YouTube, users to share revenue

This will make YouTube even more attractive to aspiring videographers and producers: The videosharing social site’s co-founder Chad Hurley said over the weekend that YouTube would be sharing revenue with its users, the Associated Press reports. He didn’t offer details as to how much revenue or how it would work. More than 70 million videos are viewed each day on YouTube, which is now owned by Google.

Do-it-yourself social sites

First there were do-it-yourself Web sites (called blogs), now there are user-created social-networking sites with the help of Ning.com, the Wall Street Journal reports. With the privacy choices Ning allows, teachers could create private mini-social sites to create class discussion around Canterbury Tales profiles their students create and social activists can generate buzz and support around their causes with a very public social-networking site. The service offers all the tools for free, only charging for upgrades like extra storage (for all those photos or videos users can upload). Ning “allows users to easily set up three different kinds of sites - a social-networking site, a photo-sharing site and a video site.” What a great tool for a photography or filmmaking class! The Journal also talks about socializing around events (such as high school reunions or local arts events) with services like Google Calendar, Upcoming.org, and HeyLetsGo.com.

Nick's virtual world for kids

Move over Nick.com and NickJr.com, make room for Nicktropolis.com, Nickelodeon’s new virtual world for kids 6-14. “Nickelodeon was prompted to join the surging world of online activities for children in part by research that showed that 86% of 8-to-14-year-olds were playing games online, more than 51% were watching TV shows and videos online and 37% were sending instant messages,” the New York Times reports. And – as in ClubPenguin.com and the virtual world the BBC’s planning (see last week’s issue), young users will navigate this virtual world with the avatars, or online characters they create in Nicktropolis. There will be familiar friends (brands) too, such as SpongeBob and other characters in Bikini Bottom, which the Times says will be one of the world’s play environments. The Times doesn’t say much about safety, only that there will be no message boards, as in Nick.com, but avatars will be able to chat in real time. Nicktropolis’s safety info for parents doesn’t say chat is moderated, but the interaction is apparently governed by a “sanitized dictionary” with a profanity filter and no violent or threatening language.

National sex-offender database

MySpace today donated the US’s first national sex-offender database, which it built with identity verification company Sentinel Tech Holdings, to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. The database “combines close to 50 US state registries in an aim to help police keep track of an estimated 600,000 convicted sex offenders,” Reuters reports. Ernie Allen, CEO of the National Center, said his organization “will use the new database to help law enforcement in investigations.” The Adam Walsh Act, which President Bush signed into law last summer, called for a national sex-offender database, but it would likely have taken months, if not years, for the federal government to create. Internet News’s story led with this: “During the four years that Missouri teen Sean Hornbeck was abducted, he was sometimes able to visit social networking sites. Could a database like the one [unveiled] today have helped speed Hornbeck's return, or kept him safe? Ernie Allen … told InternetNews.com he believes so."

News sites in the classroom

News Web sites, not newspapers, are the tool of choice in US classrooms. Reuters reports that 57% of teachers use Net-based news “with some frequency,” a just-released survey of more than 1,200 teachers of grades 5-12 found. That compares with 31% who use TV news and 28% who use papers. Topping the list for news sites were the BBC, the New York Times, and CNN. “Teachers prefer printed papers, but only 8% said the newspaper was a student's preferred choice,” and 75% put papers at the bottom of the students’ preference list.

Teens' fight video: Closer look

The cyberbullying case involving four Long Island, N.Y., teenage girls and – it is now being alleged – the victim's boyfriend has turned out to be a real puzzle for parents, police, and school officials to solve (see last week's issue ). We find in "A family stunned," a later, more in-depth report from Newsday , that the victim says she first met her attackers when they approached to attack. The attackers say they all knew each other and the victim and her boyfriend encouraged them to fight with the victim (the boyfriend allegedly videotaped the fight). The mother of the victim did say, as did the police, that the fight had "revolved around a boy." The mother also said that only after the video appeared online did her daughter tell her about the attack (bearing out research showing that only 11.3% of cyberbullying victims tell their parents – see below). The attackers' lawyer told Newsday the whole thing was staged for airing on MySpace, YouTube, and Photobucket, where the video appeared. Suffolk County Executive Steven Levy says parents need to be as concerned about cyberbullying as online sexual predation. I think he's right, not because sexual predation isn't a risk, but because research will probably soon show that a great many more children will be affected by cyberbullying than by predation. We have research now on half that equation: more than one-third of US kids have been cyberbullied, and that doesn't even include those who have caused or witnessed an incident. For more on what might be learned from this incident, please click to this week's issue of my newsletter.

Winning social sites

There are now so many kinds of social-networking sites that it's now possible to have SN awards with multiple categories. In the Mashable blog (all about the social Web), the 12 categories of the Social Networking Awards of 2006 included "Mainstream & Large-Scale Networks" (MySpace won); Social Bookmarking (digg.com); Sport & Fitness (FanNation.com); Photo-Sharing (Flickr.com); and Social Shopping (Etsy.com). Each category also had "People's Choice" and "Hot for 2007" winners; for the general category that MySpace won, Multiply.com was the "People's Choice," and the sites deemed hot this coming year were Bebo, Vox, Facebook, and Facebox. This whole page on Mashable is packed with information for anyone seeking a crash course in social networking. In the mainstream media, PC Magazine gave Vox.com its Editor's Choice in both the blogging and social networking categories.

U. students on social networking

Students at the University of Wyoming surveyed fellow students about their social networking habits for a student discussion on the subject sponsored by the Dean of Students and other university offices. According to the Laramie Boomerang, the discussion covered everything from identity theft to privacy to social networking's impact on studying (84% of the 50 students surveyed in the Student Union said online socializing distracted them from "homework" or "studying"). One student offered a Native American perspective: "She said reservations can be isolated geographically, so social network sites are a chance for students to meet other Native American students from different areas and different tribes" (the university's Multicultural Resource Center was one of the conference's sponsors).

Net-related curbs for kid TV

TV shows and channels whose audiences are children 12 and under can no longer show the Web addresses of "sites that contain any links to commercial content," CNET reports. Just exactly what that means is kind of complicated, apparently. "Never mind that recent visits to NickJr.com and Noggin.com, online properties of kid networks, turned up more advertisements for Tylenol cold medicine and Nissan minivans than for anything youth-targeted," according to CNET. It says even some children's advocates say the TV shows themselves are pretty ad-like, displaying "the toys and edible goodies endorsed by their stars." But the new rules, which went into effect January 2, are meant to keep broadcasters from using children's shows as billboards for Web sites that are just interactive ads, so the FCC's heart seems to be in the right place. Read the article for details but not a lot of clarity.

Europe on violent videogames

The European Union is looking into whether to establish continent-wide curbs on violent videogame sales "amid worries that national controls are too lax," the Associated Press reports. It'll be interesting to see if free-speech concerns will carry as much wait in Europe as they have in the US, where federal courts in a number of states have struck down anti-videogame laws on constitutional grounds. " Most if not all EU governments have in place parental advisory rules and voluntary agreements with games makers and retailers to prevent the sale of violent or other adult games to those under 16." Germany's Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries said an inventory of EU members' national bans and ratings will soon be posted in a Web site, and the EU would be consulting with other countries about greater international coordination. In other videogame news, two bills "aimed at restricting games deemed to contain violent or racist content from minors"
have been proposed in New York State, Gamasutra reports, and Reuters reports on a US university professor's urging of schools "to consider using videogames as tools to better prepare children for the work force."

Dispelling 2 social-Web myths

Social media researcher danah boyd is doing parents of online socializers a real service. Through countless quotes in news stories and many speaking engagements, she's helping us understand what's really going on in social sites. Don't miss an interview with danah (who prefers to have her name uncapped) at AlterNet.org, where she dispels two widespread myths about teens' use of social sites. Myth 1: "that everybody is on there to meet people, and everyone is on there to engage in social networking…. It has [more] to do with constructing or presenting your social network, showcasing it, showing it off, engaging in the status around it," danah says, rather than meeting new friends. The latest research bears this out – see my 1/12 feature about the latest study. Myth 2: "that kids are in grave danger just because of participation. The risky behavior is not putting information about yourself online, which is what most adults think. We do not have a single case related to Myspace where someone has been abducted. We've had plenty of press coverage of these things, and every single one of them has proven to not be an abduction, but a runaway situation, or the kid was abducted by their noncustodial parent."

danah also told interviewer Kate Sheppard that there are two "clusters of kids" who use social sites: 1) "You have kids who are getting all they need in terms of validation and status, and everything else from school, peers in the physical world, peers from church, summer camp, activities, school, those kinds of obvious physical environments" – the kids just replicating all that online – and 2) the much less common type: "the marginalized and ostracized kids who are actually actively seeking out a community of peers online because they don't have one offline." The latter are the kids online-safety advocates and offline experts in all forms of at-risk teen behavior really need to focus our efforts on going forward.

A shift in media attention

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

BBC's virtual world for kids

As widely reported, the BBC is jumping on the social-networking bandwagon (see Reuters), and this week there's news of the first example. CBBC, the BBC for 7-to-12-year-olds, is joining the likes of Whyville.net and ClubPenguin.com in opening a virtual world for young people, the BBC reports. CBBC says it'll be like Second Life without chat, virtual money or ecommerce, or the ability to build new islands or other user-generated real estate. But kids will be able to create their own avatars, or online characters, interact with each other's avatars, and "create and share content." The CBBC expects to launch the online role-playing game or world this summer.

MySpace: Lots of news

The two biggest headlines this week are MySpace's lawsuit against a major spammer and its partnership with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to publish Amber Alerts on the site. On the anti-spam front, the suit was filed against Scott Richter, "who allegedly sent out millions of unsolicited 'bulletins' ["newsy" messages to entire friends lists] to MySpace members," CNET reports. According to MySpace, Richter gained access to users' accounts via phishing schemes, then used the site's bulletin feature "to churn out unsolicited messages that advertised" all sorts of products. Richter was similarly sued by Microsoft in 2003. Under the second headline, MySpace today (Tuesday) will start broadcasting Amber alerts in the profiles of members who live in the community where a child has gone missing, the Associated Press reports. The alerts "will appear in a small text box at the top of a user's portfolio. The user can click on the box for more information, including a photo of the missing child and a description of the suspect." Meanwhile, PC World looks at whether the families suing MySpace "for sexual assaults against children who met offline with people they'd been in contact with on the site" actually have a case. Here's last week's coverage on this and a legal commentary on a similar case filed in Texas last June.

'Storm' worm hits family PCs

The worm looks like it was a perfect storm of social engineering, actually. Just as severe storms were sweeping Europe, users got an email saying something like "click here to get the latest weather news," CNET reports. There were six waves of these emailings over the weekend, and the other parts of this perfect storm were that "each new wave of emails carried different versions of the Trojan horse," and the viral code was "pretty much undetectable by most antivirus programs," CNET added. Computer security firm F-Secure told CNET hundreds of thousands of family PCs around the world could've been infected, which turns them into "zombies" (computers controlled by malicious hackers for spamming, denial-of-service extortion, and other ways of making money). Anti-virus software is no longer total protection (if it ever was). Tell your kids to be very careful about what they click on or download. And don't be smug, Mac users, security flaws have been found in Macs too. For example, a critical one discovered earlier this month that "can be exploited if the Mac user has enabled an option in Safari to 'open safe files after downloading'," CNET reported earlier. Mac patches are being worked on too – see this CNET interview.

Unrestricted Net music?

Who would've thought?! Contrary to what they said in the past, the major record labels "are moving closer to releasing music on the Internet with no copying restrictions," according to the New York Times. Reporting from Cannes, at the recording industry's annual international trade fair, the Times adds that at least one of the four major labels could start selling unrestricted MP3 files "within months." Independent labels have been selling unrestricted MP3s for some time as a marketing tool, but the majors have resisted doing so, thinking digital sales of copy-protected files at online stores like iTunes and Rhapsody would make up for losses to online file-sharing. They haven't. So the major labels have been experimenting with unrestricted MP3s and streaming, and change is in the wind.

'Generation We'

CNET writer Stefanie Olsen tells of 7-year-old Gabriel, who's bored with TV because he can't do anything with it. He and the rest of his generation are growing up with the assumption that media is something you create, customize, and share - that media is both a self-expression and a socialization tool. It's not that TV's going away or kids are losing interest in it, it's that they're really losing interest in the way we adults used TV (passively). Here's Stefanie's example of how Generation We uses TV - "what MTV Networks is doing with its teen-targeted digital cable channel, The N. It produces television shows that air on cable, but its audience can stream the shows via the Web through its broadband player, The Click. On the site, kids can use a so-called video mix masher to take a scene from a show, put a comment on it and add other scenes … to create their program. Part of it is what The N calls 'vomenting,' or adding commentary to shows via text blurbs or audio." (note that sound – music - is also commentary to teens).

Top 10 videogames

Any videogamer or football fan could probably tell you the No. 1 game for last year: Madden NFL '07. "Like Madden itself, the PS2 has practically become a fixture in the homes and consciousness of Americans under age 35," reports the New York Times in its analysis. The rest of the Top 5 were New Super Mario Brothers (a quest/rescue-the-princess game), Gears of War (3rd-person shooter), Kingdom Hearts II (a fantasy role-playing game), and Guitar Hero 2 (rockstar role-playing game). The Times article has a sidebar listing the full Top 10 and the consoles they're played on. Meanwhile, videogame sales had a record year last year, up 19% to $12.5 billion worldwide and up 28% in the US, the Associated Press reports.

Avatars & focus groups

It's only logical. A film studio that has teen-targeting content wants to try it out on a social site popular with teens. We'll be seeing more and more deals like this: The film studio Lionsgate announced this week that – in "identifying the next step in new media opportunities" - it "goes viral" this month. In other words, Lionsgate "has partnered with HABBO [Hotel], one of the world's largest online communities for teenagers, to allow today's teens to determine the fate of a Habbo animated release. Utilizing this interactive technology, Lionsgate will tap directly into the online community for feedback on a potential filmmaking endeavor with Habbo." Habbo users (or their avatars, called "habbos") in Habbo sites around the world will be able to check out 10 animated shorts that are set in the actual Habbo world. Lionsgate wants them to vote on whether or not it "should produce and distribute a longer feature film for the DVD and online marketplace."

Grownups embellishing too

This New York Times piece, "Bling for Your Blog," does two things: 1) offers parents insights into how huge the page-embellishing (or, as young social networkers put it, the "pimping your profile") part of blogging and socializing is among teens, and 2) shows it's a growing phenomenon because adult bloggers are into it too. The Times's case in point: the blog bling habit of Pastor Bob Hyatt in Portland, Ore. I'm not sure if teen social networkers do, but adults call these little page add-ons "widgets" (not to be confused with the mini-applications Mac computers have on their "desktops"). Among the widgets on, or embellishments to, the Web site of Pastor Hyatt (who told the Times these are addictive, but I'm sure he advises "moderation in all things"): "a selection of book covers from his personal library … the most recent posts from some of his favorite blogs, and … random quotes from the television show 'Arrested Development'." More typical of social-site pages are slideshows, blinking text, avatars, creative layouts, racy questionnaires, and buttons to click on that dial the profile owner's cellphone (see "Pinpointing peers"). In sheer traffic, among the top sites on the Web are those that provide these bits of code to paste into people's pages, and it's interesting to see blog-hosting sites providing these widgets for their grown up users too. "The first major conference dedicated to 'the emerging widget economy' was held in November in San Francisco," the Times points out.

More views on Vista

We're all going to be seeing plenty about Vista, Microsoft's new (some say last) Windows operating system, as its January 31 release dates nears. I promise I won't link you to all of it - just the highlights. I mentioned New York Times columnist Seth Schiesel's comment that Vista's parental controls are basically the only reason to upgrade right now (unless you're a gamer). Here's the bottom line from Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg: "For most users who want Vista, I strongly recommend buying a new PC with the new operating system preloaded. I wouldn't even consider trying to upgrade a computer older than 18 months, and even some [newer ones] may be unsuitable candidates." He links to Microsoft's free "Upgrade Adviser" download, which will tell you if Vista will work on your PC. There are a lot of other reasons to read this review too. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that, for the first time, Microsoft is making a Windows upgrade available for sale and download online. I joined a briefing about Vista's new parental controls this week, and I was impressed with how extensive they are, with filtering, monitoring, time limits, gaming and other software controls, etc. For families with kids and pre-teens, they may be worth the investment of a new family PC. Here's CNET on Microsoft's Vista marketing, including special offers.

A cop on teen social networking

The headline of this clear-eyed commentary by Det. James McLaughlin in Keene, N.H., reads: "Online policing is getting results." But he describes a tough, complex new environment for policing that needs "a partnership between the police, educators, child protection workers, parents and children needs to take place to minimize the risk children face when they online." Why? Here's just a piece of the reason: "Someone once described the Internet as a place where it is Halloween 365 days a year, because everyone wears a mask. Further complicating keeping adolescents safe on the Internet is their willingness to engage in sexual behavior as a result of being manipulated by an older exploitive adult. Kenneth V. Lanning (FBI, ret.) describes this behavior of a victim willing to follow the suggestions of an offender as 'victim compliance.' The typical prevention program attempts to educate people so they can be safe by adjusting their conduct. However, many teens, not all, want not only to engage in the behavior, but also to keep its existence secret. This makes our traditional prevention approaches useless and our need to speak directly to adolescents about their being responsible for what they decide to do while online." It doesn't help to pile on the social sites, he says (he names a number of them). "Myspace is simply a platform; individuals still ultimately have to accept responsibility for their actions." So let's all keep working the problem together in partnership, as Detective McLaughlin suggests! Your views are always welcome via anne@netfamilynews.org and in the BlogSafety.com forum.

4 families suing MySpace

This week four families in four states filed lawsuits against MySpace, saying "their underage daughters were sexually abused by adults they met on the site," the Associated Press reports. Represented by two law firms in Texas, the families in New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina filed separate lawsuits in a Los Angeles Superior Court. They're seeking damages "in the millions," one of their attorneys told the AP. Last summer a 14-year-old in Texas sued MySpace for $30 million (see this item). Her case is pending in a Texas state court.

Teen cyberbullies charged

Among other things, this disturbing incident shows clearly that cyberbullying has nothing to do with gender. Three teenage girls, two 14 and one 13, "were arrested Tuesday on charges that they punched and kicked another girl and recorded the beating so they could broadcast it online," the Associated Press reports. Police on Long Island in New York said the video, uploaded to two Web sites, "showed the three girls beating a 13-year-old girl Dec. 18 at a school." The three girls were charged with juvenile delinquency and attempted assault, and the police are investigating who videotaped the beating, the AP adds.

Will teen MySpacers leave?

About the MySpace phenomenon, many analysts say things like "it's a passing fad," "kids will move on," "or MySpace's parent-notification software will cause kids to leave in droves" (see this). I don't think so. Why? A number of reasons: 1) The site has something for just about everyone (all sorts of communications tools, page-design and self-expression tools, and communities, from location-based to interest-based). 2) Most MySpace users are there because of their friends – whole peer groups, not individuals, would have to decide to leave en masse. 3) Socializing in MySpace, like IM-ing, is just part of its users' (offline) social lives; 4) MySpace's sheer size keeps people there (it's like society mirrored for a growing, widening demographic - hard to leave if it's "all" there). "MySpace is a natural monopoly," according to a thoughtful commentary in TechNewsWorld, because the user's "cost" of leaving is too high. Certainly, when Mom or Dad gets involved, some kids go into stealth mode. They use privacy tools and create free accounts in other sites parents don't know about; but they don't leave MySpace. So a piece of parent-alert software released next summer won't have a noticeable effect on the parental engagement that has been growing since the first really scary media reports started early last year (law enforcement attention for well over a year). We can be sure that teen awareness of parent awareness has been growing too! I suspect the reason why Pew found that 66% of teen social networkers use privacy tools is because of parents more than because of fearing predators (see this on the Pew study). None of this is to say that other sites don't offer things teens value, including better features and tools, privacy, and niche communities, but they supplement rather than replace the incredible, though risky, flexibility and critical mass of MySpace.

Pinpointing peers

This is new territory for online safety – the technology that allows cellphone users to pinpoint their friends' physical location with their phones. The only thing that's regulated about this in the US is the Federal Communications Commission's 1999 requirement that "cell phone companies implant location-tracking receivers in handsets," Business Week reports. On the safety and privacy front, "providers of services that help wireless users track friends and loved ones are still finding their footing," but meanwhile new companies providing all kinds of phone-to-Web media-sharing tools, as well as geolocating social tools for phones keep launching. The Pandora's Box is now open for business, so watch out, parents. If your kids are telling you "but everybody has Boost," after you ask them what that is, think out loud together about the implications of ever adding people they don't know to a friends list that tells them exactly where they are. Meanwhile, here's Mashable on a new tool called Jaxtr that allows visitors to a MySpace page call the page's owner on his/her cell. Here's an early item I wrote on mobile social networking, naming startups like Playtxt, Mamjam, Jambo, Meetro, and Dodgeball (only two of which – Meetro and Dodgeball, owned by Google - appear to have made it to 2007). Sprint's youth service Boost recently launched with loopt social pinpointing on it, and the Wall Street Journal recently went into some depth on the loopt service.

GPS phones easing parent fears

More and more phones have GPS (for getting a fix on the phone's physical location), and more and more cellphone companies are offering geolocation services. Including kid phones (see the New York Times, 12/21/06), which are easing parents' concerns and raising those of privacy advocates, the San Jose Mercury News reports. The article leads with the story of a Northern California family with two kids 5 and 6, each with a Migo, "a small phone for kids with a built-in computer chip that communicates their location." Their parents clip the Migos to their kids' clothing and use Verizon Wireless's Chaperone "location awareness" service for $9.99 a month. Sprint's Family Locator service costs the same. At first glance, it looks like there's only an upside, "but privacy advocates worry that carriers will collect location data that could be used against consumers," says the Mercury News. And some services will want to supplement subscription revenue with advertising, a growing part of increasingly multimedia cellphone communications.

MySpace's software for parents

MySpace will soon be releasing free software designed to let parents know if their kids have profiles on the site. Code-named "Zephyr," it's parental-notification software, not monitoring software, which makes sense because MySpace says it's designed to promote parent-child communication about social networking. It will be just another tool in the tech-parenting toolbox. MySpace wasn't ready to announce Zephyr because it won't be available for at least a couple of months. But the development was, it says, leaked to the Wall Street Journal, so the company made information about the software available to the online-safety community. For my best understanding of how it'll work, including what parents will and will not be able to see if they install it, please click to my special report today.

Judge orders teen file-sharer to pay

The teenager's mom, Patricia Santangelo, was one of the few parents of file-sharers who refused to settle out of court after being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America. She took her case to the national media, and the RIAA dropped it. But less than a month later, the RIAA "won a default judgment against her 20-year-old daughter," the Associated Press reports. "Federal Judge Stephen Robinson ordered Michelle Santangelo to pay $750 for each of the 41 songs she is accused of downloading illegally - a total of $30,750 - because she failed to respond to the record companies' claims." It's not clear if this ends the case against the Santangelos. When Patricia Santangelo was sued in 2005, she said she'd never downloaded songs and if her children had, the makers of the file-sharing software they used should be blamed. The AP adds that the RIAA has sued more than 18,000 file-sharers or their parents.

MySpace users: Get better passwords

If parents are looking for conversation openers with their teens social networking, one might be MySpace passwords. PC security experts actually have some numbers of people tricked by a phishing scam I mentioned in my recent item on social engineering. Because of a fake log-in page MySpace users click to on the phishers' Web server, they have 60,000 user names (email addresses) and passwords of MySpace users, reports Washington Post security writer Brian Krebs. The fake log-in page pops up before people get to the phishing site "which is most likely being advertised via blasts of junk email" and "looks identical to the real MySpace.com login page." Which gets us to the conversation opener I mentioned: stupid passwords (the insecure kind that people can easily guess). Brian lists some of the passwords these phishers have collected. The Top 10 (most popular and therefore most guessable) are: password1, abc123, swimmer1, iloveyou1, monkey1, ****you, 123456, myspace1, ****you1, and - possibly the most narcissistic one – i.

Social site winners

There are now so many kinds of social-networking sites that it's possible to have SN awards with multiple categories. In the Mashable blog (all about the social Web), the 12 categories of the Social Networking Awards of 2006 included "Mainstream & Large-Scale Networks" (MySpace won); Social Bookmarking (digg.com); Sport & Fitness (FanNation.com); Photo-Sharing (Flickr.com); and Social Shopping (Etsy.com). Each category also had "People's Choice" and "Hot for 2007" winners; for the general category that MySpace won, Multiply.com was the "People's Choice," and the sites deemed hot this coming year were Bebo, Vox, Facebook, and Facebox. This whole page on Mashable is packed with information for anyone seeking a crash course in social networking. Another publication, PC Magazine, recently gave Vox.com its Editor's Choice in both the blogging and social networking categories.

Responsible social networking

More than half (55%) of US 12-to-17-year-olds use social sites, and 48% use them at least daily, according to just-released research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And echoing the basic message of an academic paper given last week (see this news item), Pew's findings should ease some concerns: 66% of teens who have created a profile say it's not publicly visible and - Internet News reports - "most teens use the sites to map their offline social networks in an online environment – 91% of all social-networking teens say they use the sites to stay in touch with friends they see frequently [not to meet strangers], while only 49% use the sites to make new friends" (parents and teens should probably work on bringing that number down further, unless the "new friends" are peers and friends of friends). A clearer picture of how teens use the social Web has emerged from this and several other studies released in the past month. For more on all this, please click to this week's issue of my newsletter.

Disconnectors

They're people who've made the conscious decision to say no to technology – "tech-nos," as USATODAY writer Janet Kornblum calls them. But it looks like they're saying no to information overload, and/or excessive superficial connectivity, as to tech. Some members of this "endangered species" actually use technology, but in moderation. David Levy, a professor in the Information School at the University of Washington in Seattle, also tries to control the flow. An observant Jew, he shuts everything down for the Sabbath from Friday at sundown to Saturday night. He recommends disconnecting once in a while to others, too." The article acknowledges that there are possibly professional and social costs to disconnecting some nights and weekends but, if it gets people thinking about why and how much we're online, there just might be some benefits along with those costs.

Sears in Second Life

Politicians are holding press conferences in the Second Life virtual world, Reuters has a news bureau there. Now Sears will operate a showroom there, Reuters reports. It might have something to do with Second Life's 2 million+ registered users and Sears's stiff competition with Lowe's and Home Depot. "At the Sears virtual showroom, customers can do such things as change cabinet and countertop colors in a kitchen and organize a garage by customizing storage products.

Social networking in the UK

For a view of Britain's social-networking scene, see this Times of London piece picked up in The Australian. The social Web is huge in the UK, where Piczo has grown eightfold in 13 months from 1.2 million to 10.5 million users worldwide, and the music-sharing site Last.fm gets 5 million visitors a month, up from 3 million a year ago. Britain's top 3, the Times says, are Bebo.com, MySpace.com, and Faceparty.com (for people 16+), respectively. Some interesting notables about Faceparty: The site offers "adult verification" for people 19+ who wish to pay $3.25 pounds ($6.30) a month for access to content on the site). Another interesting revenue stream for Faceparty is I-Protect, which (at about $33/year) protects a member's photos from being uploaded to other people's pages. Users can also buy premium tech support (if this includes customer support, I can see it becoming a social-site revenue stream supported by parents and educators worldwide!).

MySpace international

The French version of MySpace launched today, Reuters reports. It's the social-networking service's "second officially live country site behind the UK" (where it had 6.9 million visitors in November, the most recent figure available). Ireland's still in beta. The German MySpace, with 2.4 million monthly visitors, is expected to launch "in a few weeks" and the Italian "within a couple of months." MySpace's biggest competitor in France is Skyblog (with 7 million unique visitors in November, compared to MySpaces 1.3 million in that country). "Skyblog, which grew out of a French rap radio station, has been working on English, Spanish and German blogging services to compete with its rival online communities in France," according to Reuters. Internationally, Skyblog has 13.2 million visitors in November, compared to MySpace's 82.6 million.

'Zombie threat growing'

It's a threat not to Net users' physical well-being so much as financial. "Zombies," in the world of data security, are compromised computers – including family PCs. And they're stealth zombies, because it's really hard to tell if one's computer has been compromised (operated remotely by criminals and malicious hackers). It's also hard to tell exactly how many of the world's 650 million Net-connected computers are zombies, but "the consensus among scientists is that botnet programs are present on about 11%" of them, the New York Times reports. They get into our computers via worms and viruses downloaded from malicious Web sites or activated by clicking on email and IM attachments – which we all, including kids, can easily do without thinking. What's new about this, the Times says, "is the vastly escalating scale of the problem — and the precision with which some of the programs can scan computers for specific information, like corporate and personal data, to drain money from online bank accounts and stock brokerages." Computer security experts worry that the average computer user doesn't understand the threat enough to do something about it, and it is hard to explain. I'll try: For example, a worm gets downloaded, infects, and – with key-logger software - starts recording credit card numbers, passwords, social-security numbers, etc. by monitoring users' key strokes when they type. In a case the Times cites, the stolen info "generated 54,926 log-in credentials and 281 credit-card numbers … [and] affected 1,239 companies, including 35 stock brokerages, 86 bank accounts, 174 ecommerce accounts, and 245 email accounts." Eighty percent of all that spam we get comes from botnets (networks of infected computers). Security firms can't keep up with the problem, and Internet service providers are pretty much ignoring it, according to the Times.

iPod to iPhone

Some tech pundits are calling the phone that Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled with much fanfare this week an iPod with phone features. It definitely doesn't look like a phone (here's Apple's photo). To me, the killer app is a phone that combines the iPhone's next-generation Web viewing, Blackberry-like email access, and all the features of the latest cellphones on the market. This looks to be close, but the New York Times's David Pogue, who got to play with it for about an hour while talking with Jobs, blogs that "heavy BlackBerry addicts may not want to jump ship just yet." He liked a lot of things about it, though, especially the way it handles the Web. Here are details at CNET. As for the iPod, CNN reports that the iPod may turn out to be a videogame player too, at least gamemaker Electronic Arts is banking on it.

Vista's parental controls

The earliest reviews of Vista, Microsoft's new operating system due out this month, basically said, don't upgrade – wait till you get a new computer loaded with the new operating system. But that's not the case for families with young kids. "It is not overreaching to say that if you have young children who play computer games or use the Internet you are basically remiss if you do not upgrade to Vista as soon as possible," according to the New York Times. Vista's parental controls aren't perfect, but they're a whole lot better than "clunky" third-party ones, says writer Seth Schiesel. "With Vista, parents for the first time have powerful, easy-to-use, practically unhackable tools to control and monitor just about everything their children do with the home computer, online and off." He adds that they cover Web browsing, file downloading, and instant messaging. Parents do need to keep in mind, though, that even operating-system-level protection is not the total "solution" for intrepid young users who surf at friends' houses, libraries, schools, and other access points that don't have Vista installed, and many won't because upgrading isn't cheap. [Here's my earlier item on Vista.]

Disney's 'MySpace'?

Business Week says it's the worst-kept secret: Disney has been working on overhauling sites so it's less about promotion and more a social-networking site for kids and adults. The Los Angeles Times has some details, with kids' online safety's in the mix: "The new Disney.com will present itself differently to various age groups, though all will get expanded video, games and other interaction. As on MySpace, visitors will be able to create their own Web sites, communicate with each other and mash together and share music and videos — as long as they're Disney music and videos. Parents will have to use their credit cards to register their children as regular site visitors and will get detailed options for limiting what their kids can do and how they can do it." Disney will probably maintain its Virtual Magic Kingdom "world"/game targeting kids 8-14 and allowing only moderated chat. For younger ones there's "Toontown Online." "Children who play there can chat with each other with pre-approved phrases, unless they show that they know each other in real life. In that case, they can converse normally," according to the L.A. Times. Mini-worlds, or at least avatars (animated characters that represent the user) and their decorate-able (sp?) spaces seems to be the trend for pre-social networkers – e.g., Whyville.net, ClubPenguin.com, Neopets.com, Habbo Hotel, and Disney's VMK.com.

Slightly older social networkers

With its two new sites, consumer products giant Procter & Gamble (of Pampers and Tide fame) just may help shape social networking for the 18-to-49-year-old age group. Its women's site Capessa, for networking about "parenting, pregnancy, and weight loss," won't push self-produced video so much as encourage users to be interviewed about their experiences by professional producers, the Wall Street Journal reports. The other site's a little less predictable as a P&G project. It's launching the People's Choice Community this week, the day after CBS airs the awards shows of that name. The focus of these sites is market research, according to the Journal: They'll "act as continuing focus-group-type environments where P&G - by monitoring consumer discussions on the sites - can learn more about its target audience's likes and dislikes and what consumers in different stages of life care about." Just another sign social networking's here to stay. (P&G's also going after younger consumers – its Herbal Essence shampoo has a profile in MySpace, the Journal says.) In its report, Newsweek leads with the story of a 58-year-old art historian who socializes in Eons.com, at which "you have to be at least 50 to join." Newsweek cites research showing that the 50+ demographic could "explode" from the current 1 million to 20 million and says there are "215 million social networkers regularly active today."

Teen file-sharer in Norway charged

It's not in the news as much these days, but young file-sharers still face legal action. Police in Norway have charged a 16-year-old with illegal file-sharing. He's the first Norwegian to face such charges, Aftenposten.no reports. They'll ask for a suspended sentence of 60 days and a fine of about $644. His parents face a six-figure fine. "The boy is charged with running the network known as the Stavanger Dragon Hub in the file-sharing program Direct Connect, and administering the sharing of 7,000 films, 150,000 songs and 20,000 video clips," according to Aftenposten.

'Anti-social networking'

More on social engineering, actually - which I featured last week. The little snippet about "anti-social networking" at the bottom of "Mr. Know-It-All's" column in Wired, after advice about checking spouses' browser history and whether IM-ing is ruining teenagers' spelling and grammar, is really about social engineering. It offers advice to users who have problems with friends on the social Web: "How do I stop my friend from posting embarrassing videos of us on YouTube?" The answer: "Ask nicely. If that doesn't work, employ a stronger form of persuasion: blackmail." "Mr. Know-It-All" Clive Thompson goes on to suggest a form of blackmail that on the surface sounds sensible, maybe, but could lead to the kind of downward spiral of reaction that becomes the digital version of schoolyard bullying. For tweens and teens, what needs to follow "ask nicely" is probably negotiation among peers, then negotiation involving parents or other trusted adults. Bullying never was and never will be an easy problem to solve, whether on the playground or on the social Web, but threats and revenge definitely won't end it. After I uploaded my feature on social engineering last week, I discovered this TechNewsWorld report on it. [Don't miss Clive's answer to the question before this one about IM and teenagers' grammar. He cites some studies that might ease parental concerns, then offers this good advice: "It's worth explaining to your kids the importance of code switching. Just as they shouldn't swear in front of Grandma, they shouldn’t use shrt frms on a résumé or any other document intended to impress the fortysomething set…."]

Digital music update

The ailing music industry is "set to relax digital restrictions," Reuters reports. The story's about "digital rights management" (DRM), the chunk of software code attached to digital tunes sold in services like Rhapsody and Napster – and how more and more music companies may soon be jumping on the DRM-free bandwagon. Why? Because revenue from DRM-controlled music is flat and not making up for the decline in CD sales. This thorough trend piece looks at the "five places to watch this year's DRM developments" – Amazon, MySpace, LimeWire, eMusic, and Yahoo Music – and why they appear to be the trendsetters. Very informative for all music fans at your house.

2nd-generation social networking

We're now moving from Web 2.0 to social networking 2.0. It looks to me like the 2nd generation of social sites has two categories: 1) niche ones, such as Takkle.com for high school sports fans and WAYN.com for travelers, and 2) hybrids that are either combinations of game/virtual world and the "old" kind of social site or what I'd call extreme social-networking, such as Xuqa.com. Forbes makes Xuqa sound like the popularity contest some teens make of MySpace on steroids. It also adds incentives for sticking around. In Xuqa, "users compete for popularity points by accumulating virtual kisses and hugs, winning poker games, spending 'peanuts', and even filling out surveys and looking at ads, all to attain status levels," Forbes reports. The other kind of 2nd-gen social site that may now be seeing its market kick in (in the US) is represented by Cyworld (South Korea-based, launched in the US last summer) and Finland-based Habbo Hotel (with a presence in 29 countries), both of which not only have "spaces" or rooms users can decorate but avatars to "live" in them. They're part game, part social site. Cyworld has its own economy too, with "acorns" for currency like Xuqa's "peanuts." Then there's Bix.com, which – judging by Forbes's description, mixes socializing and performing kind of like karaoke does but on a very public scale, like massively multiplayer karaoke or something. It too is a contest with prizes. For a sweeping view of social Web past and present, here's Internet News's backgrounder.

Lawmaker's virtual press conference

First there was the politicization of social networking, now politics has entered virtual worlds - in this case, Second Life, the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game). Rep. George Miller (D) of California "appears to be the first member of Congress to hold something akin to a press conference in this virtual world, which is operated by Linden Lab and boasts its own currency and a population of more than 2 million registered users," CNET reports. Well, maybe it was an aide in the congressman's office and it wasn't *quite* a press conference, but it's the idea that counts, right? "Instead of typing responses to questions, Miller [or the aide controlling Miller's Second Life avatar] read them aloud via an audio broadcast that was piped in through a process like a telephone conference call." But the setting was so cool – in an "open-air amphitheater" surrounded by "mammoth video screens" under an orange sky. Ahh. ;-)

Videogame parental controls

USATODAY recently published a handy little guide to the parental controls on the PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, and the PlayStation Portable. The Nintendo and Microsoft controls are based on the Entertainment Software Rating Board's ratings (e.g., "E," "T," and "M" for "Everyone," "Teen," and "Mature"), which are explained on this page at ESRB.org. With Sony's controls, which are not ESRB-based, "you'll need to experiment to find the right restriction level," says writer Kim Komando. "Start at 1 and gradually increase the number if acceptable games or movies are blocked." Kim also tells how to set controls on the Web browsers in the PS3, PSP, and Wii consoles. Xbox has controls for its online service, Xbox Live.

Apple worms & bugs

We all (not just Mac users) keep hearing Apple computers are so much safer. So a couple of security researchers inaugurated the Apple "month of bugs" to find security flaws – one each day this month - in the Apple operating system and application software like Safari, iTunes, etc., PC World reports. The researchers say in their FAQ this is "an effort to improve Mac OS X." each day this month. The kick-off, January 1 flaw involved the QuickTime media player. Washington Post security writer Brian Krebs reports that the flaw's "potential for abuse presents a serious security threat to both Windows and Mac users." Meanwhile, a former Apple software engineer has offered to provide patch a patch a day for the "month of bugs," CNET reports . He has already provided two, CNET adds. Not that Microsoft can snicker too much over all this. Brian Krebs later reported that the Internet Explorer browser was "unsafe for 284 days in 2006."

Most teens safe in MySpace: Study

Two professors who have been focusing on cyberbullying for some time just presented a study of teenage MySpace use which found "most teens are behaving responsibly in the type of information they post about their lives," the Miami Herald reports. Prof. Sameer Hinduja, a criminology professor at Florida Atlantic University, and Justin Patchin, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, analyzed a randomly selected sample of 1,475 profiles that appeared to be teens' and found that 90% of those allowing public viewing do not include the users' full names; 40% of the full sample "were keeping their pages completely off-limits to everyone but their friends" (the default privacy setting for MySpace users who register as 14 or 15 years old); 4% listed IM contact info; 1% listed personal email addresses; and "just a handful" listed their phone numbers. On the flipside, "more than half of teenagers posted their pictures online, and an unspecified number of others provided detailed physical descriptions of themselves"; 5% had pictures of themselves in swimsuits or underwear and 15% of the profiles included suggestive pictures of their friends. The researchers did find that, though 90% didn't list full names, "they left other identifying information, including their first names (40%), hometown (81%) and high school (28%)." The researchers presented their as yet unpublished findings at an academic conference the Herald didn't name. Here's coverage from the Associated Press, which quotes Professor Patchin as saying that the benefits of social networking "far outweigh any potential risks."

Italy's anti-child-porn law

The new law in Italy, which goes into effect almost immediately, will require Internet service providers to "block child pornography Web sites within six hours of being told to do so," Reuters reports. The wire service adds that "Italy's penal code includes severe punishment for the distribution and publication of child pornography." Maybe Italy's ISPs will use an anti-child-porn filter like the "Cleanfeed" service used by BT, the UK's largest ISP, which announced last February that it was blocking 35,000 attempts to view child-porn Web pages a day (see this item). Here's an analysis of Cleanfeed in its early days in The Register.

'Dear everybody'

The other day I was reading a family friend's holiday newsletter to my 80-something mom. The newsletter was available on the Web for all to see, and my mother was shocked that this friend would make her family's personal news so public. My surprise at Mom's reaction got me to thinking about how differently the generations view the user-driven Web. A grandmother can't imagine writing a letter for global consumption. That's no big deal to me, but as a mom I'm a little amazed at the innermost thoughts and intimate photos teens post in blogs and profiles. In "On the Web, 'Dear Diary' becomes 'Dear World'," the Washington Post takes a look at why many teenagers want to be so emotionally accessible. Two young bloggers gave the Post interesting observations: "blogs actually protect vulnerabilities by allowing for a more polished presentation of self" and "blogs let writers interact while avoiding the emotional risks of one-on-one conversation." So being very public is somehow safer. Hmm, what a comment on teen lives. Then, in an interview for our book, MySpace Unraveled, social media researcher Danah Boyd told me, "Kids are getting all these messages [like reality TV and American Idol] saying, 'Expose, expose, expose.'... 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" (for further insight into teen vs. adult blogging, see a post this week in Danah's own blog). Over in England this week, The Guardian ran a collection of views from writers of all ages about "the urge that makes people keep a record of their inner thoughts and everyday impressions."

Social networking unleashed

There's social networking, and then there's retro social networking – the kind without photo-scanning, customer-care staffs, and safety czars. Sites like Stickam.com, the New York Times reports, "which is building a business by going where others fear to tread: into the realm of unfiltered live broadcasts from Web cameras." Stickam hosts live video chat for users, "often from their bedrooms and all without monitoring by any of Stickam’s 35 employees." [Remember Justin Berry, who, within weeks of buying himself a Webcam at age 13, was making money exposing himself for adults online (see the New York Times a year ago).] There are also video-hosting sites without a lot of rules. Besides Paris-based DailyMotion (see "Parenting media-sharers"), the Times mentions London-based LiveLeak, which "has positioned itself as a source for reality-based fare like footage of Iraq battle scenes and grisly accidents." But the article says what worries children's advocates most is sites like Stickam that host "continuous self-produced reality TV show starring [users] themselves."

Social networking about health

I get so many press releases and Google alerts about new social networking sites that I long ago decided to pass along to you only the milestones. This one is: "The social-networking revolution is coming to health care," the Wall Street Journal reports, adding that "patients who once connected mainly through email discussion groups and chat rooms are building more sophisticated virtual communities that enable them to share information about treatment and coping and build a personal network of friends." Advocacy groups like the American Cancer Society and government agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control are using social-networking and online gaming technologies to educate consumers. For example, the CDC has actually held virtual health fairs in the virtual world Second Life, the Journal reports. As for social networking, GroupLoop.org "helps teens with cancer connect in a private, safe environment," and OrganizedWisdom.com is a social site that allows users to share info about diseases, medications, and medical procedures. "At DailyStrength.org, patients and caregivers dealing with hundreds of issues, including asthma, celiac disease and depression, can join a support community, start a wellness journal, share advice and recommend doctors, link to news stories and Web sites with disease information, and even send other members a virtual hug," according to the Journal.