the online social networking party" on this side of the Pacific? Tough to tell, but there is a lot of competition besides MySpace, of course, in Xanga, Facebook, LiveJournal, Bebo, Tagged, Friendster, Hi5 (very popular in India), MyYearbook, and dozens of others (see Wikipedia's linked list). What's different about Cyworld is it aims to be not just your virtual or online self and social life, as with MySpace, but your virtual home or room, in which your avatar or online self lives and which you decorate – a little like a MySpace profile, but with a more spatial feel. At Cyworld that "self" is "minime." The Mercury News says the site targets 17-to-24-year-olds, but its Terms of Use say the minimum age is 13, a year younger than MySpace's. The avatars and room decorating will probably appeal to younger users, and "people will see Cyworld as more intimate, more slumber party than stadium concert scene." But US teens don't seem to mind MySpace's comparative edginess. For more on Cyworld, see my 3/24 issue.

Anybody outing anyone...

…about anything, anytime. That may sound a bit elliptic, but it describes what people can do with digital photography, and to parents and many other people it could be a little scary. It has got to be scary to paparazzi, anyway, because tabloids and other publications are now paying anyone with a camera phone for spontaneously snapped photos of celebrities, as the New York Times points out. The scary part for parents and educators is that celebrities certainly aren't the only subjects. Anyone can not only be a photographer and publisher, but also a subject - peers, parents, teachers, etc. That's fine when intentions are good, but if someone has it in for a peer or an adult, it's getting very easy to snap and upload photos that victimize the latter. Sometimes embarrassing or compromising photos and videos are taken in fun or friendship but the friendship goes bad, sometimes purely maliciously. Not only do we need to require that our kids and students ask permission to upload photos and footage of others, we need substantive home and school policies about using images of others maliciously, including in blogs and profiles that impersonate them (fake pages made to look like theirs). Someone recently posted in BlogSafety.com a link to California TV personality Josh Kornbluth's account of being victimized by someone who put an impersonating profile of him on MySpace. Almost immediately after he got it deleted, another one popped up.

This is the nearly uncontrollable nature of Web 2.0, where there are hundreds upon hundreds of free sites where people can play dirty tricks against schoolmates or anyone against whom they might have the slightest beef, and there is very, very little all these sites can do about it except be quick to detect and delete impersonating or otherwise malicious profiles, and some – like MySpace – are clearly working on that. But as I posted in our forum, the only real, lasting, solution in the kid part of the harassment spectrum is the tough one: to work with the kids involved and maybe fellow parents.

Teens online: Major study

'Tis the season for surveys about online teens, it seems. Several have just been released, but the biggest news in Net safety this week was the much-anticipated "Second Youth Internet Safety Survey" (the first, much-quoted, study came out in 2000) from the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, sponsored by the US government-funded National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Let's look at it first because it's a milestone (in my newsletter next week: two interesting studies that fold in online parenting, one focusing specifically, and so far unprecedentedly, on MySpace).

USATODAY's coverage came with a *very* at-a-glance sidebar with three points that sum up quite effectively what has changed in kids' online experiences over the past five years: 1) Sexual solicitations are down overall (in spite of social networking's rise), 2) exposure to porn is up (despite increased use of filters), and 3) peer harassment (cyberbullying) is up. Of course some qualifying is needed. First the contact issue: Even though "a smaller proportion of youth Internet users received unwanted sexual solicitations" (13% in this study, down from 19% in 2000) and a smaller percentage are interacting with strangers (34% down from 40%), "aggressive solicitations [defined as solicitors trying to meet in person] did not decline," and 4% of young people surveyed said the solicitors asked for nude or sexually explicit photos of themselves (not surprisingly, digital photography is now showing up in the research, which means it needs to show up in Net-safety education at home and everywhere – and, parents, beware of Webcams and picture phones!). As for increased exposure to porn despite greater use of filters, my guess is this is not so much a comment on the effectiveness of filters as on the effectiveness of relying on filters installed on home computers when the exposure increasingly happens in multiple locations on multiple devices. In other words, this finding is a comment on young users' experience of the broadband, everywhere wired and wireless Web 2.0 – and on how important it is to work with our kids on *self*-protection and critical thinking wherever they access the Web. Please click to this week's issue of my newsletter for a few more key findings of interest to parents.

One very connected girl

Parents of young teens might enjoy the story of 14-year-old Julia Schwartz of Pacific Palisades in "Girls Just Want to Be Plugged In – to Everything." "Julia's voracious appetite for all types of entertainment - and the tech-savvy ways she consumes it - is typical of girls her age, according to a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll that surveyed the habits of 12- to 24-year-olds. Girls ages 12 to 14 are the most deeply motivated by TV: 65% say they are influenced by a TV show or network, are more likely to multi-task than boys of their age group and are easily bored - 41% say there are too few choices of entertainment," reports the Los Angeles Times, adding: "They're also the most carefully monitored by parents: 68% say their parents know how they spend their time online." This is the fifth in a 5-part series of articles on teen tech and entertainment based on several L.A. Times/Bloomberg polls released this month.

Our Web searches are us

What we type into Web search boxes says a whole lot about us – very personal information most of use wouldn't want to be public. A recent "colossal miscalculation" at AOL, as the Christian Science Monitor put it, highlighted how easily our privacy can be breached. A team of AOL employees "publicly posted the Internet search topics of hundreds of thousands of customers online. The goal was to support academic research about Web traffic, and AOL users' names were replaced by numbers. But that didn't guarantee anonymity," according to the Monitor. The New York Times was able to trace one of those user numbers (4417749) to the woman in Lilburn, Ga., it represented. "AOL removed the search data from its site over the weekend and apologized for its release," the Times reported, "but the detailed records of searches conducted by Ms. Arnold and 657,000 other Americans, copies of which continue to circulate online, underscore how much people unintentionally reveal about themselves when they use search engines — and how risky it can be for companies like AOL, Google and Yahoo to compile such data." This has bearing in the online-safety field because state attorneys general have recently been calling for age verification in social-networking sites. Verifying children's ages, ID verification experts tell me, would require a national database of children's personal info against which verification technology could check.

'Bully' the videogame

Jimmy Hopkins, 15, can be anything you want him to be. That's because he's the main character in Bully, a new game for PlayStation 2 that has stirred up a lot of controversy. According to USATODAY, which got a "two-hour exclusive preview" of the videogame set for release in October, "the 'Columbine simulator' fear appears to be meritless. There are no guns in the game and no killing. Schoolyard fisticuffs are a central element, but there is no blood or black eyes, and nobody seems to get seriously hurt." The fears might have come out of the fact that Bully was created by Rockstar Games, "the company that created the ultra-violent, ultra-popular Grand Theft Auto titles." Meanwhile, KXAN in Austin has a report about a videogame, Re-Mission, that helps young cancer patients.

Very social media players

Gadget makers are taking a cue or two from MySpace, it appears. How so? Media players are increasingly social tools, just as MySpace made teen blogging a social phenomenon. In fact, media players and personal communicators are now being called "lifestyle devices." One example is Microsoft's Zune MP3 player, expected to launch this fall, which "aspires to be one part MySpace, one part iTunes and one part Xbox Live," Reuters reports. Then there's Sony's mylo, which stands for "my life online" and targets 18-to-24-year-olds who want their media, IM, Net-phone, and email capabilities everywhere, all the time, CBS News reports. That would be in addition to their cell-phone talking and texting options, which seems like one gadget too many to carry around, but I'm no 18-to-24-year-old, the Associated Press reports. Mylo "doubles as a portable media player. It can play music, photos and videos that are stored on its internal 1 gigabyte of flash memory or optional Memory Stick card. It also can stream songs between mylo users within the same network, as long as the users grant permission to share their music files." Sony has partnered with Yahoo and Google for IM (it's working on folding in AIM), and Skype for Net-based phoning.

Social-network investigations

Law enforcement people see the online social scene as "part of their jurisdiction now," reports Fox Carolina in the Greenville, S.C., area. They do a lot of their investigation work right in social Web sites. "Sometimes people talk about crimes they've committed, other times they brag about those they plan to commit. And it's also a way to catch adults soliciting under age kids," according to Fox News. It gives three examples: a MySpace page a Fox Carolina reporter found "that helped Easley police get critical information on a suspect in a pawn shop murder"; Houston police tracking "a suspect in four murders all the way to Greenville through his MySpace page"; and this week's arrest of "an Anderson County teen after his MySpace page contained vivid descriptions of shooting at cars."

Homeland Security on PC security

Patch your Windows, the agency said in what ZDNET called "a rare alert" on PC security. If you haven't already automated security patches for your Windows PC, Homeland Security "recommended Wednesday that people apply Microsoft's MS06-040 patch as quickly as possible. The software maker released the 'critical' fix Tuesday as part of its monthly patch cycle." Microsoft this week issued a dozen patches as its regular monthly security update, saying nine of them were critical. "However, the flaw addressed in MS06-040 is the only one among the updates that could let an anonymous attacker remotely commandeer a Windows PC without any user interaction," ZDNET adds. Go to Windows Update (using the Internet Explorer browser) for more info.

Google: MySpace's new search source

The good news is it may be easier to find your kid on MySpace; the bad news is it may be easier for other people to find your kid on MySpace. It looks like MySpace is going to have a better internal and Web search engine: Google. The two just formed a partnership that means Google will provide MySpace and other News Corp. sites advertising and search. News Corp. also receives $900 million over three years for letting Google do so, the San Jose Mercury News reports. For one thing, this means Google text ads will appear on users' profiles - the type of ad that's "triggered by the content of a page or keyword typed into a search box - the popular 'Ads by Google' feature on many sites," according to the Mercury News. In its coverage of this development, the New York Times says MySpace will pass the 100 million-member mark this week. Pundits have been saying MySpace hadn't yet figured out how to capitalize on its huge traffic. This should help. Other News Corp. sites to receive Google search and ads are IGN.com, GameSpy, TeamXbox and 3D Gamers, as well as Rotten Tomatoes, a movie site. The Times reports that Google will not try to put ads on every MySpace page, that "fewer, better ads" was the solution. That's probably good news for parents, too, and also likely includes MySpace's recently announced policy not to display racy ads to users who register as under 18 (see my coverage). Here's the Los Angeles Times.

Universities on social networking

Heads-up, freshmen! Along with all the other warnings your college-bound kids will be getting about partying and credit card debt, this year they'll be told to be careful about what they post in blogs and social-networking sites, the Associated Press reports. "From large public schools such as Western Kentucky to smaller private ones like Birmingham-Southern and Smith, colleges around the country have revamped their orientation talks to students and parents to include online behavior," according to the AP. Some even include role-playing skits about online socializing in their orientation programs. But note that the schools are warning not banning. "College administrators say they can't -- and wouldn't want to keep students off sites such as Facebook. Many welcome the kind of community-building the sites facilitate, and they recognize they have become an important, and usually harmless, venue for the kind of identity formation and presentation that's an important part of the college experience." The AP adds that these sites actually help with the bonding that is one of student orientation's major goals.

Google's help for searchers

This is a great development for people (like kids) who haven't quite mastered "think before you click. "Google has started warning users if they are about to visit a Web page that could harm their computer, the BBC reports. If you're using Google and you click on a link that would take you to a page that would download spyware or other nasties to your machine, you'll get a little pop-up window warning you. "The warning suggests that people try a different site but if they want to continue to the potentially dangerous webpage Google will not stop them," the BBC adds. It works like McAfee's "Site Advisor" software, which does about the same thing. A recent survey found that 4-6% of sites have harmful content on them, and if someone's looking for "free screensavers" or games, that percentage goes a lot higher, since those sites' owners try to lure people in with freebies or "easy winnings."

Child ID card?

"NetIDMe," a new "virtual ID card" for kids out of the UK mentioned by the BBC, is no "killer app." Like child age verification, it would require critical mass to be truly useful - e.g., all children required to have an ID card, which would also mean large databases of personally identifying info. One way it would work is in large groups, say, a school district: if every student had an ID card tied to a district's student database, and if there were a rule everybody followed that they could only email and IM with fellow ID-card-bearing students in the district (obviously this wouldn't work on MySpace). But everyone would have to obey the rule. Actually it might work better with peer groups, if everybody in the peer group obeyed their parents' household rule that everyone on the buddy list has an ID card. Parents, you can see even that would be a challenge! For more on this, see my feature "Verifying online kids’ ages.”

What can happen to teens' Web videos

Who actually owns those millions of video clips on YouTube.com – their creators? Nope. YouTube does. In "What goes on the Net stays on the Net," PBS tech writer Robert Cringley says that, apparently in preparing for a copyright-related lawsuit and in "feinting toward going public," YouTube just "clarified" in its terms of use "exactly who DOES own all that video." Not that YouTube would, but under its new license, here's what the site could do with any video your teen film producer uploads to the site, Cringley says: "produce a Best of YouTube DVD and sell it on late-night TV. They could take your musical performance, strip the audio from the video, and sell it to almost anyone for almost any use. They could refuse to take down your video, no matter how embarrassing. They could charge YOU for your own video. And of course they could insert ads in the video virtually anywhere." The thing is, lots of young videographers wouldn't hesitate for a second to put themselves in a position like that – for their chance to be "famous" and make connections with "fans." That's why we need to know what can happen to their homemade, often self-starring videos, because the above possibilities are the *best-case* scenarios for what can happen to photos and videos of minors on the Web. For more, please click to this week's issue of my newsletter.

Insights into multitasking

We all know that one of the hallmarks of being a digital native (aka teenager) is skill at multitasking. That has concerned some parents and educators. Well, new research published by the National Academy of Sciences may be providing some cause for concern – or at least insights. The study "shows distractions affect the way people learn, making the knowledge they gain harder to use later," the Associated Press reports. It's about two kinds of learning: declarative (which comes with full attention, which allows memorization) and habit (coming from doing a task thousands of times). The latter isn't as useful and flexible because it requires the same conditions. Like punching a number into a phone 100 times, you have to be using a phone to recall the number. UCLA psychology professor Russell Poldrack "said the problem is that the two types of learning seem to compete with each other, and when someone is distracted, habit learning seems to take over from declarative learning." One could draw from that, the article suggests, that multitasking promotes habit learning.

Gender-bending in games

When online gamers create game "selves," or avatars, of the opposite sex, they're not experimenting with sexual identity. They're gender-bending "to gain an advantage in game play," Reuters reports. Reuters cites male gamers who say they have female avatars for various reasons – because females "get more free stuff" or because they'd rather look at a female avatar for hours on end than a male one. There is a downside at times, though: They also "get unsolicited and sometimes condescending game play advice from the thousands of mostly male players who populate the MMO [massively multiplayer online] universe." Though gender-bending happens in lots of games, including World of Warcraft, EverQuest, and City of Heroes, most sexual experimentation happens in Second Life (which is more an alternate reality than a game with levels, winners, and losers), Reuters says. For parents reading this, there is a more age-appropriate Teen Second Life you can recommend to young gamers at your house. Read the Reuters article for more detail on this, and for more on the Second Life games, see "Second Life for teens," "Lively alternate lives," and "Virtual pedophilia in Net world."

PC security overview

For anyone interested in the latest big picture on protecting family PCs, Internet News provides it this week. It details the key players and their market shares and services, and it describes the total-care trend that especially the big companies - Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micros, and now Microsoft - are fueling.

Self-verification: New trend?

This is not the killer-app age verification that state attorneys general are calling for on the social networks (see “Verifying online kids’ ages”). The story in the Wall Street Journal is about people verifying themselves (which teens probably won't do unless someone makes them). But as more and more people do so with the various means described in the Journal piece, the questionable characters will increasingly stand out. It's the kind of trend that, if it really kicks in, will grow fast as awareness grows, in a snowball effect, starting with dating sites and online transactions in sites like eBay. The Journal gives an example in Rob Barbour who wanted to verify his good reputation because he sells software and tech consulting on the Web. "When he put up an eBay Inc. listing a few weeks ago, the Ashburn, Va., technology consultant embedded a link to his new online profile on verification service Trufina Inc. He soon will paste the link in his emails" and his site to ensure that everyone knows he is who he says he is. "Proving who you are is increasingly important on the Web, amid growing concern that pervasive Internet fraud is making it difficult to know whom to trust," according to the Journal. So far, only adults can verify themselves, because there isn't publicly available info on minors that verification services can check against and verify, and establishing a national-level database of ID info on US children would likely be highly controversial (see my feature for more detail on this).

New-style ads on social networks

Can your kid tell the difference between content and advertising? It's getting harder to. Social-networking is moving advertising way beyond banner ads, CNET reports. Advertisers now have profiles just like people do – users now interact with ads and bots posing as their favorite celebrity or even a "real person" just like them. "For example, Wendy's [burgers] has a profile page for a character named 'Smart,' a 28-year-old male from New York whose interests include Angelina Jolie, hip-hop music, movies and Wendy's Bacon Mushroom Melt. In the character's 'about me' section, it says, 'it takes flair to be square. Do a square burger at Wendy's and do what tastes right!' Smart has more than 80,000 friends" Rule No. 1: Avoid adding anyone to your Friends list who has 80,000 friends! Probably most teen MySpace users have internalized that rule, but it would make for a great dinner-table conversation to ask them what they think of, say, Paris Hilton's profile or Burger King's – if they have any appeal whatsoever. One thing's for sure, this kind of advertising's growing. CNET says "a report issued last week estimates that US advertising in social networks like MySpace will leap to $1.8 billion in four years, up more than 500% from $280 million in 2006." Check out the Washington Post on how art and opinion (and marketing) are getting mashed up.

AOL & CNN: New video hosts

As a San Jose Mercury News blog quips, it seems the "Ratio of video-sharing sites to videos approaches 1:1." AOL and CNN are joining the ranks of the many, many video-hosting sites trying to attract all those homemade videos out there." AOL is revamping its video portal to better spotlight user-produced videos, YouTube-style, the Merc says. Then there's the just-unveiled CNN Exchange, "a hub for people to submit and share their news videos" called "I-Reports" (to be previewed by editors before they appear on the site). CNN Exchange is "powered by blip.tv," the site will allow amateur videographers to upload “I-Reports,” which will be reviewed by editors before being published to the site (here's CNET on the CNN development). Knowledge@Wharton says there are more than 225 of these YouTube-type sites, among them VideoEgg, Video Bomb, Blinkx.TV, Blip.TV, Guba, Grouper, Frozen Hippo, Blennus, and Eefoof. I'm hoping these myriad opportunities for kids to put themselves on display will soon hit the public consciousness as a safety issue, not just a copyright one (see this week's feature).

MySpace tips from a teen

Don't miss (and try sharing with MySpacers at your house) "five gems from the diamond necklace that is my infinite wisdom." Those would be the gems of CNET intern Soumya Srinagesh, who is heading to college shortly and took the time to share her top rules for using MySpace (they are gems, actually). Here's some sample wisdom: "The number of friends you have on MySpace is inversely proportional to the number of friends you have in real life. It amazes me that some people have more friends than the population of small African countries." Soumya also suggests that in passing the Deleting Online Predators Act, US representatives devotedly represented "Capitol Hill's true goal: making sure teenagers have as little fun as humanly possible."

Move over, MySpace?!

That's what USATODAY is suggesting - that MySpace is facing so much competition that it may be "losing its cool." It cites some niche networks like WAYN (travel-oriented social networking) and vMix (one of the many video-oriented services, though probably more social), and it cites the view of one older teen moving on to Facebook (which practically owns the college market, so this is not new or unusual). The article also has a sidebar spotlighting four "MySpace invaders": Xanga, vMix, Facebook, and Whyville (an interesting pick that could just as easily have been Disney's Virtual Magic Kingdom and more logically been Imbee.com). Here's my theory: All the new niche sites are more additions to MySpace than competition. People use different sites for different things (photo-sharing, video uploading, blogging, socializing, etc.); many MySpace users have multiple accounts at multiple services (not to mention at MySpace itself); some college kids move on to Facebook, but many keep their MySpace accounts too because of the non-college network of friends associated with them – friends they'll want to keep in touch with. I don't think MySpace is even close to "losing its cool." Online socializing is here to stay and has proliferating tools, services, and access points. FYI, here's earlier coverage on social-networking niches: "New social networks," "Social networks keep morphing," "More SN niches," and "SN with a purpose."

DOPA: 'Ill-conceived law'

The Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), which just passed the US House of Representatives (see this item), could actually do more harm than good, writes BlogSafety.com co-director Larry Magid in CBSNews.com (for full disclosure, I'm the other co-director). "It is ill-conceived because, rather than 'deleting' online predators, it deletes the ability of schools and libraries to determine whether kids can constructively take advantage of social networking and other interactive services that are extremely popular among teens. Maybe the law should be called DOTA (the Deleting Online Teenagers Act)?" Larry asks. He likens DOPA to trying to protect kids from drunk drivers by ruling that they "can no longer walk, ride a bike or even ride in a car or bus to school." Besides being overly broad and failing to define social networking (possibly because there is almost no research on the subject yet for legislation to build on!), the law also fails to acknowledge the positive aspects of teen blogging and social networking – for example, how they can be used to teach, learn, and practice writing, collaborative research, software writing, photography, videography, digital editing, graphic design, journalism, media literacy, critical thinking, and ethics – not to mention the tough demands social networking makes on one's social skills on a daily basis!