News for the Week of July 9, 2006
Videos on Web 2.0 - the kind that kids upload as much as they download and view - were much in the news this past week...
Parent awareness kicking in
One mom told the Associated Press her family, including three teens, often looks at funny online videos together. When they run into racy stuff, she uses it as talking point with them. Another mom cringed when she saw her 14- and 10-year-old "encounter homemade videos online that included nudity and animal cruelty." These accounts are in the AP's "Online video boom raises risks, concerns," about how "Popular Web sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Yahoo, Google and soon also Microsoft's MSN are featuring user-generated videos that quickly have become a phenomenal form of entertainment" as well as a source of concern. The various services have different policies and practices for screening the video that gets uploaded. MySpace says it reviews every video before it appears in the uploader's profile (the AP doesn't mention this). YouTube relies on member policing, and told the AP that the really objectionable ones get flagged quickly and usually get pulled down within 15 minutes, Yahoo Video has a safe search tool parents can turn on (Google Video's considering it) and told the AP that, though it doesn't prescreen all videos, "any clips that get onto its featured pages must first pass the muster of the company's human editors." Meanwhile, these sites' success is kicking in, with the help of Hollywood - see the San Jose Mercury News on deals some of them are striking to distribute not-so-homemade video (movies and TV shows) too.
Pests with your Web videos
Lovely. Free videos just may not be that free anymore. Tell your kids! Now an unsuspecting Web video fan can click on a title like "Friends Play a Hilarious Practical Joke" and get a bunch of pop-up ads on their screens. That's just one of the annoying, buggy clips working its way through the Web social networks, ASPnews reports. They come with "adware Bellevue, Wash.-based Zango," which, APSnews explains, "makes money by partnering with webmasters who post videos on their sites." What happens is, you click on a title and get a pop-up box of "fine print explaining the end user license agreement." When you click on that, you download "a 'Zango Search Assistant,' which, according to tiny text in the pop-up, 'will show you a limited number of ads that pop up on your screen in a separate browser'."
In Other News...
- Patch that PC! If you don't have your Windows patching automated, stop by Windows Update to get the seven new security updates this week. They "address 18 separate flaws in its Windows operating systems and Office software," the Washington Post reports . Thirteen of the security flaws are critical, which the Post says means they can be used to hijack PCs without their owners doing anything (like opening an email or IM attachment). See the Post for details (they're in its PC security blog). Here, too, is ZDNET's coverage . For comprehensive Microsoft protection, check out Windows Live OneCare .
- MySpace No. 1 in traffic. The social network just beat out Yahoo and Google to become the US's most high-traffic site, Reuters reports . According to HitWise traffic tracking, MySpace "accounted for 4.46% of all US Internet visits for the week ending July 8, pushing it past Yahoo Mail for the first time and outpacing the home pages for Yahoo, Google and Microsoft's MSN Hotmail." In the social-networking category, MySpace "captured nearly 80% of visits to such sites, up from 76% in April. A distant second was Facebook at 7.6%."
- 'Smart phones' & kids. Very soon our kids will be badgering us for smart phones, not just camera phones - if they aren't already. "Experts say smart-phones - mobile devices that can handle phone calls, email, calendaring and Web surfing, among other tasks - are starting to go mainstream as prices come down and the devices become easier to use," the San Jose Mercury News reports . Only 2.2% of US cellphone users use smart phones right now, the Mercury News cites research from Telephia as finding, but the phonemakers "drool at the thought of putting smart-phones into the hands of the estimated 200 million US cell phone users." So instead of depicting guys in suits on the go, the ads for Motorola's Q and T-Mobile's Sidekick, for example, are featuring "hip models." And the phones' very unaffordable price range of $400-500 is falling. But while email may be the phone-based "killer app" for adults (addicted to Blackberries, or "Crackberries," as they've been nicknamed), for teens social networking could well be - see "Social networking untethered".
