Posting pix: How cautious should we be?

The other day I was talking to a psychologist who described a time when he was driving into a busy 4-way intersection on a highway frontage road – one of the craziest intersections I've ever heard described. He came to a stop, he said, and suddenly found he just couldn't take his foot off the brake, paralyzed by a voice in his head saying, "Be careful. Don't move. Don't get in that driver's way. Careful!" He said it was then that he realized he'd heard those words countless times as a child, and that they'd become almost a mantra in his head, making him overly cautious as an adult. For him the solution, he realized, was simply to go forward, make that move. He has since been much more decisive, he said, and – as he related this experience – I was thinking about the similar messages kids and parents are getting from so many directions about young people's Internet use. Of course we want them to be safe, but we don't want to clip their wings altogether. This article at AnnArbor.com offers that perspective – it's one of the few I've seen in the news media questioning the message that posting pictures in parenting and family blogs is highly risky. For more on both sides of this, see "Violating our kids' privacy" and "Online privacy: Photos out of control."

Violating our kids' privacy

Kids aren't the only people who need to think before they post, but the latter half of that sentence is an oversimplification, of course. New York Times columnist Lisa Belkin brings new meaning to the phrase "Protecting Your Child's Privacy" in her Motherlode column this week. Where's the line between "exploiting [a child's] pain" – as one teenage subject of his parent's published memoir put it – and blogging about your parental struggles (or joys) with that child in the public blogosphere? Belkin asks: "At what point do parents lose their right to their children’s tales? When do things stop being something that happened to 'me' and start being something that happened to 'them,' and therefore not 'mine' to tell?" There is no blanket answer to those questions, partly because the answers are highly individual and the surrounding conditions change (kids grow up; they can become mortified teenagers). Also, as Belkin points out, the questions didn't first arise with blogs and social network sites – or even the Web or newsgroups or email. At the core of Belkin's post is the story of a mom who felt she had to un-adopt a child after 18 months and wrote about it. Some detractors "scoured everything she has written in the past, finding a post that used the boy’s real name and country of origin, and circulating it around the Internet" and then, after the mom deleted as many references as she could think of, they "found old cached versions," Belkin writes. The questions are age-old, but there are some differences now: e.g., the Web as both permanent, public, searchable archive and - sometimes - amplifier (see also "The Net effect" and "Online privacy: Photos out of control").

Top 10 'social media sites'

That's what TechCrunch wisely calls them, as it looks at the latest available comScore traffic figures (November) for "social networking sites." ComScore includes blog-hosting, media-sharing, and pre-social-Web community sites in that category, though, so "social media" works much better. Google's Blogger - which hosts blogs, of course - is No. 1 (with 222 million unique visitors in November, up 44% from '07). The rest of the top 10 are: Facebook (200 million); MySpace (126 million); Wordpress blogs (114 million); Windows Live Spaces (blogs - down 22% to 87 million this year); Yahoo GeoCities (69 million); Flickr photo-sharing (64 million); Hi5 (No. 1 social site in Latin America - 58 million); Google's Orkut (social-networking site that's huge in Brazil - 46 million); and SixApart (blog-hosting - 46 million). Two China-based sites, Baidu Space and 56.com, were in the 11th and 13th spots, respectively. [See also "Latin America's social Web."]

Safe New Year's partying online & off

Here's really good New Year's advice from MySpace's (and its parent Fox Interactive's) chief safety officer Hemu Nigam. I'm biased in saying this - I like what he's posting because it's what we've been saying to parents asking about safety on the social Web for years - in NetFamilyNews.org, ConnectSafely.org, email, speaking engagements, and our book, MySpace Unraveled. Here's the best part: Whether we're talking about MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, YouTube, or any other site, safety on the social Web is not about technology; it's about behavior, human relationships - civility, consideration, and common sense. These are things parents and kids have been talking about since long before the telephone even, long before anything we think of as technology. "Too often it seems too complicated to talk to your teens about online safety," Nigam writes. "After all, it’s the online world and they know it better than you do. But is it? Did you know how a car engine works, what the transmission does, or how an airbag gets deployed when the car bumps something at 30 mph? Yet, you got right in there and taught your teen how to drive. Correction, you taught your teen how to drive safely.... You’ve done it all your life – these lessons on safety.... The world may have changed, but the lessons are still the same. Don’t stop the dialogue."

Regular, micro & now 'slow blogging'

First there was fast food, then slow food. Now, instead of mere blogging, there's slow blogging, the New York Times reports - more reflective blogging. Clearly, blogging is a maturing medium. It's diversifying. "Some slow bloggers like to push the envelope of their readers’ attention," not unlike just about all bloggers, who start out with enthusiastic high-frequency posting that they later find hard to sustain. What's even harder to sustain when the frequency goes down is "stickiness" - when posts aren't daily, readers get out of the habit of checking in. Which may be one explanation for the popularity of the Huffington Post: "With about 50 new posts a day," it's more like a daily newspaper - high frequency and a little something for everyone. Besides the maturing of the technology itself, another factor is tech segmentation. There are new technologies for "fast blogging" or "micro blogging," e.g. Twitter, in which you can link to longer posts in a blog, but you're under no obligation to say much. And Twitter has secondary technologies such as Twitter news feeds that automatically announce to your Twitter followers when you've posted. This layer is like a blend of blogging and instant messaging. I know, I know. You might be asking, "Where does it stop?" Maybe nowhere. ;-) BTW, there's fresh thinking too, now, on a similar movement: fast (global) retail to slow (more local) retail. [See also "30 Days to Being a Better Blogger."]

More bloggers in hot water

Bloggers are getting more attention from lawyers, these days. They're "starting to receive legal letters when they upset someone with enough money to hire a media lawyer," the Financial Times reports, and "defamation, offensive messages, incitement, compromising intellectual property, linking to illegal websites, and inaccurate reporting can all get you into hot water, regardless of whether you are a blogger, journalist, publisher or an e-mail user." This is an opportunity for all of us - parents and young people - to learn more about their free speech rights. "Just 5% of internet users are clear on their legal rights and responsibilities when posting comment online," the FT cites a law firm's research as showing. The study found that 77% of bloggers are "uncertain or unaware of where the law stands."

Teen fashion blogs: Creative outlet

A New York Times style writer reads these teen fashion blogs and "weeps," according to the sub-headline. "Meet the next generation of style bloggers. They might not be able to drive yet, but their fashion sense is so incredible, it's actually intimidating," Elizabeth Spiridakis writes. Ten years ago, teen fashionistas would pore over their issues of Vogue. Now they have their own readerships. Spiridakis points out a number of them in her article. "These sites are part of a developing sense of fashion and self, today's equivalent of doing your hair 20 ways before bedtime. Only you use a digital mirror." And your audience is part of that mirror, posting comments and possibly shaping your fashion sense. This is participatory creativity, learning, maybe even career development. For more on teen design and artistry online, see this in the New York Times last February and this on the study behind these findings.

Social Web & business

I'm including this in a family-tech blog because kids just could some day be businesspeople! Aspects of social networking are really making inroads into the business world. One bit of evidence this week is the finding that "more than 50% of German companies use the means of communication provided by web 2.0, i.e. blogs, wikis and social networking." That's from Just4business.eu, citing a study by BITKOM and Oracle. Wikis (the collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia being an example) in particular are used to help match people with creative solutions to "particular tasks and problems." Other benefits cited: increased productivity, more cooperation between departments and company locations, transparency, increased productivity, and accessible documentation of work processes. Meanwhile, two US-based businesses, the New York Times and the professional social site LinkedIn, just struck a deal that allows the Times "to draw on all the personal profile data that users have entered on LinkedIn, such as the profession or industry they work in, as well as their job title, age, sex and location, the better to target advertising at NYTimes.com," the Financial Times reports. And Visa and Facebook have teamed up to bring "almost half a million small-business owners" to Facebook in an area of the service called The Visa Business Network, BankTech.com reports.

Do you Twitter?

Given that lots of kids are converting parents from talking to texting, Twitter may be around the corner for you. If you've heard people at your house use the word "twitter" in association with technology and think it's yet another frivolous temptation for chronic multitaskers (as I did when a friend said she was swamped by tweets at a conference), there's a mind-changing story in the San Jose Mercury News for you. In it the mere twittering (or "texting") of the word "Arrested" on his cellphone to "a wide circle of friends in the United States and to the mostly leftist, anti-government bloggers in Egypt who are the subject of his graduate journalism project" got a University of California, Berkeley, student out of an Egyptian jail within 24 hours. But there are more mundane reasons to use this technology that's like group texting on the fly or push micro-moblogging (broadcasting mini blog posts on your phone to your contact list): keeping in touch with your family during the odd free moment on a business trip, spontaneously sharing your reaction to (and getting fast feedback on) a comment in a conference, sending a link or new contact info to a bunch of friends all at once, etc., etc. It'd be interesting to get a bunch of teenagers in a room and ask them if they use it in addition to IM-ing and social networking. Here's "How Twitter Works" at howstuffworks.com and another Twitter primer that I was tipped off to by my friends at the California Technology Assistance Project. Meanwhile, here's a slightly snide view of Twitter in a Wired blog, and - this just in! - Twitter's popularity seems to have caused some service disruption, and CNET looks into it in "Can't live without Twitter? Don't believe the hype."

'Mom-tested' sites for tweens

It's hard to find out much about MomLogic on the Web (couldn't easily find an About Us page), but the site put its stamp of approval on five sites for preteens: Stardoll (digital paper dolls + social networking), the Whyville virtual world, Imbee blogging, Allykatzz social networking for girls 10-15, and Yamod (a kind of YouTube for kids 14 and under). BTW, Imbee is fixing a problem the Federal Trade Commission had with the site. It has settled with the FTC, which had sued Imbee for children's privacy violations. Wired reports that Imbee asked kids to "register up front with their full name, date of birth and email address. Only after the child provided the information did Imbee send an activation email to the parents. And if the parents didn't activate, Imbee held on to the tot's data anyway."

'TMI' online

Too Much Information online is becoming a widespread, cross-generation social dilemma, not just a teen online-safety issue (in fact, giving out personal information in itself isn't the safety risk we all used to think it was - see this). For example, your teenaged child just reported details of last night's parent-child argument in her blog; a friend posts a comment in his profile about your mutual past that you don't really want your students or current employer to see; you just mortified your college-age child by calling and mentioning that you noticed in her Facebook profile that "she joined an online discussion group called 'Heavy Drinking''; or "remember that day you called in sick? Your friend just posted pictures of you at the beach that day. Your boss got the story." Some of the above are from a highly readable, slightly unnerving USATODAY piece on TMI. The good news is, both MySpace and Facebook - which together represent nearly 90% of US social networking - are about to add tools that will allow users to keep the online versions of their personal and professional lives separate.

Bullying made easy

University of Michigan student Emmarie spent “countless hours” as a teenager “justifying [her] online journal to her parents,” she writes in her university’s student newspaper, The Michigan Daily. They didn’t understand why she wanted to make her private thoughts so public, but she said it made her “feel connected knowing that someone knew my exact mood at that moment … and my side of the latest gossip.” But then the gossip turned against her. “By giving adolescents the opportunity to voice their opinions in public - an opportunity once reserved for the supposedly more responsible members of the media - the Internet has allowed them to elevate high school drama to a tabloid-like level of sophistication,” writes Emmarie, who is the paper’s associate editorial page writer this summer. “Worse still,” she adds, “there's a degree of suspended reality involved in Internet communication. Without face-to-face interaction, we can't actually experience the consequences of our words, making it easy to hurt others without a second thought.” You may be interested in her conclusion.