Teen 'content creators'

Most of us knew teenagers love to communicate online, but we now know more about their avid interest in creating content there, thanks to a just-released survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Pew found that "fully half" of all US 12-to-17-year-olds, about 12 million (and 57% of those who use the Net) "have created a blog or Web page, posted original artwork, photography, stories, or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations."

* 19% of online teens keep a blog and 38% (or 8 million) read them (as opposed to 7% and 27% of adults, respectively)
* Older girls (15-17) "lead the blogging activity among teens"; 25% of online girls keep blogs, as opposed to 15% of boys.
* 51% of online teens say they're downloading music files, and 31% video files.
* 75% of teen downloaders think that getting free music is easy, and it's
unrealistic to expect people not to do it.
* Teens are just as likely to have paid for music online as they are to have
tried P2P (file-sharing) services like BitTorrent or eDonkey.

USATODAY this week zoomed in on just the blogging/journaling part of teen content creation, with "Teens wear their hearts on their blog." USATODAY cites market research firm Intelliseek numbers as saying at least 8 million teens blog (compared to Pew's 4 million).

Spam scams on phones

Watch out, it may be coming across the Pacific. I'm referring to a tech plague: Apparently, junk SMS messages, including fraudulent ones like the nine scams that, reportedly, have bilked victims out of 1 million yuan (about $124,000) in less than 20 days, may be coming to a cellphone near you. "China has declared war on scams using mobile phone short messages that promise everything from fake cash prizes to sexual services to contract killings," Reuters reports, adding that "China's mobile phone market have fallen behind its explosive growth, which has generated huge profits for short message service providers." China had 330 million mobile-phone users by the end of last year, having sent "a total of 217.7 billion messages" in 2004, according to Reuters.

Teen in court over email 'bomb'

The legal world is watching this case because it's testing Britain's Computer Misuse Act (CMA). In the case, a teenager is accused of launching a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on his former employer by sending the company 5 million emails, CNET reports. So far, no Briton has been convicted for launching a DoS attack (which is like "bombing" a corporate network or Web site). "According to those familiar with the case, the teenager's defense will argue that launching a DoS attack is not illegal under the CMA," according to CNET, which adds that "the CMA does not specifically include a denial-of-service attack as a criminal offense, something some members of … Parliament want changed." Later today CNET reported that the judge cleared the teenager of charges - that DoS attacks were not illegal under the CMA.

Update on $100k virtual land

Remember last week I linked to coverage of the $100,000 (real-money) purchase of a virtual resort-in-development in "the treacherous but mineral-rich Paradise V Asteroid Belt" in the online game Entropia? Well, it turns out that buyer Jon Jacobs, an avid Entropia gamer/citizen who appeared in a 2003 dance music movie Hey DJ!, plans to turn his virtual real estate "into a nightclub to change the face of entertainment," the BBC reports. He told the BBC that he "wants to call it Club Neverdie [after the name of his character in the game] and sees it as the perfect vehicle to bridge reality and virtual reality." It's hard to tell from the BBC piece how he'll do that - but maybe by providing live music for gamers while they play. He also told the BBC he's talking with "some of the world's biggest DJs" about doing the real music in his virtual nightclub."

Lively alternate lives

This is one of those mind-blowing stories about how whole lives can be lived - not just dragons slayed and death stars exploded - in cyberspace. Check out a New York Times piece about Second Life, pop. 75,850, where people in 80 countries "live"; take balloon rides; hold Nascar races; dance at nightclubs; buy and sail boats; purchase, subdivide, and sell real estate, get married (in real life), and kiss (virtually) distant spouses (in real life). "A handful" of players earn six-figure (real) incomes in profitable virtual businesses in the game, according to the Times. What parents might want to know, not readily found in SecondLife.com site info is the fact that parts of this massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) are X-rated. "Like most virtual worlds, Second Life also sees its share of cybersex, in which two people will use a private chat channel within the world to type suggestively to each other," the Times reports. "But Second Life adds a visual element to cybersex that chat rooms lack…. In addition, there is a virtual sex industry," the Times adds. Which is why there's a Teen Second Life (see my coverage of this in August).

Child-porn filter in Denmark

Large Danish phone company and Internet service provider TDC has "activated a nationwide filter to help fight child pornography on the Internet," DMeurope.com reports. Developed by TDC, Denmark's national police and Save the Children, the filter checks Web addresses against a database of addresses of sites containing illegal pornographic content (involving minors) and blocks illegal ones. The police and Save the Children together do the work of identifying the sites for the database. A similar project in Norway "daily blocks 10,000–12,000 attempts to get access to addresses with child porn, and in Sweden, 20,000–30,000 attempts are blocked," according to Dmeurope.com. Thanks to BNA Internet Law for pointing this news out.

Web therapy: Kids & adults do it

Let's hope mental healthcare people are paying increasing attention to what people are saying online - especially in specialty sites such as WrongPlanet.net, for people with Asperger's Syndrome. The Los Angeles Times reports that, "in the weeks before 19-year-old William Freund donned a cape and mask and went on a shooting rampage in his Aliso Viejo neighborhood, he reached out for help" at WrongPlanet.net. Another example was reported in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: The blog of Alex Stirlen, 17, at STLpunk.com "came to light … after he was charged with the murder of classmate Erin Mace, 16…. She also had a blog on the local punk rock Web site that linked to Stirlen's and vice versa." Those are horrible extreme examples, but research shows that "nearly half of [the Net's some 15 million] bloggers consider [blogging] a form of therapy," the Washington Post reports. AOL sponsored the research, which also found that "although AOL provides tools that allow bloggers to limit their audience to selected viewers, most don't." Making one's inner thoughts very public seems to be the whole point of blogging, whether you're a teenager or an adult - something healthcare professionals should be aware of. Of course, some are. Ron Scott, a St. Louis-area psychologist mentioned in the Post-Dispatch article, has thought a lot about this phenomenon. And the Washington Post cites a warning by psychologists that "although it may feel good to blog … going public with private musings may have ramifications, and … little research has been done on the consequences of the Internet confessional."