News for the Week of December 17, 2006
We're seeing more and more references in kid-tech news to virtual worlds - new environments for young socializers and social activists, and new frontiers for fresh thinking about their online safety...
Virtual concert for tweens
Whyville - which claims to be "the leading educational virtual world" for kids 8-15 - is putting on its first virtual concert. The very real pop/R&B singer Stacie Orrico, who sold 3.8 million albums by the time she was 18 (she's now 20), will appear (as an avatar) in a live, 45-minute performance this Saturday (12/9), the site announced this week. The some 6,000 "Whyvillians" expected to attend "will be able to chat with each other during the performance"; clap for Stacie; buy virtual souvenirs, tunes, and ringtones (using "clams," Whyville's virtual money); and submit questions to Stacie during the concert. "Selected kids will join Stacie on 'stage' at the site's "Greek Theater" and ask their questions, live in front of thousands of their virtual friends." Stacie will also "make several virtual costume changes during the show and auction off these virtual goods on ebay.com." All this seems very educational about concerts in "real life," including the commercial part of the music biz. More such education' is coming from Toyota. "Whyville will co-sponsor a [Toyota] Scion owner's activity - a special [concert] 'after-party' for kids who own a virtual Scion in Whyville, and their passengers," the Whyville press release says.
Youth marketing expert Anastasia Goodstein explains in Business Week: Toyota "let kids buy and customize virtual Scions and taught them what happens when they miss a virtual payment" (here's more on Whyville in an earlier issue of Business Week). Anastasia describes how marketing works in other youth-targeting virtual worlds, including There, MTV's Laguna Beach, and Teen Second Life. A very different education campaign in Whyville is its joint program with the Centers for Disease Control to teach kids about disease prevention with virtual flu shots - administered to Whyvillians so they won't catch "Why-Flu," a CNET blog reports.
Virtual community, real engagement
Online community has a "direct impact on civic activism," reports education technology expert Andy Carvin in his review of the Annenberg study I linked to last week. In fact, the authors led with this, among more than 100 other issues covered in their 2007 Digital Future Project. So I thought parents, especially those with concerns about kids' online socializing, would want to know that - besides the informal learning that's going on, highlighted by MIT's Henry Jenkins - young people are also engaging in social activism on the participatory Web as well (e.g., see this about Rock for Darfur in MySpace). As Andy points out, the USC-Annenberg researchers found that "just over one-fifth of online community members - 20.3 % - take action offline for a cause related to their online communities at least once a year. Nearly 65% of online community members say they now engage in civic causes that were new to them when they started going online, while an additional 43.7% say they participate in social activism more since they've joined their online communities. This may explain why 43% of online community members feel as strongly about their virtual life as they do about their real-world life." In his last paragraph, Andy explains why this data leaped out at him. Meanwhile, the anti-poverty World Development Movement is trying to encourage just such real-world activism, The Register reports. The WDM has put a digital counter in the Second Life virtual world of 1.5 million members. The counter provides a real-time tally of "the number of preventable child deaths since [Second Life] was first opened in 2003. A child's life is lost every three seconds."
In other news...
- Social networking tops. User-driven sites dominated Web searches this past year, Britain's VNUNET reports. "Bebo took the crown as the most searched for term throughout the year, followed by MySpace." Not surprisingly "World Cup" came in third, followed by video-sharing site Metacafe.com. But YouTube didn't even make the Top 10 ("video" was No. 7). And Internet News reports that social networking "rocked the [Internet] industry" in 2006, adding that the surge in high-speed Net connections was a huge factor.
- Child investment advisers. If you're a venture capitalist, it pays to have children these days - literally. One such told the New York Times that her daughters were her secret weapons. The daughters good-naturedly called themselves "lab rats." These young people may be friends and family, the Times says, "but their impact can be broad, because venture capitalists not only help steer the development of new ideas but also invest billions of dollars in those ideas on behalf of investment groups and wealthy individuals." Interestingly, this is new. It was not the case during the dot-com boom. But this is Web 2.0, the youth-driven as well as user-driven Web. It's probably why Time magazine's Person of the Year for 2006 is You. As Time put it, "look at 2006," and you'll see a story that "isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before" - the year of MySpace.com, YouTube.com, and Wikipedia.org.
- MySpace more mobile. Social-networking giant MySpace is about to get more ubiquitous. It just struck a deal with Cingular that allows more than just Helio users to socialize via cellphone. Internet News reports that "MySpace Mobile for Cingular allows subscribers to edit MySpace profiles, view and add friends, post photos and blogs, send and receive MySpace messages for $2.99 a month." Facebook works with has a similar deal with Cingular too, and YouTube with Verizon, according to Internet News. But this "agreement marks a change in the way carriers present content." Before, the phone companies adjusted it for teeny screens. Now they're reportedly bowing out of the process more.
