News for the Week of June 12, 2005
The top story this week is kids blogging - something many parents are just getting up to speed on. According to a recent study on "Gender, Identity, and Language Use in Teenage Blogs" at Georgetown University, 52% of the blogs out there are being developed and maintained by teens 13-19 (blog numbers range wildly from 10 million to 32 million, according to the Wall Street Journal).
Young bloggers' privacy.
The good news is, the big blogging services are getting better about providing their bloggers privacy protections (kids as young as 11 and 12 are posting the intimate details of their lives in these online journals). The bad news is, young people aren't using the big services at MSN, Yahoo, and Google. They seem to prefer the littler guys, e.g., MySpace.com, Xanga.com, LiveJournal.com, etc. I've yet to see a study on this, but the only blogging spaces I hear about from concerned parents are the latter.
Still, even if they can't persuade their kids to move to AOL's RED blogs, MSN Spaces, etc., parents can get some good insights into how blogs work from the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg this week. He and his assistant Katie Boehret created blogs at Google's Blogger.com, MSNSpaces.com, and the yet-to-be-launched Yahoo 360 and do a readable job of describing the experience. They report that Yahoo and MSN's services offer varying degrees of privacy, Blogger does not. [BTW, have you, too, noticed that blogging is like IM-ing for kids? No matter how great the bells and whistles (or privacy protections) are at any other service, they just use the service their friends use. End of story.]
Kids as spin doctors.
If they don't care about their privacy online, they'll need to develop serious spin-control skills. It's almost impossible to delete the past or rewrite your history online. Stephanie Rosenbloom gives an example in the New York Times: a 10-year-old picture of her as a brunette in sensible shoes is still "the definitive image of me on the World Wide Web, the one that pops up every time my name is entered in a Google search," even though the "real Stephanie" is now blonde and wears stilettos. Then there's the friend of a Washington Post reporter cringing every time she thought about "prospective employers 'Googling' her" and finding "a concise and prominent summary of her dating proclivities" (see this item at Net Family News). The solution? Rather than trying to get those Web sites to delete the offending photos and text (and many sites are still in the Internet Archive even after they've been taken down), be your own spin doctor. "The secret to burying unflattering Web details about yourself is to create a preferred version of the facts on a home page or a blog of your own, then devise a strategy to get high-ranking Web sites to link to you," the Times reports. An assistant attorney general emailed me recently: "When one of these kids is running for President one day [or interviewing for college admission or a job], those online pictures are sure to show up." Another daunting thought: party pictures on photoblogs (for future employers to google - see this piece at CNET).
In Other News...
- Fresh patches. Microsoft just issued 10 new patches for Windows PC users, three of them critical. "Microsoft's rating system deems a security issue as critical - its highest ranking - if it could enable a worm to spread without any action from the PC user," ZDNET reports. The rest are important, too, though, because they fix flaws that "could compromise people's data or threaten system resources." So, family PC owners, go get 'em! Just click to WindowsUpdate.Microsoft.com in the Internet Explorer browser (Windows Update doesn't work with FireFox, which is one reason why I use both). Here's more on this from the BBC.
- Mobile bullying. Picture-phone alert! In the UK, where cellphone use by young people is much higher than in the US, one in five 11-to-19-year-olds have been bullied by mobile phone or via the Net, 14% have been threatened or harassed using text messages, and 10% have been intimidated or embarrassed by bullies using images taken with camera phones, the BBC reports. It's citing research by UK children's charity NCH, which also found that "some 26% of digital bullying victims did not know the identity of their tormentor." The BBC added, however, that, "in terms of the proportion of children affected, the problem would not appear to be getting worse." ConnectforKids.org recently published a thought piece on cyberbullying in general.
- High-frequency viruses. "Instead of releasing Windows viruses intermittently, many creators of worms and trojans are pumping them out with increasing frequency," the BBC reports. Families can no longer unthinkingly rely on their anti-virus software and services. Ideally, whoever hears about a new virus circulating needs to tell the rest of the family, and make sure everybody remembers not to click on attachments in either email or instant messages.
- PC security = online safety. A heads-up for parents is buried in this post by the Washington Post's Brian Krebs in his PC security blog: "I remain awestruck by the juxtaposition of those two offerings," writes Brian, referring two system spam on his friend's infected PC that was selling drugs and kids' games in the same sleazy ad. "Somewhere out there, a diabolical marketing machine is reaching through cyberspace offering wide-eyed kids all kinds of goodies, including their very own custom-made smileyfaces or 'emoticons,'" for use with AOL's chat program, AND their choice of highly addictive narcotics and sexual-performance enhancement drugs, with a selection of adult Web sites to boot!" It alerts us parents to the fact that having anti-virus and anti-spyware software installed isn't just about PC security, it's more and more about online kids' well-being.
