Jimmy Kimmel tapped into this with a challenge to parents to give their kids a terrible present for Christmas, which a lot of parents were more than happy to respond. Even without Kimmel, there have been plenty of videos submitted of parents pranking their kids with an awful present.

One such video is picking up steam on YouTube, and has by far been my favorite of all the submissions. Being a White Sox fan, I absolutely understand this girl’s reaction to receiving a Chicago Cubs pillow pet for Christmas. My response would have been more smarmy than hers, and would have just bragged about winning a World Series in the past 10 years. Not sure she was alive in 2005 though.

Here’s the rest of the submissions, enjoy, and have a Happy New Year!

The sources of the info in this graphic are a Bullguard Internet Security Survey and Parents, Children & Social Networking Consumer Reports.

“There is a lot you can tell about a person by reading their Facebook profile,” says Loreal Lynch at OnlineSchools.com. “From incriminating photos to friendship insights, Facebook tells all. That’s one of the reasons so may parents are joining Facebook, according to a recent study. As it turns out, more than half of parents use the popular social network to spy on their kids’ Internet activity–and 11 percent of parents joined Facebook for the sole purpose of snooping on their kids! But with the growing number of underage Facebook users, are parents snooping, or safeguarding? Find out the stats on parents and Facebook in the below infographic.”

Here’s the infographic:

Courtesy of: OnlineSchools.com

Jackie Cohen at AllFacebook, who gets a hat tip for pointing out this infographic, says, “Half of all parents have been keeping tabs on their teenage kids via Facebook. If anything, we’re surprised that the percentage isn’t higher.”

I guess the last question stated in the infographic is the real question: invasion of privacy or good parenting? What do you think?

That means subscribers now have access to episodes of Yo Gabba Gabba, more episodes of Spongebob SquarePants, True Jackson VP, iCarly, and Dora the Explorer from Nickelodeon, so the children have more things to watch on Netflix.

The content expansion also includes new episodes of MTV’s Jersey Shore and The Hills, as well as episodes of The Buried Life and The City. It also has new shows from BET like American Gangster, and more Comedy Central content like episodes of The Sarah Silverman Program. There is also some amount of unspecified content form VH1, Logo, and Spike.

“We’re pleased to be able to offer programs to suit different ages and tastes and, as always, remain committed to bringing you more great TV shows and movies to watch instantly when and where you prefer,” wrote Netflix VP Content Acquisition Cindy Holland on the Netflix Blog.

Netflix is rapidly expanding its streaming on-demand offerings. Last week, the company announced a multi-year deal with Miramax, which will see the addition of a whole bunch of movies, which when combined, account for 284 Academy Award nominations.

In addition to expanding upon its content offerings, Netflix has also continued to expand upon the number of devices it supports. Recently, the company announced a new Android app that works for some Android devices, and said that they were developing for additional Android devices. As Google’s mobile platform continues to gain market share of its own, compatibility here will be key for continued Netflix growth, especially considering that Google is now renting movies directly from the Android Market and YouTube.

Doodle 4 Google is a nationwide contest that asks K-12 students to submit their own Google-inspired doodles. This year, the theme was “what I’d like to do someday.”

Last year, the contest received 33,000 entries. This year, the contest grew to over 107,000 applicants. Last year, students had to submit through their schools, but this year Google allowed parents to register their kids directly and submit doodles on their behalf.

Here’s the way the contest was judged: A panel of Google execs and guest judges narrowed down the 107,000 submissions to 400 state finalists across grade groups. The “guest judges” included celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg, Garfield creator Jim Davis, Michael Phelps and Diary of a Wimpy Kid author Jeff Kinney.

Those 400 state finalists were then narrowed down to 40 regional finalists. Online voting, open to the public, narrowed that down to the final four, one per age group. The winner was selected by Google.

So what did Matteo win for all this? A lot, actually. He will receive a $15,000 scholarship to the college of his choice, a trip to NYC, and new laptop and a digital design tablet. Matteo’s school with also get a $25,000 dollar grant for the establishment of a computer lab or other tech services.

Matteo won the whole thing coming out of the K-3 field. Here are the 3 winners from the other age groups- 4-6 (My Galaxy by Joseph Miller), 7-9 (The Majestic Sea by Justas Varpucanskis) and 10-12 (Illustration by Hannah Newsom) respectively:

State winner from Kentucky for the grades 10-12 “Google Tattoo” is probably my favorite of the state finalists. Come on, this one is awesome:

The survey also found that 76% of parents with kids on Facebook have "friended" their teenagers, while 29% of these teens would un-friend their parents if they were given the option. Heartwarming isn’t it? These kids are twice as likely to un-friend their mothers as opposed to their fathers.

Along with the survey, AOL has released a new product called Safe Social, which provides parents with a "360 degree view of their child’s social networking life". This includes a report card of overall social networking activity and identification of potential red flags.

Safe Social requires consent from the child to allow parents access to their kids’ friends list and what they’re posting on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Parents can even get alerts about potential predator relationships and indications of "at-risk behaviors" like references to alcohol, bullying or suicide.

"Predators, whether bullies or sexual offenders, often masquerade as friends," says John Ryan, AOL’s head of Online Safety and Security. "The key is to unmask them. Safe Social takes an across-the-board look at your kid’s friends and checks them against more than 50 databases and other factors, such as distance, to help you find out if they are, who they say they are."

Safe Social also addresses reputation management issues for teens, giving parents the ability to review postings, uploaded photos in which their kids are tagged, etc.
 

"Keeping kids safe no longer only means teaching them about the dangers of alcohol or how to deal with a school bully," says McAfee’s Tracy Mooney. "This report is a wake-up call to the real dangers our teens face when they make themselves vulnerable online. As a mom, it worries me that kids aren’t practicing safe ‘street smarts’ when they’re online."

"Kids know not to talk to strangers – it’s one of the first lessons you teach them. But online, there’s a sense of trust and anonymity, so kids let their guard down," says Mooney. "Kids would never hand out their name and address to a stranger in the real world, so it’s alarming to see how many kids do that very thing online."

The study of 955 US 13-17 year olds, conducted by Harris Interactive found:

- 69% of 13-17 year olds have updated their status on social networking sites to include their physical location
- 28% of teens chat with people they don’t know in the offline world
- 43% shared their first name
- 24% shared their email address
- 18% shared a personal photo of themselves
- 12% shared their cell phone number
- Girls are more likely than boys to chat with people online that they don’t know in the offline world, (32% vs. 24%)
- 14% of 13-17 year olds admit to having engaged in some form of cyberbullying behavior in 2010
- 22% say they wouldn’t know what to do if they were cyberbullied
- 87% of teens go online somewhere other than at home
- 54% access from their friends’ or relatives’ houses
- 30% of teens access the Web through a phone and 21% through a video game system
- 23% of kids go online anywhere with an open Wi-Fi signal
- 38% close or minimize the browser when their parents enter the room
- 32% clear the browser history when they are done using the computer
- 55% of 13-17 year olds hide what they do online from parents
- 27% accidentally allowed a virus, spyware, or other software to infect the family computer
- 46% admit to downloading music or videos from a free service
- 16% of 16-17 year old boys have downloaded x-rated content

The report in its entirety can be found here (pdf). Are you surprised with any of the stats listed? Share your thoughts.

Before I comment on the letter, I want to tell you a little bit about its author, Tony Orsini. I can’t say that I know him very well, but all four of my kids attended his Ridgewood New Jersey middle school and he is a good principal. He is passionate about what’s right for his students, and I guarantee you that every word in his letter is built on what he believes is right.

I just think he is misguided on this one. And it is very understandable how that happens, because it happens to all of us when faced with new technology. Because the technology is the thing being injected into our otherwise settled equation, it feels right that the technology is the problem, when we are our own worst enemies. It’s not the technology. It’s us.

Think about it. Tony points out that Facebook and other social networks have become the newest venues for bullying, which is an incredibly serious problem. But the issue isn’t where the bullying is happening. The issue is the bullying. Let me make this point with a personal story.

Even though I am older in dirt, I was in sixth grade once myself. My family had moved from another state and I was "the new kid." I was short and scrawny–a patsy. I was the easiest victim they’d ever seen, so the other boys in my grade bullied me for well over a year at every recess every school day.

One day, in seventh grade, I decided that I wasn’t going to subject myself to it anymore, so when everyone else went to play at recess, I just plopped myself down away from the other kids and did not move from there. A teacher who had apparently never noticed the bullying going one for months noticed me today and asked me what was wrong, so I told her. At that point, the school cracked down on the kids and my life got better.

Schools have changed a lot since I was 12. They now take bullying extremely seriously and no kid would go through what I did, because the kids are told that the adults care about this problem and that they can be approached. I never knew that anyone would care if I told them and the bullies had made it clear that that wasn’t my best strategy. So, I wasn’t intending to tell someone about my problem when I removed myself physically from the bullying. I had taken Tony’s solution. Instead of addressing the problem, I canceled my own recess.

So, I understand where Tony is coming from. If they are bullying you at recess, cancel recess. If they are bullying you in Facebook, cancel Facebook. But that was my solution as a 12-year-old. Fortunately, the adults, the teachers and other educators, have spent the last 40 years figuring out how to stop bullying without canceling recess. And as far as I can tell, it has been highly effective. The teachers try to monitor bullying behavior more than they once did, yes, but the main thing they do is to empower the victims of bullying by telling them what to do when it happens. And they also drill into kids from an early age that bullying is unacceptable. And it works. Without canceling recess.

The truth is that although Facebook seems like this brave new world to us oldsters (and in some ways it is), it doesn’t repeal the laws of human behavior. The problem is not bullying on Facebook. The problem is bullying. 40 years ago, many teachers said things like "boys will be boys" over this problem because they felt helpless about what they could do to stop it. It is understandable that we might feel a bit helpless about cyber-bullying now, but canceling Facebook is not the solution.

Instead, we must accept that bullying is unacceptable no matter where it happens. And we must accept that in the real world or the cyberworld, adults can’t always monitor what kids do. And we must accept that this technology will be used no matter what we want. At what age is Facebook OK? How do children learn how to act appropriately online? We must step up to teach them and we must emphasize that they are accountable for what they do online as well as everywhere else. And we must emphasize that we care what happens to them online, just as we do everywhere else. Canceling Facebook is just drawing a line that cannot hold.

Having said that, i have no issue with parents who want to follow Tony’s advice. That might be the right approach for your kid. But it can’t be right for every kid. There are plenty of mature eighth graders that can handle Facebook, just as there are probably some ninth graders that can’t. Each parent can make that decision based on their own kid. If Tony’s letter helps parents reclaim their confidence to make that decision, good. But if his letter just scares everyone into thinking that putting our heads in the sand will keep the cyber-bullies away, that would be a shame.

It’s easy to demonize Facebook for cyber-bullying. It’s harder to address the problem of student behavior, whether it happens online or off. But just as 40 years ago we ignored the problem offline, we have learned enough to know that we must confront bullying wherever it happens. On Facebook, too.

Thanks for raising the issue, Tony. I know it comes from a good heart. I just think we need to take a different approach.

Comments

"Today’s kids see advertising everywhere – in movies and TV shows, outdoors, on phones, in games," said David C. Vladeck, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. 

"That’s why it’s important to teach them how to apply critical thinking skills to the ads they see.  The resources at Admongo.gov help kids figure out who’s responsible for ads, what ads are saying, and what ads want their target audiences to do."

The campaign is targeted to "tweens" ages 8 to 12, and includes a free game-based website at Admongo.gov. The curriculum is tied to national standards of learning in language arts and social studies that teachers can use to educate students, a library of fictional ads that can be used as teaching tools, and activities parents can do with their children.

The online game allows kids to create an avatar and features four levels of play to help them think critically about advertising. In "The Atrium," they identify the ads that are around them.  In the "Assemblimator," they learn how to take apart an ad, evaluate its claims, and figure out how ads try to persuade people.  In the "Planadtarium," they find out how ads are targeted, and in "The Adgitator," they build and target their own ads.  Throughout the game, players learn to ask the three critical questions about ads, no matter where they see them:  Who is responsible for the ad?  What is it actually saying?  What does it want me to do?

"To me, the great thing about Admongo is that its gaming format is designed to reach out to children right at the age where they can actually distinguish between content and advertising," said C. Lee Peeler, President and CEO of the National Advertising Review Council.
 

Google demonstrates how to to lock SafeSearch with the following short clip:

When SafeSearch is locked, there is a big image in the top right-hand corner of Google that shows colored balls. This makes it easy to tell whether or not SafeSearch is locked. "Even from across the room, the colored balls give parents and teachers a clear visual cue that SafeSearch is still locked," Google says. "And if you don’t see them, it’s quick and easy to verify and re-lock SafeSearch."

You can lock SafeSearch by simply going to Search Settings from the Google home page. There is a "SafeSearch filtering" section there, where you can adjust the settings and lock them if you choose. When you lock SafeSearch, you are automatically choosing the "strict" setting (as opposed to moderate).

Can Certain Words Get My Content Blocked?

People have often wondered if their content is being blocked in SafeSearch if they have certain words on an otherwise family-friendly site. In fact, Google’s Matt Cutts recently addressed such concerns in a video at Google’s Webmaster Central YouTube channel.

"We try to write our algorithm such that just having a single word mentioned here or there really won’t have that much of an impact," says Cutts. "Now, of course some words are worse than others. If you’ve got some slang or something that’s misspelled and really is not a word that you can repeat in polite company, that makes it more likely that that page will get flagged. But in most cases you should be in relatively good shape as long as most of your content or most of the words on your page are family-friendly."

It stands to reason that if you are producing content that you are hoping that families and children will view, it’s in your best interest to keep your language family-friendly. That’s pretty much common sense, but Google has put it into a search engine visibility light as well.

Related Articles:

> Google’s Safe Search Filters

> Google Won’t Remove Pages About You

Research released from Pew Internet, however, seems to contradict the notion that Twitter is just for the old. In fact, according to Pew, three groups of Internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of tweeting and status updating. These are social network users, those who connect to the Internet via mobile devices, and younger Internet users (under 44).

Of course, what kids consider to be old, may often be well below 44, so they may still have a point. Pew does say that the more devices someone owns, the more likely they are to use Twitter, and adults are far more likely to own more devices than kids who haven’t entered the workforce yet.

Going by median age, Twitter looks a little younger than Facebook, but not by much. The median age of a Twitter user is 31, while the median age for Facebook is 33 (In May 0f2008 it was 26). So young Facebook users may start worrying (if they’re not already) that the old folks are crashing their "in" party.

The median age for MySpace, according to Pew, is 26, and for LinkedIn it is 39.

"It will probably become more difficult to track status updating as an independent activity as social network updates feed into Twitter and vice versa," says Pew. "For now, it is clear that a ‘social segment’ of internet users is flocking to both social network sites and status update services. This segment is likely to grow as ever more internet users adopt mobile devices as a primary means of going online."

One thing’s for sure. No matter what age you are, if you are using sites like Twitter and Facebook, you better be careful of what you are posting publicly even more so now. Updates are going to start appearing in major search engines.