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.
 

Features include:

- Permissions: Parents can set permissions for individual teens to designate how the account can be used. They can also require that their approval is required when a teen receives money in the account.

- Mobile Features: Parents can use their mobile phones to check account balances and transfer money to their teens’ account. Additionally, teens can check their account balance and easily request money from their parents via simple text message.

- Alerts: Parents can receive alerts notifying them when their teens’ payments exceed a certain amount or when a specified low balance is reached.

- Built-in security: As with all PayPal accounts, the Student Account allows teens to shop online without exposing any financial information.

"As a parent I understand the challenge and stress of raising kids that are financially responsible," says Don Fotsch, PayPal vice president of customer experience and design and parent of six, ranging in age from 8 to 19. "With the Student Account, I know I can give my kids a level of financial independence while remaining on top of my kids’ spending."

Parents have full visibility on the account, and can establish up to four PayPal sub-accounts and transfer funds as needed on a one-time or recurring basis. PayPal giving account holders some back-to-school savings opportunities as well.

Once upon a time, a $15 purchase of a Webkinz toy and its included access code led wide-eyed children (and more than a few parents) to the wonderful webby world of fluffy goodness from Ganz. All it lacked was the ubiquitous advertising seen on every other site on the web.

Hi innocence, reality just called, your license to exist has been revoked. That’s the general tone of the New York Times documenting the placement of ads for films "Bee Movie" and "Alvin and the Chipmunks" on the Webkinz site.

Advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood registered their displeasure with the shift from ad-free to ad-supported content on the site.

"It is disappointing that Webkinz is choosing to maximize profits at the expense of parents’ trust," Susan Linn, CCFC’s director and a psychologist at Judge Baker Children’s Center, said in a statement.

Paid Content called the move a "PR nightmare" for Ganz, the producer of the cuddly Webkinz. They cited the perhaps-mistaken impression parents got that paying for the toy meant receiving ad-free web content too.

"If Ganz really needs the money, it should immediately eliminate the ads and charge more for the toys," Henry Blodget said at Silicon Alley Insider.

This could be a tempest in a teapot, though, as so many Internet users have become used to tuning out banner ads. These ads may not have the desired impact; indeed, the placement of an "Alvin and the Chipmunks" banner may serve as a warning to Dads everywhere – annoying chipmunk noises ahead, beware!

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The poll found that 81 percent of all children play video games at least occasionally, and 38 percent of adults say they play video games as well. Out of adults that play video games 45 percent are female.

"These findings underscore gaming’s broadening reach," said Ralph Rivera, Vice President of AOL Games. "It’s not about eating dots and shooting pixilated aliens anymore. Today, games are multi-million dollar productions that range from kid-friendly to adults-only fare."

When it comes to how many hours a week parents spend playing video games with their kids, 43 percent said they never play with their kids and 30 percent said less than an hour. Younger parents were more likely to play games with their kids than older parents.

Eighteen percent of those surveyed said they were very or somewhat likely to purchase a video game console like an Xbox, Nintendo, or Playstation during the upcoming holiday season. Thirty-five percent said they were likely to purchase video games. Fifty-one percent of those planning to buy a console during the holiday season said that price was the most important consideration followed by recommendations from friends and family (34%).

More than half of adult gamers are under 40 years old, and 27 percent are under the age of 30. Just a third of adult gamers are married and have children. The average adult gamer spends 2 hours each week playing video games. The number increases to 4 hours per week for fans of shooting games, and 5 hours for fans of adventure and role-playing games. Ninety-three percent said the usually play online games at home and 5 percent said they played games at work or school.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project said that about 59 percent of Americans with children between the ages of 12-17 believe the Internet is a positive influence on their offspring. That is an 8 percent drop from 67 percent in 2004.

In 2006, 30 percent of parents of online teens said they did not think the Internet had any effect on their children compared to 25 percent in 2004. Parents with high levels of education are more likely to think that email and the Internet have been beneficial for their children than parents with less education.

The majority of parents stay involved with their teen’s online lives. Sixty-five percent of parent’s say that after their child has been online, they investigate to see what Web sites they visited. Seventy-four percent of parents can identify if their teens have created a profile on social networking sites that others can see such as MySpace and Facebook.

Parents are more concerned about the content their children view online than the amount of time they spend on the Internet. Sixty-eight percent of parents say they have rules about the kinds of sites their kids can visit along with rules about the information they share with people they talk to on the Internet.

Michelle Slatalla of the New York Times recently had an experience of that sort; she details it in an article called “‘omg my mom joined facebook!!’”  If you couldn’t guess from that title, Slatalla created a profile on the social networking site, much to her daughter’s dismay.

The piece goes on to explore a parent’s role in Facebook – the sort of information the adult may gain access to if his (or her) children (or their children’s friends) care to share.  And although I’m sure Slatalla’s daughter is very well behaved, the general topic brought to mind another bit of news in which police prevented a large (and probably illegal) party by monitoring Facebook.

Still, online relationships between parents and their offspring apparently don’t need to relate to law enforcement; Slatalla seemed happy to report that her daughter finally accepted her overture of Facebook friendship.

Facebook for adults is fine – even (reputedly) stodgy old politicians use it.  Facebook for parents is a trickier matter, but it appears that it may be worth looking into.

The reason kids are being asked to help their parents online is that almost half of them (47%) are "clueless" when it comes to the Internet. Around one -third (29%) of children said they needed to help their mom’s online because they did not have enough time.

The majority of the kids polled believe they had a positive affect on family activities by helping their moms with online chores.

The top five online chores for 8-14 year olds:

    — 38% share pictures & emails with relatives
    — 38% get movie listings
    — 36% invitations & party planning stuff
    — 36% plan vacations/travel
    –35% get driving directions

The good news for online marketers is that kids are consumers with 77 percent saying they have completed an online transaction such as shopping at Internet retailers.

While 26 percent of kids say they are online an average of three or more hours daily, 46 percent say their parents control how much time they spend online.

Adele Schwartz, Ed.D. Research Director at Stars for Kidz said, "One-quarter of the kids we surveyed admitted they have been ‘busted’ for doing something wrong on the Internet,
and still one- fifth (20%) of 8-14 year olds have their own email account that they are able to keep secret from their parents."

Parents Obsessed With Google Baby Names

Parental competitiveness has always been with a lot of people. Whether they are vicariously living through their children’s accomplishments, or using the kids as a way of boosting Mom and Dad’s egos, there is always someone whose science whiz daughter or football hero son figures in the parent’s conversations.

Google may be becoming part of that conversation, if the Wall Street Journal can be believed. Their story about being a nobody without a name that Googles well has been bouncing from blog to blog; since writer Kevin Delaney used Google as a verb, his story might be bouncing around Google Legal. Google hates anything that dilutes their brand name in a generic fashion.

A couple focused in the article subjected their unborn offspring’s potential names to lots of searches as they tried to find something distinctive. One possibility, Kohler, was an old family name. It also happens to be the brand name for a line of plumbing items like faucets and toilets.

Complain as Google might about being tossed into the Merriam-Webster dictionary as a transitive verb, the habit of “Googling” someone on the search engine for information about them has become commonplace. Employers check out applicants, singles look up their dates, and people even search for themselves to see what appears.

Pre-emptive searching as illustrated by the Journal’s story is a curiosity today. It seems obsessive and just a little bit disturbing. But the potential impact of choosing a baby’s name that oh by the way has a lot of negative associations in Google’s index outweighs the oddity factor.

“The power of Google is more subtle, and the effect is to increase diversity, rather than diminish it,” Valleywag said of optimizing a newborn’s search potential. The John Smiths out there might agree with the assessment.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/parents-obsessed-with-google-baby-names-2007-05/feed 2 http://www.webpronews.com/bad-plan-and-a-bad-cms-implementation-2007-03 http://www.webpronews.com/bad-plan-and-a-bad-cms-implementation-2007-03#comments Sat, 31 Mar 2007 00:52:09 +0000 Michael Gray http://www.webpronews.com/?p=36654 One of the biggest mistakes really large publishers make today is doing SEO like it’s 1999. They throw up hundreds, thousands, and sometimes millions of pages, with the belief that more is better. This has grown exponentially with web 2.0 and blogging apps and cross-tagging, listing and publishing content in multiple spots. Here’s an example that’s pretty typical of a problem I see with alarming frequency.

The National Crime Prevention Center (NCPC) uses the recent exodus of a teenage MySpace member to the West Bank, where she had planned to rendezvous with a man she’d met on the site, as a talking point to underscore the importance of parental oversight the Web 2.0 era.

“The popularity of social networking sites makes kids vulnerable in new ways and leave parents wondering what they can do to protect their children,” says Michelle Boykins, Director of Communications at NCPC. “Parents tend to watch their young kids closely but relax restrictions as kids get older. But parents need to know the Internet dangers do not stop when their kids turn 13.”

A 2002 study by the Girl Scout Research Institute found that kids are underreporting disturbing interactions online. The study found that 30 percent of girls polls had been sexually harassed in a chat room, but only 7 percent had told their parents.

Another study, conducted more recently by the University of Maryland, found that female chat room members using feminine usernames received 25 times more threatening or explicit private messages. Female user names received 163 malicious private messages per day on average, compared to just four messages per male username.

It is safe to say that is more unsafe for underage girls than for boys, though predators seek out boys as well, and parents may be very unaware of what goes on in their child’s online world. The NCPC issued advice for both parents and teens to help keep kids out of harm’s way on social networking sites.

Parents should also be aware of so-called “dark sites,” or secret personalized pages set up by teens in addition to a public profile page that parents know about and monitor. Kids who’ve had their profiles closely monitored, policed, restricted, or banned by their parents often set up dark sites where they engage in much riskier behavior like giving out personally identifiable information.