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Dear Subscribers:

Happy Halloween! We've gotten some great responses to our Subscriber Survey - nearly a 10% response rate, which is outstanding - and we want to thank each of you for your thoughtful answers. We'll let you know what we've learned soon (still compiling). New responses are always welcome ! Here's our lineup for this last week of October:

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Not-so-scary trick-or-treating

It's a little late for Halloween recipe-swapping, but not for trick-or-treating safety. Parent Soup has some tips, as does FamilyPlay.com.

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Lessons learned: 2 videos

One thing we've learned from your survey responses is that we have many teachers, technology coordinators, librarians, and other subscribers with professional as well as parental interest in Web news and online safety. We've just seen two new educational videos - one for parents, one for teens - and we think many of you would find them useful in your work with young cyber-explorers.

We're singling out educators only because the videos are expensive ($145 each) - they were developed for the education and social-services markets. But there probably isn't a parent out there who wouldn't be moved by this material. Entitled "Cyber-Seduction: Danger on the Web" and "Cyber-Seduction: What Parents Need to Know," both videos feature Caroline and Brian, two young teens who met adults online and were lured into out-of-state meetings. They tell their own stories on camera (Brian himself, now mature well beyond his years, gives the rules about giving out personal information online). The stories are interwoven with comments and context from their mothers, FBI special agent Randy Aden in Los Angeles; Shirley Goins, executive director of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC); and psychologist Samuel Kimbles.

Both the children and their mothers were courageous to "go public" with their stories. Filmmaker Gary Mitchell told us in an interview this week that Caroline and Brian were willing to go on camera because they wanted to help keep others from experiencing what they went through. These children's cases are not typical. It's important to view the videos in this context. Gary told us in an interview, "My whole career I've tried to avoid making scare films. We weren't trying to do that at all, but the stories were inherently scary." They're scary but not sensationalized in any way.

Gary told us he's been doing abuse-prevention documentaries since 1975, starting with "Child Abuse: Cradle of Violence." In the early '80s he began using animation and puppets to "talk" directly to children, teaching good values as well as how they need to protect themselves against threats to their well-being.

We asked Gary why he picked this particular subject. "We've been aware of developments in the child-abuse arena and people working in it for so long, and it just hit me one day that we're remiss if we don't get out there with a prevention picture on this right away." Did he intend to do separate videos for parents and teens from the start? No, he said, "As I was doing the kids' one it became apparent that a lot of the material [from interviews with the adults in the film] wasn't that appropriate for a kids' film, but it was perfect for what parents should be hearing."

Some examples:

The videos come with a discussion guide, including take-away lessons. They can be ordered at the film company's Web site, EmpowerKids.com. If any of you do view these videos or would like to recommend other resources your school or family has found useful, do email us!

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Web News Briefs

  1. Plagiarism.org

    The Office of Student Conduct at University of California, Berkeley, says that cheating at Berkeley has "more than doubled in the last five years." And the Internet, they say - with Web sites that make plagiarism easy - is partly to blame. Enter Plagiarism.org, says ABCNews.com. With this site, developed by a former grad student at Berkeley, any passages in a student's paper that have been cut and pasted from a cheat site are detected and underlined. The Office of Student Conduct uses Plagiarism.org to investigate cheating accusations, ABCNews reports, adding that there are two other cheating-detection programs (URLs not given).

    Meanwhile, Web-published class notes are another topic of debate on university campuses. Among other questions, a legal one raised by a New York Times piece on the subject is: "Is the commercial distribution of a student's class notes a violation of the professor's copyright?" Some class-notes sites are Study24-7, Versity.com, and StudentU.com.

  2. Campaigning on the Web

    You can tell the Internet has really become a force in the US political scene when the Federal Election Commission starts coming up with rules for candidates' Web sites. According to the Nando Times, this week the federal election regulators "asked for public input on what rules and regulations should govern campaigning on the Web." The Commission also said it would not count independent Web sites that support George W. Bush ("fan sites") as contributions to his presidential campaign. His campaign people had asked the FEC for a ruling on that.

  3. AltaVista a portal now

    Somewhat belatedly, it seems, AltaVista this week joined the ranks of all those search-engines-cum-portals out on the Web. According to InternetNews.com, the new AltaVista is called AltaVista Live. "Portal" is an Internet industry buzzword for a search engine that includes a whole bunch of other services: a directory (like Yahoo!'s) free email, chat, discussion boards, user-customized news, stock quotes, and - of course - e-shopping (Lycos is pushing e-commerce heavily now too). Many portals, like Lycos and Disney's Go Network now also offer "family filtering" - filtered searches that turn up only child-appropriate material. But AltaVista was always a darn good search engine, especially when one is looking for material on obscure subjects or for individuals who aren't especially famous. But the search engine itself has been redesigned too. See the InternetNews.com piece for AltaVista's description of how it'll now give use "easier access to more relevant results."

  4. Personal Web sites

    By next spring nearly half of Net users (in the US) will have their own Web sites, according to NPD Online Research, via CyberAtlas. A quarter of users already have personal sites. Most of those sites have been online for less than a year. As for why they do it? "Among those Internet users who have introduced or plan to launch a site soon, almost half reported the main reason as being to learn how." Hobbies (at 60%) and family (38%) were the top two subjects for the sites' content. Does anyone in your family have his or her own Web page? If so, tell them to email us about why they built it. And send us your URLs (personal Web pages only!) - we'd like to start a section of subscribers' own sites.

    And we also learn from CyberAtlas that one-fifth of Europeans are Net users (as opposed to about a third of Americans), ranging from 5.8% in Portugal to 38% in Norway. The gender breakdown there is 61% male, 29% female (close to 50-50 in the US), the average age is 32, and the average user logs on three times a week.

  5. Is yours a 'high-volume household'?

    According to Editor & Publisher's WebTrendWatch, 20% of US households are. That means that, among other things, they: Send and receive at least 240 messages a week, more than twice the number of the average household; use nearly twice the communications tools (6) as the average household; and do almost four times as much e-mail. For some this is not a good thing. According to Wired News, CEO Eric Benhamou of $6 billion networking company 3Com surprised colleagues with some "sobering remarks" at a conference last week. Speaking of the impact of wiring millions of homes, he remarked on how little "hard data" there is on how a more connected world could fundamentally change society. He cited the "growing imbalance in opportunities between the technology haves and have nots."

  6. For informed holiday shopping

    Yet another bargain-trolling service debuted this week. Only, R U Sure isn't a Web site, reports Wired News. It's software that runs in the background on one's computer and "accompanies the shopper on the Web" (see the Wired piece to see how it works). Other such services - shopping search engines - are BottomDollar.com, mySimon, and DealTime. If you'd like to try one of those bargain-hunters out in the toy category, you could pick a toy from Duracell's just-announced "Top 10 Kids' Toy Picks for '99". And if you want to read about a product before you search for the best price, check out Epinions, which not only publishes product owners' reviews, but rewards and rates the reviewers, according to the New York Times. The Times reports on three similar services that don't, however, go as far as providing incentives for good product reviews.

  7. Happy 30th, Internet

    Thirty years ago today (Oct. 29, 1999), the mighty word "login" was transmitted from one of the "Internet's" first two nodes to the other. Well, back then it was called the Arpanet. The two nodes were at the Stanford Research Institute and the University of California, Los Angeles. The next node, at Cal Santa Barbara joined the Net a month later, then in another month one at the University of Utah. Finally, the coasts were linked when a node at Cambridge, Mass., consulting company Bolt Beranek & Newman (which had won the Pentagon contract to build and run the Arpanet) joined in. For you history buffs, get the details and a lot more in a long backgrounder in the New York Times. As for the Internet's next giant leap, see an interview with the World Wide Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee in Wired News about his new book, "Weaving the Web." (Here are reviews in Salon.com and the San Francisco Chronicle.)

  8. Online karaoke, anyone?

    Wonder what Tim Berners-Lee thinks about this milestone. Well, the story's not just about doing karaoke online, but that's part of it. It's a fun New York Times piece about mixing voice and text in chat. "Voice chat," as it's called, is a kind of Internet telephony, instant messaging + audio. It has its pluses and minuses. It doesn't allow for quite the anonymity as some people like about text chat, but that may make some people feel more secure - because they can tell a little bit more about the people who are in the chat room with them (say, if the person's male or female and maybe if s/he's a teen or a senior citizen). The Times says hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded some sort of voice-chat software in the past six months (you also need a mic). So if you hear funny sounds emanating from the room where your family's connected computer is, it may not be a kid with her Walkman earphones on… or the dog in the middle of a high-speed dream.

  9. Convenient cure for munchies

    Maybe too convenient. Food.com is now making it even easier for college freshmen to gain weight! According to ComputerCurrents.com, students can log on and request delivery now, or tell the site exactly what time they want their munchies delivered. Food.com says it has 13,000 affiliate restaurants nationwide (mostly near large campuses right now, such as the U. of Michigan). The article says there are 15 million college and university students in the US, and - surprising to us - only 50% of them are connected to the Net right now. Jupiter Communications says the figure will grow to 95% by 2003.

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Online safety in French and Spanish, too

It's great to see Web resources in languages other than English. A new one that's just come to our attention - WebAwareness.org - is a completely bilingual resource site for parents, teachers, and librarians by the Media Awareness Network in Canada. The site is meant to "highlight the new challenges and issues that arise as children and young people go on the Internet," MNet says. It highlights a lot - where kids "go" on the Net (Web sites, chat, newsgroups, email, instant messaging), how to authenticate information on the Net, privacy and how kids are marketed to on the Net. They'll also provide downloadable PowerPoint workshops as teaching aids on these subjects (you'll need to register to gain access).

Then there are MNet's teaching tools for *children* (in both French and English):

The Children's Partnership - a US nonprofit children's advocacy organization in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. - has developed the "The Parent's Guide to the Information Superhighway" and the "Parents' Online Resource Center," both in Spanish as well as English.

TCP's site is in "frames," which means the resources in their site don't have their own addresses, so here's how to find them:

"The Parent's Guide to the Information Superhighway" - On the site's home page, click on the title in the left-hand margin, then "Click here for a Spanish language version of the Guide."

"Parents' Online Resource Center" - On the home page, click on "Parents Online" in the left-hand margin, then on "Bienvenidos" for the Spanish version.

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

Sincerely,

Net Family News


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