News for the Week of November 05 2006
This week we zoom in on new findings about what school officials are thinking about students on Web 2.0. Not what you might've guessed...
Students lost in irrelevance
A new study commissioned by Thinkronize, creators of the NetTrekker search engine for schools, found that school administrators' biggest concern about students' use of the Web was their getting redirected (linked) to irrelevant commercial info on the Web that has nothing to do with their research. "When asked to rate the specific types of dangers facing students on the Internet, 61% of survey respondents said pornography and 58% said adult predators were a great or significant danger. Concern over getting useless or irrelevant results when using search engines was also high at 59%. The issue rated highest, however, at 76% was concern over unauthorized redirection to commercial or pay sites when conducting online research," according to Thinkronize.
I asked a spokesperson to clarify, and she offered the example of a student researching the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen getting redirected to a furniture store, or a student doing research on stars (constellations) getting mired in possibly more interesting but irrelevant content on "Star Wars, Star Trek, Star Search, etc. before he/she gets anything on constellations."
Finding relevant results
Then I emailed Bob Dahlstrom, a former professor who founded Kidsnet filtering, and asked for his take on the study: "The findings that all educators are taking steps to protect kids from porn are not new," he wrote. "But as you point out it seems like a new trend that 35% of them are purchasing special search engines." He also thinks part of the reason for the concern is "the fact that computers are getting less and less secure," and not only are educators concerned about the morass of spyware and other malware students can download just by surfing around the Web, they're concerned about school "data loss and theft."
I asked him for an update on Hazoo.com, a safe search engine that's part of Kidsnet and might be considered a counterpart to NetTrekker at home. The sites searched by Hazoo are all human-reviewed too. "Unlike NetTrekker that uses educators to create their list of content, we use 'traffic' data. Basically, [in building their original list of some 175 million Web pages], we reviewed 100% of all the Web sites Neilson/NetRatings tracks," then the company reviews sites Kidsnet users visit and keeps adding them to the Hazoo list. "Thus our list is probably much larger than a list from NetTrekker but theirs is more specific and targeted. So I would say, if a kid is at school accessing the Internet with the specific goal of research for a school project, the student will most likely want to use a tool focused to that purpose (such as NetTrekker). If the student is at home and looking for a more broad range of content less targeted to education, he or she will most likely want to use a tool like Hazoo that's broader."
In other news...
- Video sites like rabbits too. "Nichefication" is happening in Web video now, just as in social networking, where social sites of every possible narrow niche are multiplying exponentially (in the past week I've seen one for people who want to lose weight, one for alcoholics, and one for mobile social-networkers in India - see also "Social sites multiplying like..."). YouTube is "so last month," according to a Washington Post writer covering the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, because it's so general. Maybe it's the MySpace of Web video. "Already, users are finding the sheer of volume of videos available on the Internet too difficult to digest and are looking for new ways to pick through them." One panelist, "Mary Hodder, chief executive of Dabble, which helps users search and organize online videos, estimated that 200,000 videos are uploaded onto the Web every day."
- 'The Overconnecteds'? The New York Times cuts right to the chase and asks the question we adults have had for some time: "What are the psychological implications of simultaneously talking to 50 of one's forever best friends, who are not actually present?" Answer: We don't know yet. The article looks at how very individual teens' online social experiences and their impacts are. But there's a list of "practical advantages" to all this connectedness for teens at the bottom of p. 2. One of them is, "If someone seems to be in trouble, there are no longer just one or two good friends to the rescue but hundreds who send support via email messages, instant messages and text messages." Elsewhere in the piece, one teen source told the Times that her peers are "stronger socially" than adults because of the way they use electronic communications, mostly IM, partly because people aren't inhibited by appearance and facial expressions...
- Bargain laptops just might be a hot item this holiday shopping season. Online and in its stores, Wal-Mart just started selling a $398 Compaq with "a 15.4-inch screen, a 3300+ Sempron processor from Advanced Micro Devices that churns at 2.0GHz, a 60GB hard drive and 512MB of memory," CNET reports. It also has a $598 Toshiba on sale, and Dell is selling a $499 notebook on its site. CNET suggests the trend is laptops as individual rather than family purchase - "everyone in the family is getting their own machine."
- PC protection perspective. Paying for PC security is one of those necessary evils, suggests Washington Post writer Rob Pegoraro. Or worse, actually. Because "too often, the software meant to keep your computer safe does so at an unnecessary cost," he writes. The cost he's talking about is how two such programs (e.g., the latest version and an earlier version) active on your computer can create "serious conflicts." Rob saves you the trouble of complicated comparison shopping by comparing the latest products - those of CA, McAfee, Panda, Symantec and Trend Micro - for you ("Microsoft and Zone Labs are between updates," he explains). He looks at their effectiveness, cost, efficiency, consistency, and whether they educate you about PC security as well as protect your computer.
