• Social networker age verification revisited Parents often ask us why on Earth social-networking sites can't just block teens altogether - verify their ages or something? After all, it's all over the US news media that attorneys general are calling for age verification. Well, we have been replying for months that it just wouldn't work (e.g., see "Verifying kids' ages: Key question for parents"). But don't take it from us this time. The UK-based Financial Times has an editorial on this saying the exact same thing. Why wouldn't it work? "The practical problems are considerable. Fourteen-year-olds do not have drivers' licences and credit cards that can be checked via established agencies. The sites could insist on verifying the parents, but anyone who believes that a teenager will not 'borrow' his father's Visa has never been 14 years old." Also, think about how hard it is accurately to verify kids' ages in person, at the door of a nightclub, much less over the anonymous Internet with no physical evidence or view of the person's face.
  
  And then what would the result be? "The consequences of successful age verification, meanwhile, would be even worse," the FT continues. "Minors would be driven off mainstream sites such as MySpace and Facebook and on to unaccountable offshore alternatives or the chaos of newsgroups," which we tell parents all the time - because kids are experts at finding workarounds. "There they would be far more vulnerable than on MySpace, which now makes efforts to keep tabs on its users."
• US sites, foreign social networking. When the user-driven social Web meets the fairly evolved consumer-privacy and free-speech laws of the US (where many social-networking sites are based) meets the laws and sensibilities of the country where the US company's customers are, things get complicated. And very messy, sometimes.
  
  Take Brazil, for example. There, Google's social-networking site Orkut.com "has become a major center of Brazilian social life, with two-thirds of all Internet surfers using the service, many of them children, the Wall Street Journal reports. And some of them criminals. While many Orkut "communities were built around such themes as soccer, love and overcoming injustice" (almost 400,000 people are members of a group called "My mother is the best on Earth"), "criminal elements also connected with each other and recruited sympathizers on the site, including neo-Nazis, organized gangs and pedophiles." So early on, in its zeal to protect its users' free speech and privacy, Google was much less responsive to Brazilian users' complaints and law-enforcement subpoenas than some prosecutors - and potential advertisers - in Brazil found satisfactory. Thus the story of how one country - and its watchdogs, in the business community and children's advocacy - is dealing with the social Web, an interesting case study for everyone interested in this intersection of law enforcement, civil liberties, and the social Web.
• Parental concerns key. eMarketer points out how important parents' views of social networking are to this social-Web business. It cites the research of Parks Associates as showing that "virtual world advertising in the United States will increase tenfold to $150 million by 2012 from the 2006 level. That spending could be cut, however, if parents deny permission for teens to visit virtual worlds. And parental approval is not a given, since some aspects of virtual worlds are still discomfiting for parents."
• How YouTube stardom works. Of course "stardom" on the social Web is different from mass-media stardom. Take bands in MySpace, for example - fame is more dispersed but intimate. Artists are closer to their fans, who do the real marketing (in a "viral," word-of-mouth way that has a lot more influence than the polished but less personal marketing of a record label). Income is different too - coming in more in piecemeal fashion over time - but a living can be made, sometimes after big media companies or agents notice an artist's amazing fan base. So, it appears, will it go for two funny guys in Madison, Wisc. Their eight-part series "Chad Vader: Day-Shift Manager" is one of YouTube's "biggest hits, having been viewed more than 19 million times since its debut in July 2006" and this year they, Matt Sloan and Aaron Yonda, were "among the first performers recruited by YouTube's new professional partnership program, paying content providers a portion of the site's ad revenue," the New York Times reports. But a key takeaway - if your child has aspirations of YouTube stardom - is "don't try it for the money," which seems to describe Matt and Aaron, according to Times writer David Callender.

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