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Dear Subscribers:

Next week we'll be attending the annual "Digital Kids" conference in San Francisco, gathering the latest information on sites and services for kids, as well as what marketers and researchers are saying about their young audiences. There will be so much information, we'll have to publish it for you in digestible chunks, probably over the coming month or so. Here's our lineup for this first week of June:

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Web News Briefs

  1. Privacy progress

    The growth in Web sites actually posting privacy information for users has been "astonishing," as Christine Varney characterizes it. She almost has to say that, as spokesman for the Internet industry's Online Privacy Alliance. But she does have some data to back up the enthusiasm: The number of sites posting some sort of privacy policy has increased from 14% of the general Web site population last year to some two-thirds of the most heavily visited sites this year, according to Interactive Week. Though the two sets of numbers aren't directly comparable, Varney said the trend is clear. The upshot: Improvement (in telling consumers how Web sites are using their information), yes; stellar performance, no. And some privacy advocates say these companies are only paying lip service to consumer privacy.

  2. Mentors for women in science and engineering

    Now here's a terrific idea if you have a girl interested in the sciences: MentorNet, The National Electronic Industrial Mentoring Network for Women in Engineering and Science. It's a mouthful, but check out two anecdotes in a Wired News story about students who have found real help from their e-mailing mentors. MentorNet's goal is "to encourage young women to pursue careers and stay in the sciences by giving them access to a support network of experienced women working in their field of interest."

  3. A publishing company's very own online university

    Textbook publisher Harcourt, Inc., is moving beyond providing course materials to providing courses, according to the New York Times. Harcourt University Project, as it's called will start with "120 online courses toward degrees in four fields: information technology, general studies, business and health systems and administration." We'll probably be seeing more publishing-company project like this. See the Times article for concerns related to this trend.

  4. Trials of a fatter e-rate

    Not everyone is rejoicing over the $1 billion increase the FCC voted last week for the fund that subsidizes Internet connectivity for school and libraries. According to News.com, more than 62,000 schools and libraries have applied for the e-rate, seeking up to 90% discounts on internal wiring costs and 'Net access bills. Some long-distance phone companies don't like being forced to collect what some see as a hidden tax from their customers, and there's an ongoing partisan battle in Congress over the program. Even some of the schools benefiting from the e-rate say they've been buried in e-rate bureaucracy that hasn't much helped them get wired in the past two years.

  5. Not-so-accessible tunes

    If you have a teenager in your house who enjoys downloading and listening to the latest vibes off the Internet, maybe he or she could teach a thing or two to the New York Times's Neil Strauss. Neil wrote a fun piece, "Difficulties in Downloading", about his experience with downloading the Public Enemy's "There's a Poison Goin' On." It's "the first new record by a major artist being sold through direct Internet download before being made available in record stores," Neil reports. History in the making, right? Well, the Dark Ages part of history so far! Neil's conclusion: "Going to a record store suddenly seemed like a very easy and progressive concept." If you know a teenager who is fluidly downloading music from the Web, do tell her to send us her own report)!

  6. A little Web history: Bye-bye, Pathfinder

    We have fond memories of the early days of the Web, back in '94, when about the only publishers on it were universities, research organizations, HotWired, and Time Warner's Pathfinder? Well, one of those pioneers is no longer. Instead of putting all its magazines in one giant Web site, Time Warner is letting them have their own URLs on the Web, according to News.com. So if you type in www.pathfinder.com, you get Time. This was probably practical - since 98% of the people who went to Pathfinder clicked directly to its individual magazine sites anyway.

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Parry goes to Hollywood

This past Memorial Day weekend Highwood Online, a sister non-profit organization working to make the Internet a better place, put on what they called a "global technology festival" called a2K/99 (a2K for Access to Knowledge). Awards (for technology that unifies), speeches (Dan Millman, author of The Way of the Peaceful Warrior), and performances (singer/songwriter Melissa Manchester, the Paul Kennedy Dancers, comedian Charles Fleischer) were given on Friday night, and two "interactive summits" (about community and creativity and art and healing) were held on the Web on Saturday.

Friend and partner Parry Aftab, executive director of CyberAngels, joined Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (D-CA), and Rev. Jesse Jackson as contributors to the online "Town Hall" that wrapped up the festival. Here's her account:

"This weekend I had to rough it in Hollywood. Holly Brooks, founder of GirlSite, among other sites, held a conference at the Brentwood Theater (former home of the "I Love Lucy" show) in Los Angeles. Holly had the vision to pair kids with war veterans. (The Brentwood Theater is located in the Veterans Administration complex in West Los Angeles and houses the VA's New Directions program. Thousands of formerly homeless veterans have found support, caring, and a hot meal at the New Directions center.)

"With the help and supervision of Debbie Allen (of 'Fame' fame), young inner-city children danced and sang with the veterans' singers. It inspired the rest of us to realize how vibrant interactivity can be. Melissa Manchester sang her new song, 'A Mother's Prayer,' written after Littleton. After we wiped away our tears, we laughed when a young child, in response to Arianna Huffington's question about her native Greece, thought the country was the musical Grease. A professor of linguistics from the University of Michigan, who gives voices to people who can't speak and allows them to sing the song of their soul, brought us back to tears again. Hillary Clinton, Maria Shriver, and Senators Boxer and Feinstein all appeared via video. Billy Zane showed us that he isn't the villain in real life (he was the villain in 'Titanic'), when he announced the development of a 'good news' site. (And he was so gorgeous we'd follow him anywhere, even if it weren't a brilliant idea.)

"It was a wonderful showcase of special people who are working with children online and offline. To check out the happenings, drop by OurSite. If you look really hard, you might even catch a fleeting shot of me, sharing information about UNESCO, online safety, and avatars working with non-profits - and wearing a fake nose, mustache and glasses to demonstrate how you never know who you are talking to online."

Material supplied by our partners, CyberAngels, reflects their views, not necessarily those of Net Family News. E-mail us anytime with questions or comments. Parry can be reached at parry@cyberangels.org.

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Dinosaurs, maps, and musicianship

For researchers in other categories, three great sites Homework Central pointed out:

  1. For map enthusiasts

    The Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) Map Viewer offers all kinds of ways to look at maps of the world (USA maps offer more detail). Click on part of the map, and you automatically "zoom in" further. You can click on federal lands, roads, rivers, to see where all those things are on the map of your choice. Downloading's a little slow because the project's been around a while and its server is a little old. If it's too slow and you want slightly more glitzy and commercial maps, the FAQ has links to other great map resources on the Web. We've enjoyed using MapQuest to find the offices of people we wanted to visit on business trips. No need to call for directions; just type in the address and a street map pops up with a big star on it showing the location you seek.

  2. For musicians

    The mission of the Performance Practice Encyclopedia is to help musical performers be as true as possible to the historical context of and composer's intentions for a particular piece. (We remember listening to cellist Yo-Yo Ma talk about how important these goals are to him in an interview on Arts & Entertainment.) The site summarizes ongoing and earlier research on historical practice. Musicians can look up terms (arpeggio, cadenza), genre (early 19th-century American music, Baroque), instruments, or composers and find out what research shows about various treatments in a period or how a composer treated various media (piano, choir, etc.). Quite a resource for the serious student! If there's a professional musician in your family, we'd love to get her or her thinking on whether this is a useful resource for professional musicians, too. Just e-mail us.

  3. And for dinosaur fun (or "infotainment")

    Is someone in your house obsessed with dinosaurs? Here's a great resource for him or her: http://www.homeworkcentral.com/Top8/highschool1.htp?sectionid=16463. (And if any of you can explain this apparently universal obsession among pre-schoolers, could you e-mail us your theory? We've long wondered!)

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Subscriber Antoinette in California sent us the URL of her favorite site, a genealogy resource (after the No. 2 item in the newsletter last week):

http://members.theglobe.com/tonirossi/index.html

She wrote: "It is my favorite site because I can search for my ancestors there, learn how to search, and where to look for more info."

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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend.

Sincerely,

Net Family News


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