Disney's UK kids portal

Disney says it's about to launch a site for UK children and tweens. Disney.co.uk will be a portal pulling together the company's assets (including social networking) for kids, Reuters reports. "At its heart [is] a feature called Disney Xtreme Digital" in which users can "customize multimedia content simultaneously while watching and sharing videos, messages, music, and games." It'll be interesting to see what is meant by "social networking," but Reuters says "online parental-protection measures are wrapped into the site, along with functionality that prompts children to use Disney-proposed online-chat phrases that have an emphasis on being polite while also using language that can reflect whether the user is looking at content focused on pirates or princesses."

Oz kids: Pros on Web

Most Australian children go online for the first time between the ages of 5 and 10 and quickly become Net regulars, "with two-thirds of children logging on from home at least twice a week and 43% doing so daily," Australian IT reports, citing a new report from Nielsen/NetRatings. Nearly half of Australians 6-17 are online daily, the study also found. Older teens "are wedded to the world of Wikipedia, email and social networking, with 75% of those aged 15 to 17 going online daily for study and to chat with friends." Adults with children are likely to be more Net-literate than those without, and parents have "a high level of trust" in the way their kids are managing their personal info online, according to Nielsen. On a recent visit to Oz, author and pundit Howard Rheingold had some thoughts for parents, recorded in the Sydney Morning Herald. And brace yourselves, fellow parents Down Under: video-sharing just got more convenient and local for your kids; YouTube launched its Australian site, Australian IT reports that YouTube just launched its Australian site.

Social stuff taking over Web - worldwide

Wherever you are in the world, parents, your teens’ social networking seems to be here to stay. Online video and social networking are outpacing all other uses of digital media worldwide, according to international market researchers Ipsos, and social networking “is quickly becoming the dominant online behavior globally." In terms of frequency of visits to social sites, South Korea leads the way, followed by Brazil, China, Mexico, US, UK, Canada, India, Germany, France, Japan, and Russia. “While 20% of regular Internet users worldwide had visited a social networking site in the previous 30 days, the figure was 55% in Korea and 24% in the U.S.,” according to MediaPost.com’s report on the Ipsos study, “The Face of the Web.” And this study was just of people 18+. As for the UK, Nielsen/NetRatings has a more granular picture: MySpace is “well in the lead with 6.5 million UK users, compared with 4 million for Bebo and 3.2 million on Facebook,” the BBC reports, but the latter two are growing there much faster and could quite possibly catch up to MySpace in the fall, the BBC cites Nielsen as saying. Then there’s time spent: MySpace users “spent an average of 96 minutes on the site in May,” compared to 152 minutes for Bebo users and 143 minutes on Facebookers.