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Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for this first full week of July:

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The view from Italy

Ferdinando Offelli, principal of Scuola Media Statale (Junior High) in the Vicenza area of northern Italy, wanted online-safety information for teachers in and parents connected with his school.

"From all over Italy there is a great demand about this kind of material," he wrote The Children's Partnership, a national nonprofit children's advocacy organization in the US. He'd found their "Parents' Guide to the Information Superhighway" (available in their Web site) and translated it into Italian.

His reason? "The fact is that in Italy in these months, parents are getting more and more aware about the problem of the safety in the Internet," Mr. Offelli wrote, "and there's a greater concern and interest in every information. As a man of school, I can't limit myself in defending pupils in classroom. I want to help parents, libraries and social institutions in managing the same problem. I consider your Guide, even translated into Italian, very useful for the purpose, and that's why I spent some months in translating it into Italian."

Then, lacking funds for printing and distribution, enterprising principal that he was, he asked his school's Internet service provider, Keycomm Italia, to sponsor the printed edition. On April 30 the Italian version of the Guide was distributed free to participants at a national meeting of "the Italian UNICEF."

The Web version is "Genitori&Internet" ("Parents&Internet").

Now The Children's Partnership is onto another project even more accessible to parents new to the Internet. Now available in both English and Spanish (the latter with links to Spanish-language sites), the "Parents' Online Resource Center" is a Web guide specially tailored for 'Net newcomers in libraries and community centers. It's designed to work well as the default home page (the first Web page people see) on connected computers in those public spaces. So we'd love it if our subscribers who are librarians would tell us what you think (just e-mail us at feedback@netfamilynews.org). Certainly it's one of the more international projects of its kind. French, German, and Italian versions come next.

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Web New Briefs

  1. Free PCs: the latest twist

    Great news for the college-bound or any parent who's thinking about shelling out for kids to have their own PCs for school! Remember when the phone companies started giving away cellular phones just to get us to sign up for their phone service for three years? Well, it's happening with PCs now. According to the Associated Press, via the New York Times, America Online, Microsoft, and Prodigy are offering free PCs - or rebates that make them free or very cheap.

    You can get the machines through dealerships like Circuit City, Staples, and economy PC companies like eMachines in exchange for making a three-year commitment (around $790) to buy AOL, MS, or Prodigy Internet service. Big computermakers like Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Compaq are expected to offer similar packages as soon as they're finished striking deals with Internet service providers.

    The catch? Computer monitors ($100-$300) probably won't be included in these deals, so you'll pay extra for that rather essential part of the system. And if you're thinking about switching from dialup to higher-speed Internet access via cable modem or DSL (a "digital subscriber line" with your phone company), you're stuck with that three-year dial-up commitment. But those don't seem like deal-breakers, really, and if a computer is all you want, you can still go to auctions at CNET, Amazon.com, or eBay or directly to manufacturer eMachines or dealer Cyberian Outpost for low-cost computer opps.

    Two more stories, by News.com, show how big this snowball's gotten: "AOL, Emachines in PC-Net alliance" and "CompUSA joins the free-PC craze". The latter has links to the retailer sites mentioned in the piece.

  2. Home mortgages on the 'Net

    There's something quite attractive about cutting out the middleman. According to SiliconValley.com, borrower who used QuickenMortgage.com saved $3,000 in brokers' fees by getting his mortgage online. The number of online borrowers is not great right now, but it's growing. Forrester Research expects the number of mortgages handled online to grow from 1.5% this year to 9.6% in 2003. The interesting point that SiliconValley.com brings out: Online mortgage companies may be victims of their own success: By intensifying competition and driving down prices, they could put themselves out of business. The other big argument offline (traditional) mortgage companies offer is the customer-service one. They say they're "relational," while Internet companies are purely "transactional." Big words, those. That's the choice the Internet and e-commerce are increasingly offering us: convenience, low prices, and customer-in-charge online vs. personal service (and lowering prices, thanks to the new competition e-commerce brings) offline. BTW, besides QuickenMortgage.com, another online mortgage company is E-LOAN.

  3. Antique dress patterns, anyone?

    We've always marvelled at how the Internet helps people find each other - whether they're Vietnam veterans, long-lost family members, Llasa Apso owners, or antique dress pattern collectors. (Huh? What was that last one?) Well, we threw that last item in because we found a wonderful story in USAToday that really explains how the Internet helps people with somewhat obscure interests not only find each other but feed their passions for, in this case, those antique dress patterns. In fact, the story is constantly changing because the Web is, too. For example, now there's eBay (and other auctions, some mentioned above in the free-PC story), where people who are passionate about patterns or comics or baseball cards or Beanie Babies can find each other a little more easily. Not that collectors of pre-1920s dress patterns needed eBay. According to USAToday, seamstress Jan Engan started the Vintage Pattern Lending Library long before eBay came along. It's a gentler environment than the wild free-for-all of a public auction, perhaps a reflection of the unique community it serves.

  4. Slashdot.org, the sequel

    Remember when we reported on a site that was very popular after the Columbine High tragedy (in "'Nerds' defined")? Just to keep you posted, the site whose tagline reads, "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters," has been bought. According to The Industry Standard, the buyer is Andover.net, "a more buttoned-down collection of news, software downloads, Web-site tools and tips" for Web developers. For Webheads in your house who get their news from Slashdot, the site's founder and editor, Cmder. Taco (aka Rob Malda), assures his readers that Slashdot won't change. He'll just be able to pay writers now. Way to go, Rob!

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Speaking of Web design

This week we're highlighting two great sites about Web design, one a hands-on teacher that's geared to kids but great for grownups, too; the other a Web-design "museum" that's more for inspiration.

  1. The Monkey that teaches kids

    Last month at the Digital Kids conference we caught up with June Cohen, Wired Digital's vp, content development, and chief evangelist for Web Monkey for Kids. The site, which June told us was launching even as we were speaking, is a logical spinoff of Web Monkey for more experienced Web designers, which got its start in school.

    The original Web Monkey (which speaks well to teens and up) launched in '96 with this simple mission: help anybody who wants to make a Web site. It was HotWired's pro bono project, based on wiring, setting up a Web server, and working with students in K-12 schools on all aspects of Web publishing.

    As Melanie Chausse, a teacher in one of the schools put it, "When I realized what mastery of this language [creating Web sites in HTML] could mean for my students - namely active participation in the future, not just passive observation - I knew that this was something worth taking the time to learn."

    Web Monkey for Kids, for ages 6-12, has four simple sections for kids and a Planning Guide for parents and teachers (including an Internet Safety Guide). The kids' sections are:

    • Lessons - "everything you need to know about building your own home page"
    • Projects - online birthday invitation, slide show, self-portrait, online report, etc.
    • Playground - when they've had enough larnin' and just want to kick back
    • Tools - HTML editors, graphics programs, FTP apps (for sending one's site to the server), color codes (great stuff)

    Web Monkey for Kids practices what it preaches. We were impressed by the clarity and simplicity with which information is presented in Web Monkey for Kids. When your child or student has graduated - say, when s/he's about 11 or 12 - s/he can move right on up to JavaScript, Shockwave, and programming databases "for a data-driven site." Yeah, right. Maybe "the monkeys," as they call themselves, can explain it to us.

  2. Not MOMA - MOWA!

    It stands for Museum of Web Art, and it's a pleasant place to visit. Its premise is that the World Wide Web is a new medium requiring new artists' tools and techniques, and that the art which develops out of all that newness needs to be displayed "in an environment suited to it."

    In the various "galleries," you'll find art unique to the Web: animated promos (kind of like fine-art banner ads), buttons, Web site background patterns (Web "wallpaper"), and "splash screens" (the first page you come to in most ad agencies' sites - rarely conveys any information, meant to impress you with their design genius). Most fun for families is the Kids Wing, with graphical games to play with a mouse. In all the exhibits, artists always tell you what technology they use to create their piece - e.g., Adobe Photoshop, JavaScript, and HTML editor, and what kind of computer. And for the artists in your house, there's a links list of art resources on the Web.

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Fresh perspective on online safety

This one's worth passing around. It's an online-safety series by Larry Magid that started in the Los Angeles Times this week. Larry founded and runs the award-winning Online Safety Project, a partner of Net Family News. Some of us have heard bits of his advice in the column before, but there are also some fresh pointers on:

Here's a reminder that can help make the whole connected-family experience a positive one:

"Rather than approach Internet safety as purely a problem, think of it as an opportunity," Larry writes. "The lessons you and your children learn when grappling with dangers on the Net can apply to many other aspects of life. Knowing how to act defensively, avoiding dangerous places and thinking critically can serve your children well on dates, in the marketplace and in the voting booth as well as on the Internet."

Which segues nicely into this week's brief editorial: Dealing with the Internet, as a medium that will soon be more pervasive than TV in our and especially our children's lives, is becoming an essential part of parenting. Parents who move quickly from denial to acceptance of this reality can turn the Internet into a parenting *aide* - by communicating their concerns (and the love behind them) and working alongside their 'Net-savvy kids to find the best solutions. The mutual respect that grows out of this kind of parenting does a lot more for children than protect them from dangers on the Internet! But tell us what you think about any of this - via feedback@netfamilynews.org.

You can find a concise set of rules and other online-safety details in the two Web sites of the Online Safety Project: SafeKids.com and SafeTeens.com.

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

Sincerely,

Net Family News


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