Week of August 21, 2005

Probably because everybody's moving into back-to-school mode, there was no single burning issue in kid-tech news this past week. Just lots of little unrelated items. Here are the top items in family tech:

MySpace as "alternate reality." Parents of MySpace bloggers consider this: One way to think of the site is as a cross between a videogame and a shopping mall. The Wall Street Journal suggests that the Internet is becoming one of those immersive, massively multiplayer alternate-reality games, with MySpace.com as the prime example. There, "tens of thousands of young people spend many hours a day wandering around as if in a suburban shopping mall, looking for friends, expressing opinions, acquiring trends and, in general, leading a life that at times seems to have more reality to it than the life they lead when they log off." It's a social-networking site, after all, so the participants are "stop the presses - interested in sex and attractive sexual partners," according to the Journal, have "exhibitionist tendencies, though in a PG sort of way," rarely read (books, etc.), and mostly like to "chill." The male-to-female ratio "seems three or four to one," which means female participants get a lot of attention. All the more reason for parents to be sure that MySpace users at their house never use their full names and don't put any other personal information in their MySpace profiles and blog posts (journal entries). The site says under-16s aren't allowed, but Net Family News hears from a lot of parents of under-16s who are blogging at MySpace. For more on this, see "A [12-year-old's] dad on kids' blogs" and "Kids: Budding online spin doctors"). MySpace got 15.5 million unique visitors in May, according to MarketWatch.

Homework helpers. What a concept: free academic guidance on the Web and cellphones. The Associated Press gives examples, such as WebMath.com (hard to tell who's behind it, but this page sheds some light) and the site of retired engineer Henry Fliegler, who "spends about three hours daily answering 25 or so [math] questions." Then there are fee-based services AskMeNow.com (via email and cellphones) and Google Answers. Here's some more free advice: "Services offered by universities and government agencies may be more reliable than a commercial service with little information about its operators." The Web can also help kids exercise their critical thinking, when they use it to check out who's behind a service and figure out how much they really know. For more on this, see "Critical thinking: Kids' best research (and online-safety) tool". For more homework help, check out the links at Net-mom's Nice Sites and Discovery School.

Future job security for computer science students is in becoming a "renaissance geek," the New York Times reports. It cites as example a Virginia Tech PhD student whose research "is spiced with anthropology, sociology, psychology, psycholinguistics - as well as observing cranky couples trade barbs in computer instant messages." All this "spice" doesn't just keep her interested; it's "crucial to future job security as advances in the Internet and low-cost computers make it easier to shift some technology jobs to nations with well-educated engineers and lower wages, like India and China," according to the Times. But that's not all - more and more students in the liberal arts are needing tech skills. They're finding they often "need to use, design and sometimes write computer programs."

Virtual mugging, real arrest. A Chinese student in Japan used "bots" to assault and steal virtual objects from characters in the Lineage II fantasy-world game (bots look to unsuspecting gamers like real players but are tougher). He was arrested in Kanagawa Prefecture for selling the stolen virtual objects for real money in an online auction, the BBC reports. The problem is, how to prosecute? There is no virtual-property law yet. The other problem: bots, "a frequent problem in online gaming." Game publishers have "invested heavily in trying to eliminate them," the BBC says, but because they "appear in games in the same way that human players do," they're hard to detect and delete. "Complex techniques called bot traps have to be used to trick bots into revealing themselves" when they're, for example, move a little too fast for "normal" characters. "Asking direct questions or placing players in unusual situations in the game are techniques which are often used by administrators to identify bots. However, for every improvement in bot detection, the bots themselves become more complex and more difficult to spot." Here's an earlier item about a dispute over virtual property in China that ended in tragedy.