« Company-Specific Online Safety Initiatives
BlogSafety
The participatory Web requires participatory solutions. BlogSafety.com is a public forum on the Web for parents, teens, educators, and children’s advocates—everyone engaged in child protection on Web 2.0. The user-driven, all-media, multi-platform phase of the Net has begun, and parents suddenly find themselves very much a part of it. Launched in June 2006, BlogSafety is the online-safety field's first interactive resource. It…
- Educates and interacts with bloggers, social-networkers, media uploaders and caregivers.
- Gives parents a voice in the growing public discussion about teen social networking.
- Promotes individual and corporate responsibility concerning social and media-sharing sites that appeal to young Net users.
- Supports and complements all public- and private-sector educational work in this area.
The forum is supported by a consortium of social-networking services working toward making young people’s blogging and socializing online a safe, positive experience. Since mid-2005, BlogSafety has been receiving emails from parents concerned about their children's profiles, pictures, and posts in social-networking sites.
The burden on parents to protect their kids’ reputations and well-being is growing. The online-safety field has said from the beginning that parents are their kids' best and first line of defense and—though we have worked hard at educating parents—other supports such as laws and technology are not keeping up with the Web's evolution.
The two significant developments outpacing all forms of child protection are:
- Media convergence: a multimedia Internet on multiple platforms in the home, everywhere, wired or wireless, 24/7.
- Youth-published content: The potential cognitive, social and creative development involved in youth's ability to create and share their own content is beginning to be documented, but the news that shapes public awareness is all about the risks. Now that everyone can be a film producer, photographer, publisher, advertiser, and influencer with words, pictures, audio, and video on proliferating media hosting sites, parents need to talk through implications and solutions.
Why community
At a time when children's advocates, the Internet industry, policymakers, and parents have more questions than solutions that protect both free speech and children, there is a greater than ever need to think together. One way to support parents and maintain open communication among all participants is to create a “entral” online forum that…
- Allows parents to share experiences, ask questions, vent, be each others’ tech-parenting experts.
- Gives parents, the “silent majority,” a voice in the discourse about protecting online kids.
- Encourages all parties - in business, advocacy, policymaking, and law enforcement - to join the discussion, to think about the implications for youth of new tech developments.
- Promotes corporate responsibility where kid-published content is concerned.
- Connects parents to key customer-service people when a real need arises.
- Links parents to the CyberTipline when kids are in a threatening situation.
- Provides the tech-parenting/online-safety community with its own community “newspaper,” NetFamilyNews.
