Archives for June 2006

A 22-year-old Florida man was mugged at gunpoint by two teens who allegedly posed in MySpace as an 18-year-old woman, The Register reports. When 22-year-old Earnest Evans “arrived at their agreed rendezvous, Evans told police, the two girls approached him and asked to borrow his phone. Once he had handed it over to one of the girls, the other held a loaded gun to his head and demanded his wallet … [Read more...] about Adult MySpace mugged by teens

LunarStorm, a social network reportedly used by 90% of Sweden’s high school students, has started its international rollout in the UK, and UK CEO Matt Colebourne challenged his fellow social networks in an interview he gave The Register. He said his company monitors its network for potentially illegal activity but doesn’t get into the morality issue. However, he said the pedophilia threat is “very … [Read more...] about LunarStorm challenges its peers

If not the age of surveillance, certainly the age of over-exposure is dawning. And USATODAY writer Janet Kornblum highlights the fact that kid photogs and videographers are major contributors to this ongoing reality show that is American life – “featuring themselves — and anyone else they see along the way,” unthinkingly without permission, of course. Right now, all these images stored in … [Read more...] about The age of over-exposure

Here’s a parent who gets it: the Houston Chronicle’s Loren Steffy. He worries about sexual solicitations of kids online, but “I also believe that it's easier to teach children to protect themselves from others than it is to protect them from themselves. Here's what worries me about Myspace more than cyber predators: Written words are permanent. Writers learn early on, sometimes the hard way, that … [Read more...] about Protect kids from themselves?!

Did you know that’s what Bebo stands for? Well, that’s what its founders Michael Birch and Xochi Birch came up with after they bought the site’s domain name, The Observer reports in “How to make 80 million friends and influence people." They originally intended to make the site for 30-somethings but quickly found out that there’s no controlling what Web 2.0’s drivers will cotton to, and they are … [Read more...] about ‘Blog Early Blog Often’