- Instant-messaging anyone
Avid IM-ers (and if you have teenagers, there's
probably one at your house!) in AOL Time Warner's AIM system are not accustomed
to being able to IM anyone, anywhere - for example friends outside AOL
who use MSN's or Yahoo's Messenger services. But now there's a new kid
on the block who's making that possible: Trillian.
Trillian is free instant-messaging software that
people can download at CeruleanStudios.com
(or CNET's Download.com and other
such spots), and it has been noticed by the people who measure Web traffic.
Its user numbers arrived on Jupiter/Media Metrix's radar screen in February,
and they're growing fast. April's figure - 610,000 unique users - was
up 77% from February's. That's just Cerulian Web site figures; CNET reports
3 million downloads from its Web site, according to O'Reilly
& Assoc. senior analyst Clay Shirky. (That compares with the 150 million
IM screen names claimed by big daddy AIM and the 130 million claimed by
ICQ, also owned by AOL.)
Why should parents care? Because 1) they may want
to know the names of software products kids are downloading and using
on home PCs - especially in the extremely popular instant-messaging category,
and 2) IM literacy is becoming an essential skill in the workplace into
which present and future graduates are headed. "People in 82% of all organizations
are using some sort of IM application," according to a study cited by
CNET's News.com.
And Scott Werndorfer, one of Trillian's creators, told us this week that
under-25 and corporate users are equally represented among his users.
Trillian is "terrific," O'Reilly's Clay Shirky
told us. "It's great stuff." But it doesn't provide total interoperability,
Clay added, referring to the open-standard communications we all have
with email, no matter what product or service we use to write or send
it. Using Trillian is like having a conversation at which you're the center.
Everybody involved has to talk to or go through you, the Trillian user
- you can talk to anyone, but they can't talk to anyone except
you! So Trillian isn't the "killer app" that email is yet, but a lot of
IM-ing teens will download it because at least they can now IM with friends
on any service, from Microsoft's to AOL's to Yahoo's.
A good topic for a parent-child or teacher-student
conversation about instant-messaging (from which a grownup could learn
a whole lot about IM-ing and how a child is using it) is IM etiquette.
In "Chat
talk: My instant messaging do's and don'ts", David Coursey at ZDNet
does a great job of describing the pluses and minuses of socializing with
IM. And even more relevant to a parent-child discussion are some readers'
responses to David's column with their own tips and experiences. The
articles' orientation is a little corporate, but basic behaviors and discoveries
are described that might make for discussion points. After a general conversation
about how IM-ing works for teens at your house or school, they could be
asked whether they follow any basic or unwritten rules (like, just saying
"hi" wastes people's time or don't make your messages too long). And that
could lead to discussion of what they talk about and who they talk with
in IMs.
A great backgrounder on the whole subject of instant-messaging
in both home and work environments is "Generation IM," published this
past spring at Yahoo
Internet Life.
And here's the experience of one of our own readers,
featured in this newsletter last
March. We'd love to hear of your family's experiences with teens and
instant-messaging - via feedback@netfamilynews.org.
- National Geo's online geography bee
Kids can practice up for the National Geographic
Bee online at the GeoBee Challenge .
Here's a sample question: "Qanats, an ancient system of tunnels built
by the Persians, are still used by people in Iran. Qanats are used for
what purpose?" The multiple-choice answers are: irrigation, food storage,
military defense. (We played, and this is the one question we got wrong.
We guessed "military defense," but the tunnels were used for irrigation.)
This year's winner was a home-schooled fifth-grader
in Michigan - the bee's youngest winner yet, according to the Muskegon
Chronicle. Ten-year-old Calvin McCarter won a $25,000 college scholarship.
Here's NationalGeographic.com's
report.
- New site for aspiring engineers
GuideMeNACME.org
has just unveiled. It's an information site for middle and high school
students interested in engineering careers. Funded by Lockheed Martin
and IBM, it's a project of the National Action Council for Minorities
in Engineering (NACME), the US's largest private source of scholarships
for minority engineering students. Its goal is to "produce more than 250,000
minority engineers in the next decade." The site has resources, for students,
parents, and educators.
- New study of tech in US schools
One of the most interesting findings we saw in
this week's report on tech in US schools is how much schools are relying
on students for tech support! The survey of public school leaders, "Are
We There Yet?", found 54% of school districts rely on students for
technical support. "In some cases, they are assuming major responsibilities,"
says the report. "In 43% of districts, students troubleshoot for hardware,
software, and infrastructure problems. In 39% of districts, students set
up equipment and wiring. In more than one-third (36%) of districts, students
take on technical maintenance." But the overall conclusion of the study
is that the answer to its title is "no." "The bottom line: While school
districts have made great progress in joining the digital age," says the
study's press release, "they still have a long way to go to take full
advantage of technology for teaching and learning in the classroom." What's
needed is better integration of the Internet into everyday instruction,
better Net training for teachers, better anticipation and planning for
the way the Internet changes school, and broader community involvement
(here's the Guidelines
page).
Meanwhile, public schools in the US will spend
$9.5 billion on information technology by 2006, up almost 16% from this
year, CNET reports,
citing a new study by market researcher IDC. "Computer hardware will account
for just over a quarter of district technology budgets, according to the
study from market researcher IDC. And increasingly, school systems are
turning from desktops to notebooks in this category."
- CIPA decision: Could it affect schools too?
Possibly. The ruling against the Children's Internet
Protection Act (CIPA) last week directly addressed filtering in public
libraries - not the part of the law affecting schools. However, according
to eSchoolNews,
"some legal experts believe the [US federal] court's findings might encourage
students to challenge the law as well." Because the judges ruled that
CIPA violates library patrons' First Amendment rights, someone could argue
that it similarly violates students' rights, the article suggests, even
though schools are considered limited public forums (while libraries are
public forums). That means that, in schools, the government "can impose
some restrictions - providing they aren't discriminatory," according to
eSchoolNews. "Discriminatory" is the key word in that sentence. Here's
why: In their decision, the judges wrote that "any software filter that
is reasonably effective in blocking access to Web pages that fall within
[a filtering company's] category definitions [for what sites to block]
will necessarily erroneously block a substantial number of Web pages that
do not fall within its category descriptions," eSchoolNews relates. CIPA
expert Nancy Willard interprets this to mean filters can discriminate
based on viewpoint, which would be grounds for a challenge of the law
as it applies to schools as well as libraries, eSchoolNews reports. (Nancy
is director of the Responsible
Netizen Institute, associated with the University of Oregon.)
- Euro findings on filtering's effectiveness
"Good filters are probably the best way to block
at least most 'adult' sites," a recent study in Europe found, "but it
is difficult to find protection against violent sites especially ... and
recent tests show that many filters are not effective." That's from a
summary of findings from a Consumers
for Internet Awareness (CISA) study, partly funded by the European
Commission. The short, incisive summary explains four ways filtering products
work and offers advice to parents. Its writers point out some noteworthy
failings of US-based filtering: It only really blocks content in English!
And another point US companies should be mindful of: "Bear in mind that
many of the filtering products are American. This means that the criteria
for filtering can be very much influenced by American values, for example
very strict about nudity, but not so strict about weapons or violence."
Test-Aankoop, a Belgian consumer organization
that publishes consumer magazines in four countries, tested 18 filtering
products, and found only three effective: McAfee
Internet Guard Dog Version 3.13 (2), N2H2 Inc's
N2H2 for Home (UKE) A 1.0, and We-WEBCorp's We-Blocker
2.0.1 Build 82.
- Help in telling virtual from real?
A company in California says its technology can
help prosecutors distinguish between virtual and real pornography - something
it says they'll find helpful since the US Supreme Court struck down a
law outlawing computer-altered child-porn images. Bay Total Service Provider's
technology "constantly scours the Internet for copyrighted material, including
movies, images, music, text and trademarks," according to Wired
News. The company says the same system could be used to detect virtual
child porn. "The technology works by extracting what [Bay Total] calls
the file's 'digital DNA.' It can even find copies that are cropped, color-shifted
or corrected," Wired News reports. Police and prosecutors might find this
helpful because, since the Supreme Court decision, "more suspects are
claiming that the seemingly illicit pictures and videos found on their
hard drives are ersatz, police say. And an Illinois man who had already
pleaded guilty to possessing 2,600 images of kiddie porn was freed from
jail when a judge ruled that the state's law was unconstitutional because
it failed to distinguish between real and fake porn," according to Wired
News.
- Porn-reporting Web site debuts
ObscenityCrimes.org
launched this week. It's a Web site where people concerned about pornography
(not just child porn) can report what they think might be violations of
US federal laws prohibiting the distribution of obscene materials. The
site is a project of Morality in Media (MIM), which describes itself as
"a national, not-for-profit, interfaith organization established in 1962
to combat obscenity and uphold decency standards in the media." Another
project of the organization is the National Obscenity Law Center, "a clearinghouse
of legal materials on obscenity law."
According to MIM's press release about the site,
it will forward reports "to the appropriate United States Attorney and
to the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section in
Washington for investigation and possible prosecution." Presumably, MIM
will also screen out reports of material that can't be prosecuted. Child-porn
tips will be forwarded to the National Center for Missing & Exploited
Children's CyberTipline (CyberTipline.com
or 800.843.5678).
Here's how it works: A form appears on the user's
screen after s/he clicks on "Make a Report." The form requires name, address,
and county of residence (MIM provides the appropriate US attorney for
that address), and the Internet "address" (URL) of the offending site.
The reporting person describes the material by selecting words or phrases
in a multiple-choice list. MIM says the report form "does not accuse anyone
of a crime. It simply asks the US attorney to investigate for possible
violations of Internet obscenity laws." Our thanks to the National
Center for Missing & Exploited Children for pointing out this development.
- Porn-napping update
You've seen our reports on "porn-napping" before,
but this victim didn't just log off in disgust. According to Agence France
Press (via the Singapore
Straits-Times), Harvard University student Ben Edelman, who was searching
for a bicycle repair shop, clicked on one and got a hard-core porn site.
When he looked into it, he found that the new owner of "BicycleBill.com,"
Domain Strategy of Montreal, owns more than 4,000 expired Web addresses,
or domain names, most of them innocent-sounding like Bicycle Bill. AFP
reports that some 40,000 expired domain names have been similarly grabbed
by "porn-nappers." Here's a public-service page
on porn-napping and cyber-squatting at the Online Internet Institute,
an ed-tech consultancy.
- Kids teaching parents
The UK Department of Education's Parents Online
project targeting lower-income areas has had quite an impact in the Newcastle
area. According to the BBC,
the percentage students' homes with PCs in the Throckley school district
has gone from 6% to 57% since Parents Online got started there (the BBC
doesn't give the year). The project includes workshops in which students
teach their parents how to use the Internet and send email, as well as
workshops just for grownups. The piece cites a BTopenworld survey that
"bears out the idea that the web is coming of age as an educational resource
for both parents and children." The survey found that...
- 48% of parents think the Internet is now as
useful as books for their child's educational development.
- Parents are turning to the Web to improve their
own parenting skills, with 38% seeking tips online.
- 94% of students in higher education say that
they could not do their degree without access to the Internet.
- Digital divide still an issue
A recent report by three consumer organizations
found that it's too early to say the technology digital divide is closed,
reports Reuters (via CNET).
"Although nearly two-thirds of all Americans now have access to the Internet,
less affluent households run the risk of being shut out of the digital
economy because they are not as likely to be online," said the report,
sponsored by the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union and the
Civil Rights Forum on Communications Policy. Commerce Department figures
show that the gap is narrowing (as of September 2001, 66% of the US population
used the Net, with access growing fastest among households earning less
than $15,000 per year). The department also shows that racial and ethnic
gaps have narrowed. "But households earning more than $50,000 are still
three times as likely to have Internet access at home than households
earning less than $25,000," Reuters reports.
