Postcards from the Funny Farm

The Who sang “The Kids are Alright” in the 70’s and in some ways, they ought to sing it again today in the 00’s.  A study recently taken showed that online teens were less likely to give out their personal information than those older than them.  This study was done by the “Pew Internet and Life Project.”  They found that many teens who go online do not give their full or real name when participating in social networking sites like FACEBOOK or MYSPACE.

Of several common concerns, the most common stated was that they “didn’t want someone knowing where they lived.”  Bravo young ones!  We have to give them kudos when it’s due them because they take a lot of flack these days for everything.

Since DATELINE NBC recently aired a series of episodes where online predators were exposed, MYSPACE and other social networking sites have responded by offering their users a higher degree of protection.  Teens are choosing more and more (more so than adults) to require screening passwords such as the user’s last name in order to message or joining their network of friends.  These new innovations have made spam less prevalent and it has also given kids and parents more peace of mind.

MySpace and Facebook (and others but those are the largest) can now be what they should be:  an online meeting place for established friends and a gateway to meet new friends . . . with caution.  I think it’s great the teens of today are seeing the danger of giving away your information too readily to strangers . . .  a plus for our generation!

Myspace has become a vast network of bloggers as well.  Unlike bloggers on their own services or servers, they are cloistered away from the blogosphere.  Myspace doesn’t allow them to add external links to their recommended subscription lists and some browsing blog readers are kept out by a demand for a login.  For this reason, most serious bloggers opt to get their own server and domain name.

As far as the blogosphere goes, I recommend a service for networking and marketing a blog or site, it’s called: stumbleupon.com Users can promote their blogs and sites by creating a profile and then having others write a review.

Stumbleupon is a social networking site but it is more in that it enables the user to give a thumbs up or thumbs down rating at any site or blog they visit. The toolbar they give you for free enables this “stumbling.”  As a site author, not only can you get your site some network attention, but you can help the ’sphere sort through the lexicons of webpages to get to the stuff that’s truly good.

As MYSPACE and FACEBOOK continue to gain more users, we will hopefully find that the “young-ens” of today will continue to show the good judgement this study shows.

Maybe using the internet to have teen fun isn’t as bad as some have made it out to be!  I suppose in the final analysis, it all depends on how you view it and what you use it for. One thing is for sure, when it comes to privacy tools, our teens of 2007 are doing the right thing and that’s cool in my BOOK.

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