Videogame effects: New study

Watching the brain activity of a group of teenagers playing violent videogames and a group playing nonviolent ones, researchers at Indiana University found some differences, InformationWeek reports. "The groups didn't differ in accuracy or reaction time, but those who played the violent game showed more activity (brightly colored scans [using MRI technology]) in the amygdala. That is an area of the brain connected with emotional arousal. They showed less activity in an area associated with executive functions such as planning, shifting, and controlling and directing thoughts and behavior, according to researchers." Psychologists not involved in the study are saying it's "significant," according to InformationWeek, which looks at the difference between this study and others attempting to resolve the long-standing debate about violent videogames' impact on youth. Here's Reuters coverage. And in yet more videogame news this week, the Associated Press tells of a videogame that teaches teens the consequences of using drugs; and in another First Amendment case involving states restricting game sales, a federal judge "issued a permanent injunction barring the State of Louisiana from enforcing a controversial law that would have banned the sale of violent video games to minors," ArsTechnica.com reports.

Online, offline student 'melee'

A St. Louis-area school board this week voted unanimously to expel 12 students – 11 girls and one boy - involved in an in-school fight over who did or didn't get invited to a party. Three of the students will be excluded from graduation next spring. The superintendent said "the board had little choice but to expel the students because school administrators had tried to mediate differences between the two student factions before the melee," the Associated Press reports. "Madison County prosecutors already had charged three of the students - all 18 or 17 years old - with felony mob action in the fight, which produced no serious injuries." The fight reportedly was planned by the students via messages and bulletins in MySpace, just two days after "parents of seven of the students accompanied their children to school [of 2,500 students] to sign nonaggression pacts." Besides being one of the planners' communications channels, MySpace probably also played a role in identifying the fight planners, because it works closely with law enforcement and, more recently, schools. In September, with the help of the National School Boards Association and Seventeen magazine, MySpace began distributing online safety brochures to some 55,000 schools nationwide (see this 9/29 item). Not only is the line between students' online and offline lives going away, so is the line between what happens on and off school grounds, putting schools in quite a quandary. For a bit of case-law history on students' and schools' rights, see the Electronic Frontier Foundation's FAQ on student blogging.

Videogames' 'report card'

American kids need to be put on a media diet, said David Walsh as he unveiled his watchdog group's 11th-annual "Video Game Report Card" in Washington today, the Associated Press reports. The Minneapolis-based National Institute on Media and the Family "urged parents to take a stronger role in safeguarding their children from games that glamorize sex and violence. Game industry news site Gamasutra reports that "the two major topics highlighted in the report concerned 'parental ignorance' and the 'public health crisis' of obesity and gaming addiction.... While the Institute's surveys found that two thirds of parents said they had house rules over game play, only one third of surveyed children reported the same." The institute says this year's report card "focuses less on the flaws of a complex [$13 billion] industry and more on what all of us can do about the real risks posed by some types of video games [ignorance, obesity, game addiction]" and points out that nearly half of "heavy gamers" are 6-17 years old, even though gamers' average age is in the high 20s. Meanwhile, the video game industry won another victory in its battle against state laws "designed to criminalize sales and rentals of violent or sexually explicit games to minors," CNET reports. A federal appeals court affirmed a lower court decision declaring unconstitutional an Illinois law restricting sales of violent videogames to minors. The law's wording was apparently too broad. Similar laws in Louisiana, Minnesota, Michigan and California, and others face pending challenges.

Parents on Net vs. TV

That kids watch too much TV is still the view of more parents than that kids spend too much time online. In a just-released study at the University of Southern California, "21% of adult Internet users with children believe the kids are online too long, compared with 11% in 2000. Still, that's less than the 49% who complain their kids watch too much TV," the Associated Press reports. Losing TV-viewing time is also still a more widely used disciplinary measure at 57% (of parents who say they impose it) than losing Internet privileges (47%). I think this is smart, because we're really comparing apples and oranges: TV is a single, very passive medium; the Net is many media and, for youth, far from passive; parents are increasingly getting this. Other key findings:

At least 74% of all Americans under 66 are online (only 38% of people 66+), and 99% of people 18 and under are.

"On average, users spend 14 hours a week online, compared with 9.4 hours in 2000" (when USC first started researching this).

37% of US Net users have dial-up accounts, 50% high-speed ones, and 11% access the Net via mobile devices.

22% of Americans are unconnected, more than a quarter of them former Net users who "dropped out" (mostly because their computer didn't work).

Marketing, social Web-style

Parents may want to know what "brand integration" means. It's the buzzword social-networking companies use when they talk about how they're going to make money on the millions of profiles and blogs on their sites ("going to" because, despite their enormous popularity, few of these sites have really figured out profitability). The kid version of "brand integration," for example at Neopets.com, is also called "immersive advertising," as in a game sponsored by Lucky Charms cereal. Two clever examples in teen social networking are Tagged.com's advertiser-sponsored "tags," which MediaPost.com describe as "graphic icons that kids can trade à la online friendship bracelets." A Tagged executive likens them to logos on clothing – they tell friends you think this brand is cool. Bebo.com "is working with advertisers to sponsor home pages' 'skins' [such as a Web page's "wallpaper" and other elements that give it a certain look and feel] and other branded content so kids who are attracted to a sponsor 'will make it their own, and spread it virally, becoming brand advocates'," MediaPost quotes a Bebo executive as saying. Scheinman says. From T-shirt statements to Web page ones. Marketing is increasingly about self-expression, and social networking and virtual worlds/online games are capitalizing on that reality (see also "Embellishing their pages").

Smartphones like hotcakes

Those phones that are more like connected computers than telephones are "going mainstream," USATODAY reports. This means two things to parents: 1) They'll be hearing, "But *everyone* has one, Dad"; and 2) our kids' online communications will be even more mobile and beyond home supervision. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, but it's unnerving to some parents. "Unlike regular cellphones, smartphones have a PC-like operating system and download and run computer programs," USATODAY explains. "Most include advanced data features such as e-mail, instant messaging and word processing. Some, such as the Palm Treo and Samsung BlackJack, have small typewriter-style keyboards." Sales of these phones jumped 50% the first half of this from 2005, it adds. Another sign: YouTube's coming to a smartphone near you. It just struck a deal with Verizon, the New York Times reports. Meanwhile, at least in the UK, "the online video boom is starting to eat into TV-viewing time, the BBC cites a new study as finding. Back to smartphones: Even though prices are coming down (to around $100 with a service contract), you really don't want one if you're just going to talk and text. Smartphones are all about music, video, and the Web, which is what makes them very attractive to youth. But watch out, that downloading can add $10-$50/month to a phone bill, USATODAY says. [Speaking of downloading, Jupiter Research found that "adult content on mobile devices will be worth $3.3 billion by 2011, up from $1.4 billion this year," with Europe the biggest spender, followed by the Asia-Pacific region, Silicon.com reports.]

'Grey goo' & Web 2.0

Second Life's recent attack of the "grey goo" shows it has something in common with MySpace: the more creative freedom an online community allows its users the more trouble as well as user creativity it invites. Trouble in terms of both virtual-world security (against malicious hacks) and content controls in the context of child online safety. What happened recently in Second Life was basically a denial-of-service attack that looked like annoying golden rings spinning and flying around everywhere and slowed the game down for everybody, The Register reports. Second Life's creators Linden Labs had game life back to normal in a couple of hours, but among the "side effects" were "unreliable account balances, disappearing clothes, and shutting down in-game teleportation, which digital inhabitants use to get around quickly." The rings were "self-replicating objects" created maliciously - the downside of Second Life users' ability to have pets that reproduce and gardens that grow. Other virtual-world games, such as World of Warcraft, have had similar problems. However, a competitor of Second Life, There.com, requires its users to get approval for digital objects before they're allowed in the game. A parent's upside, possibly, is that "by instituting an approval process, the company can prevent X-rated content from entering its PG-13 world, keep out objects that may infringe on others' intellectual property and stop security threats from entering There," The Register cites There.com's CEO as saying. But it's just those controls that can cause players, including teenagers, to flock to the freer, potentially more lucrative experience of Second Life. One Lifer, "Lioncourt," told The Register that "the freedom to make his own content without an approval process has led to a part-time income of hundreds of dollars a month" (income that can come from selling virtual objects, advertising, and real estate for real money). This is the conundrum of the social Web: the safer or more controlled an environment is the less attractive it is to young people, who have unprecedented freedom on the social Web to move on to *less* controlled environments. This is why, I think, one tech educator, Wesley Fryer, recently suggested that, in working with young social networkers, the question shouldn't be "how do I control" but rather "how do I manage?"

Mobile trespassing?

If you look out the window and find people you don't know in your front yard talking on their phones it could because you have an open wireless network in your house and they have Internet cellphones (though not many people are using these phones yet). They're designed to make free or low-cost calls over the Net by taking advantage of "the hundreds of thousands of wireless access points deployed in cafes, parks, businesses and, most important, homes," the New York Times reports. Neat idea, yes, but one that raises ethical questions: "walk-by talkers" stealing other people's bandwidth. As for the phones, an example the Times gives is a "Belkin phone that works with the Skype calling service costs about $180; calls to Skype users on computers are free, as are outgoing calls to domestic phone numbers, at least through the end of the year. Incoming calls from phones cost extra." Other catches: lots of dropped calls (which makes regular cellphone service look a lot better) and the power-greediness of wireless calls (which means batteries lasting only 1-2 hours). This is definitely early-adopter territory, where learning about the technology adds value.

Shopping season gift lists

Lists of this holiday shopping season's hottest gifts are all over tech news right about now. One of the more reliable sources (for its independence) is the San Jose Mercury News with its list of "what's hot" for all ages this season (basically listing the newest electronics products). For zoom-ins on specific ones, there's PC World on the Nintendo's Wii, targeting the family market more than any videogame console in recorded history, and the Washington Post on PlayStation 3 and Wii (see my earlier item on Zune, with links to the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post). For help on the software side – specifically in games – don't miss Common Sense Media's holiday videogame roundup. And the St. Petersburg Times offers its picks of kid-friendly videogames for specific players.

Social-networking burn-out?

I doubt social networking's just a passing fad, as some say. In fact, it's still in growth mode (MySpace has just passed the 130 million-profile mark). But according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the novelty is wearing off. One of its examples, though, is a 44-year-old guy who established accounts at 15 difference social sites and is finding it hard to keep up! I doubt many teenagers, the most expert multitaskers, maintain profiles on that many sites. The Chronicle cites Nielsen/NetRatings figures showing that "between August and September, traffic to almost all popular social networking sites fell," but social-networking sites say the August/September traffic dip is perennial because of summer holidays and back-to-school. MySpace, for one, told the Chronicle it's growing by 320,000 new profiles a day worldwide, and Web traffic measurer comScore Media Metrix says MySpace traffic for September/October went up "on a weekly basis." Then there's the generational thing, which the Chronicle points out: New social networkers keep coming up (I wonder how many people turn 13 around the world each year). The Chronicle has a sidebar (at the bottom of the article) that lists and links to nearly two dozen social sites.

University presidents blogging

In this age of digital public exposure, I've been thinking (and blogging) that parents will soon need to teach their kids spin control – or at least have family discussions about it. It appears public figures are already blogging for that reason. "While some colleges and their presidents have seen their reputations shredded on student blogs, and others have tried to limit what students and faculty members may say online, about a dozen or so presidents, like Dr. [Patricia] McGuire [of Trinity University], are vaulting the digital and generational divide and starting their own blogs," the New York Times reports. Another example the Times gives is Towsen University Robert Caret, who has "Bob's Blog." But he doesn't seem to approach his blogging quite the way his students would. An assistant types in his posts, while he dictates; and he didn't respond to one comment a student posted, he just forwarded it to a provost. The questions occur: Does he get it? And if he doesn't, why blog? As for teens, here's what social-media researcher Danah Boyd told me in our book, MySpace Unraveled: "Kids are getting all these messages saying, 'Expose, expose, expose.' If you don't, your friends will expose you. We're all living in a superpublic environment, getting the message that you have more power if you expose yourself than if someone else exposes you."

Cellphone as tracking device

People's thinking about the pluses and minuses of using phones to track their locations is changing. GPS (Global Positioning System) on phones has been around a while, but so far the significant privacy concerns have outweighed the upside, according to a thoughtful commentary in the New York Times, as attractive as the latter can be: "Maps on our phones will always know where we are. Our children can’t go missing. Movie listings will always be for the closest theaters; restaurant suggestions, organized by proximity. We will even have the option of choosing free cellphone service if we agree to accept ads focused on nearby businesses." But then there's the hypothetical 16-year-old customer described to the writer by a Verizon spokesperson, who "said it was one thing for the customer to imprudently send out her e-mail address to a stranger, and still another for her phone to reveal her home’s location." Yes, we may be able to track our kids when they're carrying these phones, but so can others. And mobile social networking targeted at youth (e.g., Boost/Loopt, Dodgeball, and a new Dallas-based one called ublip) further complicates the discussion, while increasing the attraction of GPS-enabled phones for young people. The New York Times article goes into the unregulated realities of this business, offering great background for parents trying to get a handle on what mobile tracking and socializing means for children's (and everybody's) privacy. And moving beyond mere socializing, here's the BBC on yet another application toward the all-purpose cellphone: phone as "smart wallet," carrying around our financial info, to be transmitted over the phone, at a concert ticket office, etc. (yet another reason to be scared about losing my phone!).

Virtual worlds on phones

First there was cellphone access to social sites on the Web (e.g., MySpace Mobile). Then there was social networking on phones themselves (e.g., loopt.com, dodgeball.com, hookt.com). Next: whole virtual worlds on phones – sort of SecondLife meets MySpace meets loopt. A San Mateo, Calif.-based company called Gemini Mobile plans to provide cellphone companies like Cingular and Verizon software that allows their customers to interact in virtual worlds. The first company to bite is Softbank Mobile in Japan, which "created the S! Town online village community," InsideBayArea.com reports. "In S! Town, users [using a phone with the Gemini software] move in a 3-D world as avatars, and chat online as well as talk to each other through the voice connection of the phone. They share photos with other S! Town visitors and shop at retailers posting on S! Town." Just as kids see no border between online and offline socializing, soon there will be little distinction between social environments or virtual worlds (pick your favorite terminology) on phones or on the Web.

'Second Life,' 2nd campus?

Educators are beginning to explore the idea of virtual worlds like Second Life as learning environments, CNN reports. People socialize, buy and sell products, advertising, and real estate, build stores, design clothes, and even operate news bureaus (e.g., Reuters in Second Life) in alternate-reality games like Second Life and Entropia – why not take classes? "More than 60 schools and educational organizations have set up shop in the virtual world and are exploring ways it can be used to promote learning. The three-dimensional virtual world makes it possible for students taking a distance course to develop a real sense of community," CNN cites one educator as saying. The article is referring mostly to educators at the college level, it appears, which is probably good, because virtual worlds often include red light districts. Second Life's parent Linden Labs created an ostensibly safer Teen Second Life for that reason. Who knows? They may also see some virtual (or real) regulation at some point, at least where minors are present (see "Lively alternate lives" and "Games' shadow economy"). [One thing's for sure: virtual worlds and gaming community need to be part of the online-safety and -privacy discussion.] Back to education: In the K-12 area, a writer at Wisconsin Technology Network considers the question: "Is it realistic to expect educators to adopt video games in the classroom anytime soon?"; the article has all kinds of links to in-depth discussions on this. And here are a teacher's thoughts on where teachers can social (and professional) network right now.

France: Skyrock's social ambitions

Not surprisingly, Skyblog.com taught its parent Skyrock (a hip-hop radio station popular among French youth) the power and "universal potential" of the social Web, the International Herald Tribune reports. Now Skyblog – which gets 11.1 million visitors a month and gained "a measure of notoriety when some of its young bloggers urged French youths to revolt against the police in the midst of disturbances in the Parisian suburbs last year" – is expanding linguistically to include communities in German, English, and Spanish. "Skyblog is unusual in its global ambitions to target a multinational youth network," according to the Herald Tribune. I'm not so sure this isn't what MySpace has in mind too, with its goal of being in 11 countries by next April 1, but it is possible that Skyblog plans to mash up the cultures and languages it embraces more than other social sites, something that one of the Herald Trib's sources said will not be easy. The French company does have a leg up, though, because it has appealed to the French diaspora, from primarily French-language countries like Belgium to French speakers in Spain, Germany, the US, Morocco, and most probably other French-speaking countries in Africa. On the online-safety front, interestingly, Skyblog has "a team of 30 people [who] do screening with a 'cybercop' icon on every page allowing users to complain about violent or hateful speech." The icon on every page is something the New Jersey attorney general is calling for in US-based social sites (see GovTech.net).

Schools' dilemma: Block or educate?

Student social networking has schools in a bit of a quandary, a new survey suggests. Thirty-six percent of school officials polled recently said students' use of social sites is "disruptive" at school, but at least half of school districts don't yet have policies addressing student use of such sites, eSchool News reports, citing an email survey the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent out to people attending its annual Tech + Learning Conference in Dallas earlier this month. "Only 35% of the educators, administrators, and school board members who … responded said their districts had policies to address the use of social-networking sites by their students"; 50% said their districts had no such policies; and 15% weren't sure. In schools where there is one, the most common policy appears to be simply blocking access to social sites, according to eSchool News. In this and various news reports, I'm seeing a growing number of educators and legal experts saying that not only is merely filtering ineffective (with all the workarounds students are aware of), but it spells missed opportunities to teach students safe, responsible use of the social Web. Among the experts saying this who are cited in this meaty, in-depth article are Anne Bryant, executive director of the NSBA and Harold Rowe, associate superintendent for technology at the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District in Texas. This view seems to be based on a certain realism expressed by Jeff Hunt, director of instructional technology for the Indian Prairie School District in Illinois: "By their very nature, explained Hunt, schools themselves are social-networking sites," eSchool News reports. "Just as students congregate on the Web to chat with friends on popular Web sites, they gather in schools in the hallways and cafeterias to socialize. It's only natural that the Internet would become an extension of that interaction, he said. For schools, the challenge is finding a way to harness that power, without compromising the safety and integrity of their students."

Participation: Key opp for our kids

The nature of interactivity is changing – in fact, our children are changing it. They moved beyond interacting with computers, games, and information on the Web to interacting with *each other*, as enabled by the Web, Net-connected devices, and media. And now they're moving past mere social interaction and individual self-expression to collaborative production and social action, online and offline. I've used various terms to describe this fascinating development here and in our book, MySpace Unraveled: instead of "social networking," a more accurate "creative networking," "social producing," or "collective self-expression." This development isn't about technology, though, it's about culture - "participatory culture" - suggests MIT Prof. Henry Jenkins and his co-authors in the first paper of the MacArthur Foundation's just-launched $50 million Digital Media & Learning research program. Participatory cultures involve being a part of online communities, producing digital media, problem-solving collaboratively, and shaping the public discussion (via blogs, podcasts, etc.). And access to these is becoming key to young people's ability to succeed, the authors write. Pls click to my newsletter's feature this week for more.

Revisiting 'Net addiction'

Have to say, I've tended to lean to the opinion of a Welsh researcher of online community who told the Washington Post that the Internet is an environment, and one can't be addicted to an environment. But I do think there's content and community on the Internet to which people can, in a way, get addicted, and the Post reports that "there are signs that the [Internet addiction] question is getting more serious attention," for example in a new study "published in CNS Spectrums, an international neuropsychiatric medicine journal." It found that "about 6% of respondents reported that 'their relationships suffered as a result of excessive Internet use' … about 9% attempted to conceal 'nonessential Internet use,' and nearly 4% reported feeling 'preoccupied by the Internet when offline'." The Post article led with a 47-year-old woman in Washington state who was spending 15 hours a day online, "but it took near-constant complaints from her four daughters before she realized she had a problem." The in-depth Post article includes names of various Internet-addiction support groups and discussion boards, a list of Internet-addiction trouble signs, and links to a sidebar with tips for unplugging.

Searching social sites

Searching for social networkers just got a little easier – at least for those at MySpace, Bebo, and LinkedIn. Wink.com – which, until recently was more a media-sharing site – just added people search, reports Mashable.com. More social sites soon will be added to the service, the

US joins Virtual Global Taskforce

With the participation of US Customs, the US is now becoming a full member of an international police unit it helped design. Operating in London but now to be monitored by law enforcement in the Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US, the Virtual Global Taskforce's Web site "responds to reports from youths and others about suspected predators," USATODAY reports. "Investigators can immediately trace a suspect's location through his Internet connection and contact a local police agency to further investigate the case or make an arrest." As other law-enforcement people do, VGT investigators will also work under cover in chat rooms and social sites "where pedophiles are likely to be."

Youth pastors, rabbis on MySpace

MySpace says 14% of its users are under 18, and that's likely why youth-oriented religious leaders are there. Some are there just to monitor young people's activity, some to keep in touch and be a presence in their online lives. All the above seem to understand that social networking can be used positively and negatively, and a mom and theology professor at Princeton University told the Religion News Service that she feels it's "more helpful" for adults to be aware of both positives and negatives than to "spend all our time railing against it." A regional youth minister in the southern US who's registered on MySpace said she gets messages about everything from what school dances were like to "I hate my life, I want to die," and she acts on the latter immediately. Other examples: "Reform Jewish teen leaders from the North American Federation of Temple Youth recently adopted their 'OurSpace Recommendation' in which they pledged to be conscious of their actions and urge their peers to integrate Jewish values into online communities." And a youth consultant at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops advises youth ministers to "get on MySpace for information but not communication."

ReputationDefender.com

"You can't take it back" was the basic message when I wrote about "Protecting teen reputations [and future prospects] on Web 2.0" last spring - because once you've uploaded text, photos, videos, etc. to the Web, you've pretty much lost control of that content. People can cut and paste it into a Web page, an instant message, or an email or share it via the global file-sharing networks. That's still true, but now there's [i]some[/i] help. "A new startup, ReputationDefender.com, will act on your behalf by contacting data hosting services and requesting the removal of any materials that threaten your good social standing," Wired News reports. For $10 to $16 a month, "we scour the Internet to dig up every possible piece of information by and about your child [in social sites, media-sharing sites, online game sites, and on "the open Internet"], and we present it to you in an interactive monthly report," says ReputationDefender.com. If there's something embarrassing or damaging in the report, you can flag it and, for an additional $30, the service will "use an array of proprietary techniques developed in-house to correct and/or completely remove the selected unwanted content from the Web." If they can, that is. If the offending info is on the Web page of an ex-friend of your child or a bully, the service may not be able to deliver on that promise. If you're interested in trying the service, be sure to talk with them about that. In any case, knowing where and how our kids are represented online is a good thing; it can be a great parent-child discussion point to have a "visual aid" – with the help of monitoring tools and services like this, BeNetSafe, and others (see "Monitoring MySpacers").

As for future prospects, a recent Harris Interactive study found that "more than one-fourth of hiring managers said they had used Internet search engines to research potential employees," and 10% said they'd searched social sites to screen applicants, according to a story on this in the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., where ReputationDefender is based. KIRO in Seattle reported findings from a similar study conducted at Seattle University. See also "For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Resume" in the New York Times last June.

Your child an 'influential'?

"Social Networking: A Boost for Brand Buzz" in E-Commerce Times offers some insights into how marketers are viewing online kids. They are really interested in reaching "influentials," who are generally the starting points of viral marketing campaigns (if you can even call them "campaigns" anymore – "viral" and "campaign" being a bit of an oxymoron). The article distinguishes between "classic influentials" (a surprising 24% of all Net users) and "new influentials" (17%) and throws in a third "combination influential" (6%). The old kind is likened to Sherlock Holmes, the "recognized expert," and the new kind to Watson, who "spreads the buzz," tells everyone about his buddy Holmes. Of course, every marketer would love to influence a "combination influential." I think I'd like to meet one of those too.

Very mobile social networking

You might call it real-time, real-life social networking. Today Silicon Valley start-up loopt launched a new mobile social-networking service with Boost Mobile, "one of the nation's biggest youth-oriented wireless phone companies," the San Jose Mercury News reports. "Boost's 3.8 million customers - who are mostly under 25 - will be able to create groups of friends and keep track of them using a combination of text messaging, pictures and the GPS technology embedded in most new mobile phones today." Let's make that crystal clear: young people using this service will be able to know their friends' exact physical location so that they can socialize with them offline, in what we digital immigrants call "real life." This is new territory for online safety, which loopt's 17 employees are well aware of (they've already reached out to us and other online-safety specialists). "Loopt has strict privacy and security safeguards, including requirements that friends must be invited and accept each other," reports the Mercury News. Other services in this vein are Google's Dodgeball (see InformationWeek) and Microsoft's SLAM tech (see the Gizmodo blog). It's different from MySpace Mobile, which provides phone access to one's MySpace profile and keeps the socializing online.

To me, this is yet another sign that online safety is more and more about social engineering and less about safety technologies like filters. In other words, we need to teach our kids how not to be tricked or "engineered" to add undesirable people to friends lists and click on undesirable links. The other "next big thing" for online safety, I think, points to the same educational need: the social scene in virtual or alternate worlds such as SecondLife.com, Teen.SecondLife.com, EntropiaUniverse.com, and Xbox Live chat-enabled videogames (see this item on Entropia and Wikipedia on the Second Life games).

COPA in court again

The Web is actually not teeming with X-rated content, according to research by a University of California-Berkeley statistics professor. "A confidential analysis of Internet search queries and a random sample of Web pages taken from Google and Micrsoft's giant Internet indexes showed that only about 1% of all Web pages contain sexually explicit material," the San Jose Mercury News reports. The findings were presented in a Philadelphia federal court last week, where COPA - the Child Online Protection Act passed and almost immediately blocked by a federal judge in 1998) - is again on trial. On the surface the case is about online porn, but it's really a long, drawn-out case about free speech, and its latest arguments – between the Department of Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union - are being heard in a federal court in Philadelphia. [A federal appeals court and the Supreme Court both upheld the original injunction, but the latter sent the case back to the Philly federal court in 2004, ordering a new trial to determine whether less-restrictive ways to protect kids than those provided in COPA can be found, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.] As for the study of online porn, according to the Mercury News it "found that only 6% of all queries returned a sexually explicit Web site, despite the consistent popularity of queries related to sex. It also found that the filters that did the best job blocking sexually explicit content also inadvertently blocked lots of content that was not explicit [and the study also concluded that a lot of adult content got through the filters]. Government witnesses argued that while the percent of sexually explicit Web pages was small, it still amounted to a huge number." In related coverage, the two sides of the debate are clearly represented in this Wall Street Journal discussion, "Are More Laws Needed to Protect Online Kids." For views on parents' role, see BlogSafety.com co-director Larry Magid's "What Can Parents Do about Web Safety?" at CBSNEWS.com and "Parents are kids' best protection from online porn" in South Florida's Sun-Sentinel.

Game consoles' latest epic battle

Brace yourselves, holiday shoppers, the next wave of game console wars hits the US this weekend. Nintendo's new Wii console goes on sale here Sunday. Microsoft's Xbox 360 gained its beachhead a year ago. The PS3 launches in the US this Friday and sold out in Japan over the weekend, the BBC reports (it doesn't hit European stores till next spring). Some of the 8,000 older PlayStation games aren't working perfectly on the PS3, the Associated Press reports (mostly sound and image issues). "Users can punch in the name of the PS or PS2 game on the Web page, and a list will pop up, telling you if the game can be played without problems or not. As for Nintendo's console, with which the company is more than ever focused on the family market, the Seattle Times reports that "the $250 Wii is expected to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, must-have toys of the season." Nintendo will have "only 4 million units to sell worldwide. Even if it sells out, future competition will be brutal against Microsoft and its year-old Xbox 360 and Sony and its PlayStation 3," the Seattle Times adds. Meanwhile, here are fresh, rated game reviews at the Detroit Free Press, including one for the very controversial "Bully" from Rockstar Games (the Free Press says "those overly concerned should not be about this game"), and here's an in-depth review of Bully (for PS2) at the University Daily Kansan.

Talking to friends on Orkut - literally!

Google's social-networking site Orkut just changed enough to really distinguish itself from the pack of popular social sites. Orkut users can now "talk on the phone" with their friends. Orkut added Google Talk to its features and, at about the same time, opened itself up to everyone (Orkut users used to have to be invited in by existing members), according to the Mashable.com blog. With Google Talk, Orkut users can do both voice and text chat, or instant messaging, with people on their friends lists, Google explains on its own page about this . Yet another reason for parents to remind any Orkut users at their house not to put people they don't know in person on their friends lists. [Some parents have a rule that only people Mom or Dad knows are on friends and buddy lists in IM services and social sites.]

ID theft often begins at home

Most of the 9-10 million Americans who have their identities stolen each year don't know who did the stealing, but "half of those who do say the thief was a family member, a friend, a neighbor or an in-home employee," the New York Times reports, citing a Federal Trade Commission survey. The Times gives examples of an ex-spouse using the social security numbers of her underage children; a grown son tapping into his parents' credit; and a housemate and friend who had known the victim for more than two decades. "Identity theft involving family members takes many forms," according to the Times article. "A child steals a parent’s identity to buy drugs, one sibling steals another’s identity to try to avoid arrest or debt."

Social Web growth unabated

"Doubting the popularity of MySpace? Don't," suggests Digital Trends News. Citing new findings from Web traffic measurer Hitwise, the article says MySpace is getting 82% of visits to the top 20 social-networking sites and experienced 51% growth in visits between last March and this past September. Visits to social sites over all grew 34% those six months. In its report on the study, MediaPost cited other fast growers in social networking: "Other social sites making big gains in share of traffic include Bolt, up 271% [see this heads-up from a Bolt user]; Bebo, 95%; Orkut, 63%; and Gaia Online, 41%." In terms of average session time at the sites, Gaia Online came in first at 47 min., 1 sec., followed by CrushSpot (30:31); MySpace (30:22); Bebo (25:39); and Tagged (20:33). And of course MySpace's high traffic is spurring use of media-hosting sites (that MySpace users link to from their profiles) and sites that provide bells 'n' whistles for MySpace profiles. For example, "the top photo hosting site, PhotoBucket, increased market share by 43% from March to September, while Flickr grew by 49%. Visits to YouTube jumped 249% during that period [MySpace Videos grew 253%]. Slide, which lets users create slide shows of their photos and paste them on social networking sites, was the fastest-growing site in the category with a 1,300% gain in traffic" (see also "Embellishing their pages"). In other MySpace news, the service has serious international ambitions. This week MySpace launched in Japan (where indigenous social site Mixi just had a $1.85 billion IPO) and, "with a presence already in Britain, Australia, Ireland, Germany and France, the company plans to add 11 other countries in the coming year," the New York Times reports.

Movies on Xbox360

The media-downloading scene is not getting less complicated, in terms of what is and isn't legal and what rights various downloads come with. But the number of choices is growing. People who have Xbox 360 consoles will soon be able to download movies and TV shows via Microsoft's Xbox Live online service, the New York Times reports. "Microsoft has negotiated the rights to rent or sell more than 1,000 hours of material from CBS, MTV Networks, Paramount, Warner Brothers and Turner Broadcasting." The online store will work a lot like Apple's iTunes but with a few key differences: "While users will be able to keep television shows, movies can be rented for only a limited period. The videos will not be playable on other devices and cannot be burned onto DVDs, but the online service will keep track of purchases so that users can log in to watch their videos on a friend’s Xbox." Here's the BBC's coverage.

Parenting & profile deletion

Some parents will be relieved to read that every week MySpace deletes the profiles of about 30,000 people under 14 (14 is the minimum age under its Terms of Service). In an article about parenting MySpacers, the Boston Globe leads with that factoid. The thing relieved parents need to know, though, is that a deleted profile is far from the resolution of any parent's social-networking struggle, especially if his or her child is a determined online socializer. For a teen, getting one's profile deleted - after putting significant time and effort into cultivating page esthetics and friends' comments - is a major pain. But a new account can be set up, in stealth mode (set to private and harder for a parents to find), very quickly, after which the development period starts anew, usually with friends rallying around the effort. So account deletion by MySpace is never the ultimate goal. Parent/child communication and learning are more realistic ones, often with parents learning about both the technology and their kids' social lives and with kids learning about how to protect and present themselves better in public places, not to mention why their parents have concerns. I appreciated the points made by a psychology professor and a middle-school administrator quoted by Globe writer Barbara Meltz. Meanwhile, some fresh statistics from Harris Interactive (as reported in Media Life): 75% of teens and 43% of tweens have an online profile in a social-networking or community site, and teens have, on average, 75 friends on their friends lists in such sites.

'Music detective' tech

The music business is still suing individual file-sharers (see this latest example, reported by the Associated Press), but the newest front in its war on copyright theft is social networking – not just in tunes downloaded and shared, but in the background music of videos upload to YouTube, MySpace, and other social and media sites. To help music fans at your house understand how these companies are using technology to detect pirated music, see this article by CBS tech writer (and SafeKids.com publisher) Larry Magid. Halfway down in the article there's a link to Larry's audio interview with Jim Hollingsworth, an executive at the company, Gracenote, that provides MySpace with that copyright-detection tech. He explains how it works.

Newest music player

If you have music lovers at your house and are curious about the MP3 player options this holiday season, there's help from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg looks at the new kid on the block - Microsoft's Zune music player and its own music store – and finds some positives over the iPod. Walt likes its "larger screen, the ability to exchange songs with other Zunes wirelessly and a built-in FM radio," but he concludes it "has too many compromises and missing features to be as good a choice as the iPod for most users." The Times's David Pogue likes some things about the Zune too, but his bottom line is "this game is for watching, not playing. It may be quite a while before brown [one of the three colors Zune comes in] is the new white." Meanwhile, apparently in an effort to make sure all the major record labels are represented in Zune's online music store, Microsoft signed an unusual deal with Universal Music Group in which Universal gets "a payment for every Zune player sold" in return for more access to artists and music rights for Zune, the Associated Press reports.

Video sites like rabbits too

"Nichefication" is happening in Web video now, just as in social networking, where social sites of every possible narrow niche are multiplying exponentially (in the past week I've seen one for people who want to lose weight, one for alcoholics, and one for mobile social-networkers in India – see also "Social sites multiplying like…"). YouTube is "so last month," according to a Washington Post writer covering the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, because it's so general. Maybe it's the MySpace of Web video. "Already, users are finding the sheer volume of videos available on the Internet too difficult to digest and are looking for new ways to pick through them." One panelist, "Mary Hodder, chief executive of Dabble, which helps users search and organize online videos, estimated that 200,000 videos are uploaded onto the Web every day." She said video uploads to PhotoBucket, Metacafe, and AOL add up to 25,000-30,000 videos a day. Dabble wants to help users get to the content that matches their interests. Another new service, Jumpcut, helps users create their own video playlists. As for online video growth, MediaPost cites new findings by traffic measurer Hitwise showing that between March and this past September, visits to YouTube grew 249%; to MySpace Video 253%; to Google Video 170%; to Metacafe 133%; and to Yahoo Video 13%.

Online mobs

Koreans call what these not-so-virtual mobs do “cyberviolence.” First they “demonize those they disagree with,” the BBC reports, then they somehow obtain and pass around their victim’s home address or other contact data, financial info, employer’s phone number, etc., and spread rumors to affect the victim’s social status. An example the BBC gives is a comedian on a South Korean game show where one celebrity provokes his or her celebrity opponent into “reacting to put-downs.” The comic joked that his pop star opponent had a fake smile. But the latter’s fans threatened to kill the comedian for what he said. “The spiteful comments and threats continued for 12 months…. All of Korea's police stations now have a cyber terror unit to help deal with the problem. The number of cases referred to Korea's Internet Commission tripled last year.”

The 'overconnecteds'?

The New York Times cuts right to the chase and asks the question we adults have had for some time: “What are the psychological implications of simultaneously talking to 50 of one’s forever best friends, who are not actually present?” Answer: We don’t know yet. That’s my take-away, anyway. The other takeaway from this long article: how very individual teens’ online social experiences and their impacts are. But there’s a list of “practical advantages” to all this connectedness for teens at the bottom of p. 2. One of them is, “If someone seems to be in trouble, there are no longer just one or two good friends to the rescue but hundreds who send support via email messages, instant messages and text messages.” Elsewhere in the piece, one teen source told the Times that her peers are “stronger socially” than adults because of the way they use electronic communications, mostly IM, partly because people aren’t inhibited by appearance and facial expressions. They feel more confident going into face-to-face conversations after the ice has been broken in IM. But of course there’s a flipside, to that “invisibility,” or lack of visual cues, in not knowing how one’s comments are being received. For an example of an overconnected wannabe, see this story in the Wichita Eagle about a 20-year-old Wichitan who aims to have all of the “approximately 500 Hispanics he found on MySpace within 20 miles of ZIP code 67212” on his friends list. “So far he has about 100.”

Bargain laptops...

…just might be a hot item this holiday shopping season. Online and in its stores, Wal-Mart just started selling a $398 Compaq with “a 15.4-inch screen, a 3300+ Sempron processor from Advanced Micro Devices that churns at 2.0GHz, a 60GB hard drive and 512MB of memory,” CNET reports. It also has a $598 Toshiba on sale, and Dell is selling a $499 notebook on its site. CNET suggests the trend is laptops as individual rather than family purchase – “everyone in the family is getting their own machine.”

PC protection perspective

Paying for PC security is one of those necessary evils, suggests Washington Post writer Rob Pegoraro. Or worse, actually. Because “too often, the software meant to keep your computer safe does so at an unnecessary cost,” he writes. The cost he’s talking about is how two such programs (e.g., the latest version and an earlier version) active on your computer can create “serious conflicts.” Rob saves you the trouble of complicated comparison shopping by comparing the latest products – those of CA, McAfee, Panda, Symantec and Trend Micro - for you (“Microsoft and Zone Labs are between updates,” he explains). He looks at their effectiveness, cost, efficiency, consistency, and whether they educate you about PC security as well as protect your computer.

What exactly is Web 2.0?

The San Francisco Chronicle takes a fairly cerebral look at this second phase of the Web, quoting some of its pioneers, including Tim O’Reilly, widely credited with coining the term. Call me simplistic, but what they all seem to be describing is what I’d call “the people’s Web.” The debate will continue, but in this space – that of youth on the Internet – it’s a force to contend with and clearly distinct from Web 1.0, so much so that it needs its own name. This social Web or participatory Web, as I also think of it, is not really the Web we parents use at work or even at home – except maybe the most early-adopter ones. It’s the Web driven by people under 30 (see “Users’ Web”). A US News & World Report article indicates that's changing, though - at least investors are banking on indicators that we'll all be driving the participatory Web. To help us nail all this down, the Chronicle has a sidebar with concrete examples – describing and linking to the “Key Web 2.0 sites."

Social Web: Research 'treasure trove'

Buried in a New York Times article about the future of computing are some interesting comments about behavioral research on the social Web. That includes research about teen users. In social-networking sites behavior "can be tracked on a scale never before possible," says the Times in its coverage of a symposium held in Washington this past month by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. "Social networking research promises a rich trove for marketers and politicians, as well as sociologists, economists, anthropologists, psychologists, and educators." Pretty soon, researchers say, people will be wearing a tiny digital device with a mic and a camera and "essentially record his or her life. The potential for communication, media and personal enrichment is striking." It may bring self-awareness to a whole new level, the way social networking is enhancing people's social situational awareness. But there's a downside to consider: a growing tension between people's privacy and researchers' hunger for knowledge.

The essential cellphone

British young people see their cellphones as "a key part of their identity," the BBC reports, citing a new study by the Trust for Study of Adolescence. "They are private, personal devices which give young people independence of both movement and communication." According to UK communications regulator Ofcom, 82% of UK 12-to-15-year-olds and 49% of 8-to-11-year-olds do. Both these age groups make an average of eight calls and 25 text messages a week. A few highlights from the Trust study: UK parents say young people are safer with phones than without them, despite concerns about text bullying; youth are more concerned about text bullying than their parents (67% said they had either been a victim or knew someone who had been); parents typically buy their kids phones to keep track of them and for emergencies; parents prefer to talk with their kids, while kids preferred texting with parents. "The research also showed having a mobile increased young people's feeling of independence and was frequently used to plan arrangements both with parents and friends."

Critical thinking critical: Educators

US school administrators are at least as concerned about information literacy as about online safety for their Web-researching students, a new study found. "Four out of five (79%) school principals and administrators see danger for students on the Internet increasing, and commercial and pay sites rank as their greatest concern," said the press release from tech education company Thinkronize, which commissioned the study. "When asked to rate the specific types of dangers facing students on the Internet, 61% of survey respondents said pornography and 58% said adult predators were a great or significant danger. Concern over getting useless or irrelevant results when using search engines was also high at 59%. The issue rated highest, however, at 76% was concern over unauthorized redirection to commercial or pay sites when conducting online research." A tech educator in Sacramento quoted in the release said she's worried about the 50,000 students in her district being "bombarded by inappropriate ads in the one place that should be all about learning" – as well as the distraction and time waste these irrelevant sites represent.

Wiki-ing, Google-style

Google is adding another app to its put-people's-whole-lives-on-the-Web agenda. Along with Writely for word-processing, YouTube for video-sharing, Google Spreadsheets for collaborative budgeting, among others, Google just acquired the JotSpot wiki service for collaborative publishing (eBay uses JotSpot for its member wiki), CNET reports. Google's acquisition may be a sign wikis (besides the already very mainstream Wikipedia.org) are going mainstream, maybe even classroom wikis (see this Boston Globe article), which might be considered dynamic "textbooks" that students and teachers write collaboratively as class knowledge evolves. [It's the way science is going. Prof. Richard Karp at University of California, Berkeley, recently said that, "increasingly, scientific research seeks to understand dynamic processes" (described by algorithms) as opposed to static phenomena (described by equations), the New York Times reports.] Here's a definition of "wiki" at eBayWiki.com: "The word Wiki is a shorter form of Wiki Wiki (weekie, weekie) which is from the native language of Hawaii, where it is commonly used as an adjective to denote something 'quick' or 'fast'."