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This is Part 4 of our coverage of the September 2000 Digital Kids conference, the largest annual gathering of people in commercial Web publishing, marketing, gaming, e-tail, and other businesses targeting kids (here are Part 1 with the overview on teens' surfing habits, Part 2 on "guerrilla marketing," and Part 3 on connecting home & school)....
Web's latest offerings for kids
Before we get to the fun stuff, we'd like to send our best wishes to the good people at YourOwnWorld.com, which closed its doors last week. The news saddened us, because we thought highly both of the service - a fun, safe, media-rich online experience for the littlest online kids - and of the people we met at parent company Passport New Media.
Passport CEO Brian Pass emailed us Monday, "I've been spending most of my time this weekend and today replying to the hundreds of wonderful emails I've received from our customers. I think the strangest part of this point in business history is the disconnect between the consumer and the financial markets. Many of us have products that customers want but can't find the funding to bring it to them, notwithstanding the demand."
And the body of evidence that investors are not interested in consumers kept growing this week. Here's just a sampler of reports and analyses:
- The BBC: "Investors watch dot.com clearout"
- Knowledge@Wharton: "Dot-Coms: Down But Not Out"
- New York Times: "Decline and Fall of Tech Stocks"
- ZDNet: "VC: Blame it on Wall Street"
* *
Kid sites: Not singing the blues
Meanwhile, here's some light in the midst of this week's dot-com gloom: some interesting new Web services for kids. We had a lot of fun checking them out and writing up our thoughts. Now it's your turn. Put these sites to the toughest testers - your kids - and email us what you see on their faces. Such taskmasters we are! ;-) Our reason: Very little solid, public-sector (non-corporate) research has been done on how sites like these affect kids - whether the ones meant to be educational truly are. So what we parents and teachers learn from each other can only help.
- Living Letters: Notable, delightful, experimental
You and your kids have to experience this Web site and its technology to believe it. But watch out, together you might want to become citizens of Letter Land, never to leave. This interactive playground is like nothing we've seen on the Web yet, and it's utterly delightful. Iris and Otto (the "I" and "O") are your hosts and playmates in Letter Land. They will soon be joined by "U," "A," and "E" (not their real names). Otto, "the round mound of sound," is an opera singer. He's a little slow but very lovable. Iris, a pronoun as well as a letter, a fashion-conscious one to boot, is the fastest letter in the alphabet, believing that most of her peers are like "super-crunchy peanut butter sliding uphill."
The technology that lets you play with Iris and Otto is designed for a "28.8 modem and a Christmas '97 Pentium computer or better," Oliver Strimpel told us at Digital Kids, when he demo'd Letter Land for us (Mr. Strimpel is business development director at Zoesis Studios, the company behind the letters). "It's a Web page," he explained, "that invokes [or activates, maybe] native computer code. The code lives on the server and is sent to your system, or streamed, while you're doing the activity." So it should work for you, as well as for us, blessed with a DSL connection (do tell us if it does and what you think of the site). Obviously this is not your typical dot-com children's Web site, subject to the current moment's scary laws of Net economics. It's part of a longer-term, or at least more open-ended, experiment in interactive entertainment that might supersede TV. The New York Times goes into more detail on that part of the Letter Land experience, which writer John Markoff says fuses entertainment, education, and artificial intelligence.
- Zillions: Fun, meaty educational service
Before launching this fall, Zillions.org put itself to the ultimate test: It subjected itself to its own kid-testers! The site actually published what its kid-testers said about various sections and what tweaks resulted. Now that is impressive.
If you're not familiar with Zillions the magazine (which Consumer Reports stopped publishing partly because of "the migration of kids to the Net"), you may not know about the Z-Team: 100 kids 8-14 all over the United States who are chosen by Consumer Reports through an annual essay contest it holds (here's the Z-Team page).
The underlying question is: If you were a kid, who would you go to as the ultimate authority on a toy? Zillions is Consumer Reports's answer to that question. In addition to kid product tests and ratings, the site includes a weekly Money Q&A (kids' questions about money, answered by kids), kids' polls, "Fad Alert!" (kids report in with fads in their locales, US-wide), site-user product ratings, and "Daze of our Lives" (a comic-strip serial with a choice of endings kids can vote on). There's an educational element to all this, of course - from bar graphs to percentages to analytical thinking.
- Rumpus.com: Very commercial, different & intriguing
It's part e-playground, part children's museum with a product to buy at every activity station, part test lab for future interactive-TV cartoon characters (that last just a guess). Rumpus.com - founded by the youngest-ever member of the Toy Manufacturers of America's board of directors, one-time law student and "former child actor and stand-up comic" Larry Schwarz - calls itself an online entertainment network for kids.
It's all based on Mr. Schwarz's very creative toy/characters, such as Sy Klops (with the removable rubber eyeball), Benny Blanket (security blanket and toy literally rolled into one), Harry Hairball (the cat with a fish, a mouse, and hairballs in his stomach), and Puppet4 (a whole puppet show on one hand). You could view this site as one heck of a fun, slightly subliminal shopping mall for kids - because every character's page links to its toy version and a shopping cart. Problem is, it's fun for grownups too. We loved the "Monster in My Closet" movie in which Monster helps the kid by making sure all's clear in the closet. Our conclusion: Just this once, why not abandon all parental earnestness and have the fun-nest armchair shopping trip you've ever had with your child? It's aeons beyond that old, dog-eared Sear's Wishbook we used to pore over! And maybe we've stumbled on a Web site that's figured out how to beat the dot-com doldrums, stay solvent, and give smiles to everybody's inner child.
- Clifford and Caillou: Educational fun from PBS Kids
Have the little guys in your house or classroom already noticed that Clifford and Caillou have arrived on their TV screens? If they can't get enough of these cartoon friends in that passive sort of format, they can interact with them on the Web. Clifford and Caillou have companion Web pages at PBS.org, launched simultaneously with their TV shows last month.
True to what PBS Kids learned in focus groups with very small surfers (and their parents), these pages have very little to no text, so three- and four-year-olds can play here comfortably. Please see "Littlest Web surfers", our interview last August with PBS Kids manager Michelle Miller about their research. Activities include learning how to share with doggie friend Cleo, meeting Birdwell Island residents with T-Bone's help, exploring a day in the life of Caillou, making music on a "magic keyboard," a counting game, and printing out storybook pages to color.
- KIDS Report: Educational service by kids, for kids
"KIDS" stands for "Kids Identifying and Discovering Sites," which signals right up front that this is an educational service for kids at both the publishing and consumer ends of the equation. It's a biweekly collection of reviews of Web sites written by students for students and teachers. The project is designed to do three important things: help students develop research and evaluation skills, integrate the Internet into the curriculum, and create something truly useful to students and teachers worldwide. Each issue is put together by a different K-12 class somewhere in the United States. The project is hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The latest, September 26, issue, by a class in Altoona, Pa., looks at Internet-based contests for kids and students. At the top of their list (top of ours as well) is ThinkQuest, with CyberSurfari a close second.
- kidzworld: Commercial site for 'tweens
The URL is not going to help problem spellers, but this near-future arrival on the fairly crowded-though-thinning kids' Web scene says it's just for 'tweens (9-14-year-olds, thoough 13- and 14-year-olds would probably move "up" to full-blown teen sites like iTurf.com, Alloy.com, Bolt.com, and Snowball.com). It hasn't launched yet, but we're including it because of the insights it offers into what kids' sites are trying to look like (responsible) and do (attract kids) in these days of tough financial times, COPPA, and consumer privacy fears in general. It's tough to appeal to both grownups and kids at the same time!!!
Kidzwerld looks to be aimed more at boys, figuring gamers will be its bread 'n' butter (a very large, passionate online community to serve, even in the 'tween category, but maybe a tough one to win over). The site is very flashy - literally. The pages are very bouncy, requiring the latest Flash plugin, which Kidzwerld's research probably shows kids like. The site is a "gateway," it tells parents, sending kids only to sites that are safe and appropriate for them. Within the "werld" will be contests, monitored chat, email accounts, epostcards, and games ("arcade, new arcade, brainteasers, sports simulators," and cheats, gamers' own reviews, previews, and downloads for multi-player gamers, of which there are many in this age group). We'll have to wait and see if all this really happens.
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