Parent News

Social networking everywhere

September 7th, 2006 by Administrator
You do know that MySpace is only the beginning, right? There are social sites popping up all over the place designed specifically for connecting users with - as parents would see it - "strangers," CNET reports. In the "amazing array of social-networking tools" being launched for mobile social networkers, CNET mentions "services like Dodgeball and Meetro, [which] allow you to locate and communicate...
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'Storytexting' on phones

September 7th, 2006 by Administrator
It's a little like a soap opera for the teeny screen – that of a cellphone. Each scene in the text novella "Ghost Town" is "about 160 characters long, just enough to fit into one text message," the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports. The story has eight characters and "revolves around a high school football star, 'Ghost,' who has a secret. He's homeless." The characters all have backstories that subscribers...
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Homework helpers

September 7th, 2006 by Administrator
It usually helps to get the lowdown from a fellow parent. Alina Tugend, parent of people in middle and elementary school, helpfully reviews homework help sites in the New York Times. After typical confusion up front, she found that "there are two main differences in online help sites — those that allow a student to interact with a tutor through instant messaging and those that provide resources and...
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Teen lured to Mideast

June 11th, 2006 by Administrator

A 16-year-old Michigan girl somehow persuaded her parents to get her a passport, then flew to the Middle East to meet a man she “met” in MySpace, the Associated Press reports. She “left home without notice.” After not returning her mother’s calls to her cellphone, her disappearance was reported, and the Tuscola County [Mich.] Sheriff’s Department “contacted the FBI, which was able to trace the teen…

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Family-networking sites

June 4th, 2006 by Administrator

Move over Martha, here comes a whole passel of family-networking sites. Martha Stewart’s may be more about networking around crafts, entertaining, décor, cooking, etc., than about parenting, but there’s a lot of what might already be called 2nd-generation social-networking competition beating her to the Web. “Since January, nearly a dozen family-networking portals have launched in test version, including…

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Game addiction & escapism

June 4th, 2006 by Administrator
"Unable to pass tough university entrance exams and under intense pressure from his parents to study harder, 20-year-old Kim Myung gradually retreated to the one place where he could still feel invincible," reports the Washington Post. That's online alternate-reality games, it adds, not saying which one Kim was into (he gained 10 pounds over four months of subsisting on a bowl of instant noodles a...
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Teen 'phisher' arrested

June 4th, 2006 by Administrator
This case could fall under cyberbullying and/or ID theft headings – Japan's first phishing case involving a minor. Japanese police arrested a 14-year-old in Nagoya "on suspicion of fraud," Agence France-Presse reported. He allegedly created a Web site (a "phishing site") that looked like a popular game site and, in that site, captured the email addresses and other personal info of 94 people. Police...
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