News for the Week of March 5, 2006
The user-driven Web, or "Web 2.0," was a big story in technology news this week, a story largely about all those creators and uploaders of home-made media, so many of them being our children!
'Auteurs' at your house?
Probably. They're everywhere. Content is no longer king, conventional media people everywhere are finding out. "The customer is king," as the BBC staidly put it, referring to uploaders, auteurs, or basically everybody on the Web. Bolt.com, one of the oldest teen social-networking sites, used the word "auteur" in its relaunch press release this week. It sort of means "author," but "auteur" goes further to suggesting a creator's control over all aspects of, say, a movie production. That's pretty much what Web users (including kids) now have, with zillions of sites (including Bolt.com, TagWorld.com, MySpace.com, YouTube.com, etc.) providing "storage" or hosting of all manner of media that - whether it's your favorite band's latest release or your home-made skateboarding video - makes a statement, to your peer group or maybe the world, about who you are.
It's Web 2.0, now upon us. But even auteurs aren't king, really. Community is, witness the popularity of everything from eBay to Craigslist to MySpace, and now the new lala.com that the San Jose Mercury News calls "a mix of social networking, Internet swap meet and music store."
Auteurs aren't happy without a community with which to share their creations (and, often, inner-most thoughts). Evidence: The Los Angeles Times reports, "Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg, actor-producer Ashton Kutcher and reality TV impresario Mark Burnett are ... grappling with a fundamental question: What defines a hit on the Internet?", and both the L.A. and the New York Times report that Yahoo has figured it out. While, it did invest heavily in professionally created TV on the Web, Yahoo is now focusing more on "user-generated content." Business Week ran that story too. Basically, our kids are king in the world of Web 2.0.
In Other News...
- Online dating study. "Thirty million Americans say they know someone who has been in a long-term relationship or married someone they met online," according to the latest Pew Internet & American Life study [PDF link], which adds that 60 million "know someone who has at least dabbled in the online dating scene." But online dating isn't all upside. In its coverage of the study, USATODAY report that opinions on Net dating among the 145 million US Internet users in general are an even split: 44% agree "it's a good way to meet people," 44% disagree. But the percentage on the positive side is only growing. "Online daters are generally younger and more likely to be employed," Pew says. The project only surveyed adults, but it was "the youngest cohort (18-29 years old)" that "has the largest percentage of online daters within it."
- Alleged pedophile in game chat. GamePolitics.com, which tracks social and legislative developments in the videogame world, reports another case of alleged child harassment in game chat. It's the second I've seen reported (see "Teen exploited in online gaming"). "A 52-year-old man who helped manage the Green Berets, a competitive videogame clan, was busted by police in London, Ontario, following accusations that he solicited obscene pictures of [10-to-13-year-old] boys he recruited for the Green Berets' Counter-strike team," according to GamePolitics.
- '25 to Life' game boycott. Democrats in the Michigan House of Representatives have called for a boycott of the "25 to Life" videogame, "in which players try to kill police officers to win the game," the Detroit Free Press reports. "The call for a boycott joins a national campaign by the police organizations to keep children and families away from the game." "25 to Life" is rated Mature/17+ by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, which says "titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content, and/or strong language." The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund has collected more than 220,000 signatures protesting the game.
- More earbud ear-risk news. USATODAY adds a few more voices to the growing discussion about what earbuds are doing to ears. The article leads with a family of iPod lovers, the 43-year-old dad of which cranks the music up for hours every day, to drown out power tools at work, to ski to, and to listen while working at his computer. He's "concerned about hearing loss and already experiences ringing in the ears, called tinnitus, which is a symptom of damage. But he says he has no plans to cut back on his MP3 use." It's sustained use at high volumes that audiologists warn against most.
- 'Spying' on IM-ers? It's the other kind of "domestic surveillance," as Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus put it, and parents of teenagers all know it's just as controversial as the NSA kind. A lot of parents shared their views on monitoring and how best to protect online kids during a discussion tied to Ruth's column.
- Parents on MySpace. I'm not talking about parents spying on kids' MySpaces - but about parenting groups on MySpace. I decided to look into it when Maggie in Vancouver posted in our NetFamilyForum(.org) about her own MySpace profile and her group's page, MySpaceMoms2006. Unfortunately, the link she posted didn't work, but clicking around MySpace Groups, I found dozens of geographically based parent solidarity and networking groups for moms (not so many for dads) in the East Bay, Tampa Bay, Tulsa, Vancouver, mid-Michigan, southern Maryland, New York City, Phoenix, and so on (there were also groups for single, teen, and stay-at-home moms, a group for "the alterna-parent crowd - Punk, Goth, DeathRock, Metal, etc.," and a "Daughters Against Moms on MySpace" group). This week Vancouver-based The Columbian led with the story of how one mom of a toddler was helped with a scary poison-control issue by another mom she met in MySpace.
