'Red-light district' makes virtual world safer

San Francisco-based Linden Lab, which runs Second Life, has sequestered adult content and activity in the virtual world onto a new continent called "Zindra." Residents of the virtual world have to verify that they're adults before they can search for anything on Zindra or go there (here's the page that explains how the age verification process works). The entire "world" is now classified as either "Adult," "Mature," or "PG." As Linden Lab explains these, "Adult" is what most of us think of as adult content or activity – sexually-themed or explicit, inappropriate for minors. "Mature" seems to be more about the shopping and socializing, or non-serious, side of virtual life, where there's nothing really inappropriate for kids to see but also where grownups don't particularly want to mix it up with 13-to-17-year-olds (who themselves would probably prefer Teen Second Life for socializing). Linden Lab describes the "Mature" classification this way: "Social and dance clubs, bars, stores and malls, galleries, music venues, beaches, parks (and other spaces for socializing, creating, and learning) all support a Mature designation so long as they don't host publicly promoted adult activities or content." "PG," obviously, is for everyone – the label for all educational and business activity (virtual classes, meetings, talks, etc., where only time zones are a barrier for gatherings of people planet-wide).

"The other day, when I logged back in after quite a few weeks," writes digital-media maven Chris Abraham in AdAge.com about checking back in after all this happened, "Second Life told me so in so many words that if I want to party, I need to explicitly commit myself to that lifestyle; otherwise, I had better just be happy with PG-13. Second Life didn't kick out the brothels and porno theaters, it just put them on a different plane of existence." All of which makes high school classes and other educational programs (see links below) in Second Life much safer and more feasible now (e.g., this from ABC News Brooklyn on science class in Second Life).

For visual aids, here's a 3 min. video interview with Second Life creator Philip Rosedale with little clips from in-world and a PG13-rated look at Zindra (on its opening day, 7/4/09).

Related links

Machinima of Rochester Institute of Technology's virtual campus in Second Life (machinima is video taken in-world, so it looks like animated film)

"US Holocaust Museum in Second Life"

"The Virtual Alamo" museum in Second Life

A video at Teachers.tv in the UK about student projects in and with virtual worlds and my post about it

"School & social media"

"Young practitioners of social-media literacy"

YouTube's crackdown on suggestive content

"It's a bad week for Internet porn,"a Wired blogger reports. Indeed. Given the news from Ning and now with YouTube "cracking down on sexually suggestive content," as VentureBeat reports. Here's some of what YouTube's crackdown looks like: "Videos that are 'sexually suggestive' (but not prohibited) will now be age-restricted to viewers 18 or older [if younger ones are truthful about their ages when they register]. In addition, these types of videos will be algorithmically demoted on pages like 'Most Viewed' and 'Top Favorites'." Also, "thumbnails" (little still images that represent videos in YouTube) will be automatically generated by the site rather than chosen by the videos' creators. You see, people would put sexy "thumbnails" at the midpoint of their videos even if they had nothing to do with sex just to game the system and get them to rise to the top, and more likely to be seen. The result was index pages of thumbnails suggesting a lot more sex-related stuff than was actually there, making the site look more disturbing to parents than it needed to be and, for advertisers, apparently not a great environment for their ads. I touch on this in "Watch this video, parents!" Here's the rest of it from YouTube itself.

Ning to delete all adult content

Ning, a site where anyone can create his or her very own social-networking site (see "Mini-MySpaces") and where people are doing so at a rate of "around 2,000 new networks a day, announced the end of its "red-light district" this week . It's a relatively small red-light district - Ning told me less than 1% of its more than 600,000 social networks - but apparently legal adult content was becoming a business problem. "We don’t want to be in the policing business and, unchecked, that's where this is heading," CEO Gina Bianchini wrote in Ning's blog. Ning has a reputation for strict compliance with federal law requiring ISPs to report illegal child-abuse imagery ("child porn"), so that was never allowed, but the legal stuff, Bianchini indicates, interestingly, was creating "a rise in volume of illegal adult social networks." The adult networks disappear by January 1, she said. This development is great news for all the other social-network creators - teachers, parents, artists, athletes, journalists, hobbyists, cancer survivors, alumni groups, government entities (e.g., the US State Department), and businesses. But if anyone's eyebrows are raised upon hearing that all these social site owners were on the same service as porn operators, it's important for you to know that people don't browse around Ning the way they might, possibly, a social networking site (and even then, most teen users just go to their own and their friends' profiles). Ning isn't a social site. It's a giant collection of social sites. Its member social networks are the destinations, not Ning itself. Here's coverage at CNET. A bit more interesting data on Ning as a global resource from Fast Company magazine last May: "About 40% of Ning's social networks originate outside the United States, and members from 176 countries have signed up, with the service already available in several languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Dutch."

Another COPA ruling

The federal appeals court in Philadelphia again ruled that the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 is unconstitutional. The decision is "the latest twist in a decade-long legal battle [that] ... has already reached the Supreme Court and could be headed back there," the Associated Press reports. COPA, which was blocked by the Philadelphia court shortly after it was signed, followed the Communications Decency Act, which was also intended to regulate adult Web content. CDA was ruled unconstitutional in "the landmark case Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union," AP added.

Fresh data on phone-based porn

"Revenues from mobile 'adult services' are set to approach $3.5 billion by 2010," reports VNUNET in the UK. It's citing new findings by Juniper Research, which says the growth "will be fuelled by increasing adoption of streamed video and video chat" on phones and "a sharp rise" in the use of "3G" or smart phones that are really Net-connected computers more than mere communications devices. A lot of that new revenue will come from North America because it's an "underdeveloped" market for phone-based pornography, compared to Europe. And eastern European consumption "is rising at a higher rate than previously anticipated." Cellphone service providers are reluctant to provide the content in North America, VNUNET reports, but the Web on phones is another whole platform for porn operators. in the adoption of 3G services. But analysts say that the most popular content is "graphic amateur content." That would be the user-produced kind, not the "professional" kind. What worries me is the kids who share risqué or sexually explicit video of themselves via the Web or phone - the devastating impact this can have on their lives if the content is made public (see "Teens' child porn convictions upheld"). Here are some tips in ConnectSafely.org for safe video-sharing.

Penthouse's social sites

If you check your child's browser history, you probably don't want to find any of the social-networking sites Penthouse has just acquired. Even though the adult content industry says all the homemade x-rated videos on the user-produced Web have hurt its business, Penthouse Media is bullish, the New York Times reports. Penthouse has invested $500 million in Various Inc., which has more than 2 dozen sites, the "most popular Web site [being] adultfriendfinder, which describes itself as a personals community for swingers and sex. But Various owns a variety of other social networks like Italianfriendfinder.com, gradfinder.com and bigchurch.com, which offers to help users 'meet people who share the same spiritual beliefs as you'.”