News for the Week of March 4, 2007
Tops in tech news this week is social networking's newest phase. Call it "everyman's" social Web or homemade social-networking sites, but basically your kid, too, can have his or her own MySpace (not a profile, not a blog, but a whole social site) and even sell ads on it...
Homemade social sites' host
The one most in the news this past week was Ning.com, co-founded by Marc Andreesen, who also co-created the first Web browser, Mosaic (later known as Netscape). Ning really represents social networking's next phase, in which teachers can have their own classroom social sites but, for that matter, so can bullies. Phase 1: Friendster and blogs (personal journals on the Web), then MySpace pulling self-expression and socializing together. Phase 2: all those niche social sites (just announced was Anheuser-Busch's MingleNow.com "to elevate and enhance the image of beer"). Now (in Phase 3), many mini-MySpaces (Ning says it already hosts more than 33,000) - social-networking sites for the 35 people who collect Pez dispensers or players of Santa Monica beach volleyball, I'm hearing in CBS News analyst (and my BlogSafety.com co-director) Larry Magid's interview with Ning CEO Gina Bianchini. Here's Larry's article at CBS NEWS.
The how-to
It takes anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes to start your site. You choose your features - such as photo-sharing, video-sharing (your very own mini-YouTube), a discussion forum, widgets from around the Web, RSS reader, blogs for your members, allowing your members to customize their own pages in your site, etc. Ning sells page-relevant ads against your pages, but if you're an educator or nonprofit, you might want to be ad-free. You can pay Ning $19.95/month to turn off the ads (or to be allowed to sell your own). Key question: privacy and safety. That's up to you, Bianchini says. You choose what level of policing you want to do and the level of privacy your site should have. You can turn off video-sharing or view all videos before they appear in your site. Same with photos. You can make the whole thing members-only or public. And you can provide a "Report Abuse" button (which your members click to report to you - that's you, not Ning, as the final arbiter). A bit scary. Ringing in my ears is the word from Spider-Man's Uncle Ben: "With great power comes great responsibility."
In other news...
- Age-verification law for CT? State lawmakers this week introduced legislation that would require social sites to verify users' ages and to obtain parental consent before minors could post pages, the Associated Press reports. The proposed law would fine social-networking, chat, and other such sites up to $5,000 per violation. "Sites would have to check information about parents to make sure it is legitimate. Parents would be contacted directly when necessary." Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said 10 to 20 other states were considering legislation like this.
- DOJ wants photo-sharer data, The Bush administration is proposing that media-sharing sites keep records on who uploads photos and videos, CNET reports. That's for "in case police determine the content is illegal and choose to investigate," the article adds. The proposal came up in a meeting the Justice Department held with Internet companies about data retention. The DOJ is pushing for it as "valuable in investigating terrorism, child pornography and other crimes," and reportedly asked the companies how much it would cost to record details on their subscribers for two years."
- Porn spam declining. Spam, or junk email, is still a big problem, certainly, but the X-rated kind "has been on a steady decline and hit an all-time low in February," CNET reports, citing a report from Symantec, which sells email-security tools. It found that adult spam constituted only 3% of the spam it filtered last month. Health-care and general product ads constituted 48%, followed by emails advertising financial service (21%) and Internet service (15%).
- Videogames at the cinema. Soon Mom and Dad may go see a film while Jr. goes to a sort of public LAN party at the same multiplex. Cinegames are already happening in Spain, where movie theater company Yelmo Cineplex spent "more than $390,000 to modify one of its small individual theaters in a high-tech video gaming hall seating about 50 people," the New York Times reports. Predictably, the busy time is weekends, with individual gamers paying a currently discounted 3 euros (about $4) to play multiplayer games (friends pay 1 euro just to watch). Yelmo is also organizing tournaments and - to fill in on weekdays - developing "an educational division that would rent out the hall to schools that could use the system for learning and testing."
