Homework helpers

It usually helps to get the lowdown from a fellow parent. Alina Tugend, parent of people in middle and elementary school, helpfully reviews homework help sites in the New York Times. After typical confusion up front, she found that "there are two main differences in online help sites — those that allow a student to interact with a tutor through instant messaging and those that provide resources and techniques to help a student figure out answers to questions." She proceeds to link to some examples in both categories. Among them is AOL's StudyBuddy.com, a search engine for students that turns up results pre-screened by teachers and librarians. The Associated Press zooms in on this service in a short review of its own. Meanwhile, here's CNET's Top 10 Sites for Students (of the college variety), which include a poker site in the "Best for Vice" category.

'Storytexting' on phones

It's a little like a soap opera for the teeny screen – that of a cellphone. Each scene in the text novella "Ghost Town" is "about 160 characters long, just enough to fit into one text message," the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports. The story has eight characters and "revolves around a high school football star, 'Ghost,' who has a secret. He's homeless." The characters all have backstories that subscribers can read at YouthNoise.com, a youth-activism site and online community that's a project of Save the Children. The other partners in this project are Stand Up for Kids, a nonprofit organization supporting homeless young people, and Virgin Mobile USA, providing its platform. The Star Tribune says 12,000 people have signed up to receive the novella's twice-daily "episodes" for a month, ending Sept. 15. All of the story's characters have blogs at YouthNoise and the main ones have profiles on MySpace, where readers can add them to their friends lists (illustrating how the line between fiction and real life on the social networks is never totally clear).

Social networking everywhere

You do know that MySpace is only the beginning, right? There are social sites popping up all over the place designed specifically for connecting users with - as parents would see it - "strangers," CNET reports. In the "amazing array of social-networking tools" being launched for mobile social networkers, CNET mentions "services like Dodgeball and Meetro, [which] allow you to locate and communicate with your circle of existing and potential friends within a given geographical location using text and instant messaging on a cell phone or laptop." Then there's Placesite, which "allows you to identify strangers with similar interests while surfing on your laptop and sipping a latte in your favorite cafe." CNET also mentions Nokia Sensor, Playtxt, Mamjam, and Jambo, which "facilitate flirting and interacting with strangers" wherever one is, using a cellphone-based profile and text messaging" or a profile "accessed on a variety of wireless devices." Of course, MySpace and Facebook profiles can be accessed via cellphone too (see this item last April). It's not just the social Web, it's the very mobile social Web on any device you happen to have in your hand. For context, CNET had some numbers: "Two of every three people in the United States now visit social-networking sites ... roughly 90% of young people are online, [and] more than 63% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 27 now send text messages." In related news, "police have arrested a 31-year-old Groton [Ct.] man, accusing him of setting up sexual encounters with a 14-year-old girl over the cellphone," the Associated Press reports. [Thanks to Det. Frank Dannahey at the Rocky Hill, Ct., Police Dept. for pointing this news out.]

Mini music stores at MySpace

This is great news for musicians and more bad news for Tower Records. Not only can young musicians and garage bands introduce their music to millions of fans everywhere via MySpace, now they can sell it to them too – right from their own pages. "Assuming that the songs for sale do not violate a copyright, the artist or label can set a price and allow Web users to buy songs the way they might with services such as iTunes and Yahoo Music," the Washington Post reports. Shawn Fanning, creator of the original file-sharing program Napster, is providing the technology, the Los Angeles Times reports, through his company, Snocap, Fans get a piece of the action too, quite remarkably: They can "sell their favorite bands' tracks on their own MySpace pages, with a portion of the proceeds going to the artists." The service is being tested now, with full availability by the end of the year, according to the Post. More on MySpace recently: a commentary in Associated Content on MySpace as "the new American social icon" (interesting but not entirely accurate).

Not-so-virtual advertising

Videogamers will soon be seeing – or interacting with – pretty sophisticated ads in their games. This is not the static product-placement advertising of the past, of course. These are being called "dynamic" ads "because they are built into the virtual landscape of the video games and can be updated by advertisers via the Internet," the San Jose Mercury News reports. Just as in real life, gamers will see this advertising on billboards, buses, storefronts, etc., right in the games' environments – urban, suburban, or rural, maybe on virtual TV and movie screens!

Monitoring MySpacers

The hands-down best way to find out what our kids are up to on the social Web is to ask them about it. It can also help to supplement that discussion by going online *with* them to their favorite hangouts and – again, with them - going through their friends lists, candidly telling them you check in on their profiles or blogs occasionally, because they're public spaces anyone can see and it's a parent’s job to make sure they're not doing anything to harm themselves or others physically or in terms of future academic and employment prospects. Another way to monitor social networkers is with monitoring technology - sometimes purely for convenience (though it might be better for parent-child relations to be up front about using it), sometimes because a child seems to be at risk and is not communicating with a parent. Three kinds of monitoring-with-tech are now available (so far, mostly for MySpace users): 1) human monitoring that uses technology (SafeSpacers emails parents their reports); tech monitoring (e.g., BeNetSafe and myspaceWatch) that makes monitoring teens easier and more convenient than going to their pages oneself; and 3) hard-core key-logger-style monitoring that logs every keystroke of the person using a particular computer. For more on the first two (newer) types, please click to this week's issue of my newsletter.

Free books online

Project Gutenberg was the first supplier of free out-of-copyright books on the Web and it's more comprehensive, but Google Book Search just made things easier – at least for when it has your book of choice. "Just one click and a PDF file of the book is on your desktop," reports The Guardian. "You can then either read it online (in which case you deserve to have it free), print it out page by page or send it to a print-on-demand publishing house such as Lulu.com where it will emerge as a fully fledged paperback for less than a fiver." Project Gutenberg says it has 19,000 free books in its catalog, including the kind your kids are assigned in school. Here's Google Book Search , and here's CNET on this development.