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Posted January 25th, 2007 by Char Lyn
When the news broke last Thursday that MySpace is again being sued for not doing enough to protect its members from sexual predators, the blogosphere reacted quickly. In a survey of over 40 blogs referring to the incident, all that expressed an opinion said that child safety comes from parents being more involved in their children’s online lives.
In 2000, the FTC tried to help parents by enacting COPPA, which requires commercial websites to actively protect the privacy of anyone under the age of 13. Although already in compliance with COPPA policies, MySpace is showing its commitment to safety with a new tool that will allow parents to track their children’s online usage. Some critics think this tool will lead to MySpace’s downfall, but I think it will survive. Trust me – determined kids will find a way around parental surveillance.
I don’t think the answer lies in technical solutions such as tracking software (though those tools do help). The answer is education.
My call to the blogosphere: Don’t wait for the FTC to create more stringent acts that restrict the rights of all. Instead, take an inexperienced parent or two under your wing and empower them with the information they need to guide their children through the internet. Whether you do it through friendship or teaching a class at your local public library, it’s a way for you to give back to the community and promote the value and diversity of the social media we all produce.
Posted December 20th, 2006 by Char Lyn
With Web 2.0 upon us, those snail mail chain letters have transformed into blog tag, a game even A-list bloggers are willing to play. The latest game of blog tag in which you state five little-known facts about yourself has infected the likes of Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, and Amanda Congdon. Thanks to the memetag, we know that that the game some of these A-listers are playing was started by Jeff Pulver on December 10th.
The graph above shows the number of blog authors who mentioned “blog tag” and “5 things” in the same post during the past 3 months. It seems the A-listers are late to a game that peaked in early November by the bloggers in MySpace.
Perhaps the moral of the tagging story is that the bloglebrities of the world are regular people reflecting the common themes in today’s society. So go head, post five little-known facts about yourself, forward that email that asks you 20 somewhat-embarrassing questions, enjoy what you learn about yourself and others in the process, and know that you are in good company.
Posted December 7th, 2006 by Char Lyn
For the past couple of years, Googling “Martin Luther King” would return the site MartinLutherKing-dot-org* as the top result due in part to a Google bomb by the site’s sponsor—the white supremacist organization Stormfront.org. This example and others like it have pushed educators to teach information literacy to help students refine and validate the search results they get on the Web.
On Nov. 19, an education blogger named Tom Hoffman decided to do something about it. He proposed Google bombing several other Martin Luther King sites to drive MartinLutherKing-dot-org off the first page of results, or at least below the fold of the first page. The next day, a few notable bloggers, including Robert Scoble, picked up on Tom’s blog and added the Google bomb to theirs.
You can view Tom’s The Week in Review to see early results of his campaign. When writing this post, my search for “martin luther king” showed that MartinLutherKing-dot-org has already moved down to 4 on Google, 38 on Yahoo, 1 on MSN, and didn’t appear in the first 10 pages of results on Ask.com. But, it hasn’t even been two weeks, and it takes time to update search engines. I’ll be interested to check back in another week or two and see how the rankings have changed.
Most people recognize the Internet as the ultimate incarnation of the First Amendment’s right to freedom of speech. Perhaps Tom Hoffman’s exercise has shown us that the Internet can also be an expression of democracy. If enough people don’t like what they see, they can vote with the links in their blogs to change that all important popularity meter — the page rank.
* You may notice that I am intentionally not using the actual URL or linking to MartinLutherKing-dot-org in an effort not to promote the site.
** If you are interested in other sites that can help teach information literacy, see Alan November’s list of favorite “sites to validate” for educators.
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