Blog Blocker : The Blog

Some interesting info on parents and monitoring social networking sites:

While a high percentage of Irish parents say they monitor what their children do on the web, only 46% admitted they really understood what social networking was, despite the fact that 70% of children and young adults under the age of 18 use sites such as Bebo and Facebook regularly.

The research shows that while many parents believe they are monitoring their children’s online activity, less than half are familiar with social networking sites.

This shows a fairly large gap between what the parents know, and what their kids are actually using.

(source article)

CBS4.com has an excellent article on tips to help prevent online sex crimes from happening.

They talk to Nancy McBride, the national safety director for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

In addition to ‘just be a good parent’, they give a few other tips as well:

-Use online filters and software to keep your kids away from certain websites.

-Check your child’s web page every once in a while to make sure there’s nothing personal or provocative on it.

-And always check out the people who have access to your children whether online or in their day to day lives.

According to ComScore, the social networking site Bebo has overtaken MySpace as the most popular social networking website in the UK.

Could this be a sign of things to come in the USA as well?

… And any other sites their kids might be getting into as well.

This article on Canada.com does a fine job of outlining the need for parents to keep a vigilant eye on what their children do on social networking websites. Some stats from the article:

• 58% of parents know where to download parental control software, but only one-third actually use such programs
• Only 49% of parents know the online aliases their children use
• 26% of parents are unfamiliar with YouTube (Wiki Article)
• 33% of parents are unfamilar with MySpace (Wiki Article)
• 41% of parents are unfamiliar with Facebook (Wiki Article)

Article was originally discovered via JustMySpaceStuff.com

A few days ago news broke that MySpace found a whopping 29,000+ sex offenders using the site.

With an estimated 600,000 registered sex offenders in the United States, this means that 5% of all of America’s sex offenders were stupid enough to put in personally identifiable information in their profiles. How much do you want to bet that more than 5% of sex offenders are on MySpace?

I was unable to discover what exactly MySpace used to identify the offenders, but a comment on MyCrimeSpace claims that MySpace uses facial recognition software to identify predators. I was unable to verify this, but this story about a false positive hints that they may be using recognition software, since the woman falsely accused was pictured with a man who was a registered sex offender.

Update: As commented below, MySpace does indeed use facial recognition technology provided by Sentinel Tech. 

Neil at The Interactive has some food for thought. While MySpace is still ahead in terms of eyeballs looking at the site, current trends indicate that Facebook is gaining, and fast.

The culture at Facebook is more tightly knit, whereas the fake profiles, spammers, and corporate profiles on MySpace are pushing users away.

Linda at The Social Networking Weblog has a different take. She feels that in order for Facebook to make significant gains on MySpace, they’ll have to start making their profiles more customizable, as MySpace pages currently are.

I personally think that the site that ends up with the most kids, wins.

Facebook is driving hard for the younger market. With new widgets like Fluff Friends, it makes you wonder: What 10 year old girl could resist a cute furry creature for their Facebook profile?

MySpace isn’t slacking in the battle for your kids eyeballs either. Just yesterday the entire MySpace homepage was pushing the new Simpsons cartoon movie.

Regardless of which site wins, parents need to be aware of both sites and know just how hard they’re trying to get your kid to sign up.

We’ve covered this before. This time, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper feels that it is time to require parental consent for children under the age of 18 to sign up for “social networking” sites like MySpace.  (source article)

Of course, there’s no mention on how Mr. Cooper plans to determine what qualifies as a “social networking” site. Or how they’ll go about ensuring that kids will not just be able to claim to be 18 years old.

You gotta love feel-good legislation…

According to Hitwise, these are the current top social networking sites. They also found that total traffic to social networking sites was up 11.5% from the previous month. I’d say that’s some positive growth!

I found it interesting that they don’t consider YouTube a social network, because that would certainly be on the list.

According to a recent Pew Internet survey, social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook are all the rage. A full two thirds of all teens have at the very least created an online profile.

Of those two thirds of all teens, nearly half are between the ages of 12 and 14 years old, which means a large percentage of kids are lying about their age to sign up on these sites, since most require a minimum age of 14 to sign up.

If you’re interested, you can view the press release that summarizes the survey, or you can view the entire survey in PDF format.

FYI, the survey took place between October 23 and November 19th 2006, so you can rest assured the numbers, if taken again today, would be higher than they were just 3 months ago.

I think most would agree that social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook should take additional steps to protect minors that sign up for their services. But do we really need government to get involved? Georgia State Senator Cecil Staton has proposed a bill that would “make it illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking Web site to allow minors to create or maintain a Web page without parental permission.”

In the wild world of Web 2.0, how do you define a social networking web site? What inherent features flags a site as a “social networking web site” and who makes that decision?  And what happens if a social networking website just happens to be based outside of the USA? This kind of legislation raises all sorts of sticky issues that are better left resolved in the private sector.

From the article:

If owners or operators of a company failed to comply with the proposed law, they would be guilty of a misdemeanor on the first offense. A second offense would be a felony and could lead to imprisonment for between one and five years and a fine up to $50,000 or both.

And the real kicker:

Staton said the bill does not tell the companies exactly how to ensure that minors don’t log on without parental permission. The companies can figure that out on their own, he said.

“They can find a way to do this,” Staton said. “That’s my challenge to them.”

Read the rest here.