The New York Times' Technology section leads with the story headlined "For Toddlers, Toy of Choice Is Tech Device," declaring:
Cellphones, laptops, digital cameras and MP3 music players are among the hottest gift items this year. For preschoolers.
On the plus side, retailers and toymakers have learned that children are not satisfied with fake gadgets. Hooray for authenticity!
On the minus side...… Read more
Read the full story from Space.com on MSNBC.
When I bought a gaming PC for home use a little over a year ago, I bought a middle-of-the-road machine that had everything I needed with a little room to upgrade later on down the line. I got a 2.2GHz processor, a high-end (at the time) video card so I could play the latest games, 2 gigs of RAM (on the advice of a gamer friend), and I opted for a 120GB hard drive to save a little money.
At the time, it seemed like 120GB would be more than enough. After all, I can remember when a 1GB hard drive was the pinnacle of storage capacity--120GB ought to be able to hold anything right? Games these days generally take up a few gigs each so I thought I would never run out of space. I now know I was wrong. If you wait long enough, even the biggest hard drives will fill up.… Read more
REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--In the wake of Yahoo's corporate troubles, and the long-ago collapses of sites and services like AltaVista, Excite, and others, some may be tempted to think that the era of the portal has come and gone.
Not so, says Microsoft's MSN.
In fact, Joanne Bradford, MSN's corporate vice president and chief media officer, said that around her shop, people look at all kinds of sites, including Facebook, MySpace.com, and YouTube as portals, and that these days, MSN's own plan revolves around a portal-like existence.
"Everything is starting to look like portals,&… Read more
Here's the lede from a Phoenix local news story: "CBS 5 Investigates discovered some Valley teachers making their private lives public by posting them on the Web."
Is it really a news flash to learn that recent college grads who are now teachers use MySpace? And that teachers have content on their MySpace pages that they don't want their first-graders to see?
Here comes the online networking generation gap, moving from college into the working world.
Most college students use online social networks, so most new teachers will have social network profiles. And yes, some of the MySpace and Facebook pages will still bear traces of sophomoric behavior on them, given that these new teachers are only a few years removed from being sophomores.
Am I concerned about this issue as a parent? Yes, of course, potentially. But this particular "investigation" looks like a low trick (or height of FARK) as the CBS 5 team decided to systematically snoop into teachers' pages. The news program says they "took a list of teachers who just started teaching in Arizona and searched for them one at a time on MySpace, checking to see which ones have profiles and what they might show."
What disturbs me most is that the CBS 5 story moves to the question of what kind of "higher standards" we hold teachers to and is more than willing to keep raising the bar to create wildly unrealistic standards of off-duty conduct. … Read more
Getting lonely on your MySpace page? That's because the growth is happening elsewhere, as TechCrunch reports. Digg? Growing at a 280% clip, year over year. Facebook? 118%. LinkedIn? 257%. MySpace is only at a 28% growth rate, and that's because they decided to let the 29,000 sex offenders back on. (No, I'm kidding!)
I admit that I still don't know what I'm supposed to do with Facebook, but LinkedIn and Digg are integral parts of my work each day (well, Digg is part of my blog "work").
Oh, and Windows Live Spaces? … Read more
Reuters reported on Monday afternoon that social-networking site MySpace.com plans to launch a "news feed" feature in the near future.
The statement was made by Peter Levinsohn, president of MySpace parent company (and News Corp. division) Fox Interactive Media, at the Reuters Media Summit on Monday. "The concept of a news feed is something we are very focused on, and we'll be well down the path in the next 30 to 45 days," Levinsohn said at the summit.
The news feed, which provides a user with updates from the people on his or her … Read more
Volkswagen has four new car architectures planned as part of its revamp, according to reports.
In mid-November Volkswagen announced it would be investing 28.9 billion euros in its automotive division over the next three years. The company said the changes would focus on completely new vehicles as well "successor models and derivatives" for all of its product classes. The investment will include new powertrain technologies and updates to manufacturing plants.
Today it's been reported this will entail the introduction of four completely new base architectures from which Volkswagen will build its new models and updates, according … Read more
I hardly ever click on banner ads, but today I was beaten into submission by the NY Times to find out more about MySpace Hypertargeting. I still can't figure out why the banner kept showing up for me...my only guess is because I read the technology section.
Hypertargeting appears to correlate data from profiles (in real-time) so that advertisers can most effectively target ads. On the surface this is not that different from Google Search advertising. But Google is far less intrusive (for now) than MySpace or Facebook which usurp data you never signed up to disclose.From … Read more
I caught CNET Editor at Large Brian Cooley on the CBS Evening News report last night, "The Secret Lives of Teens." In the second installment of this three-parter, which featured a tug-of-war between a daughter and her mother concerned about her risky online behavior, Cooley observed that, "This is just the return of the Cold War, with different players. Instead of the U.S. and Russia, it's Mom and Dad versus Joey and Bill." Cooley talked about parental control technology but added that, "In the end, this points back to the parenting relationship, and it moves away from technology when you really have to make a difference in their lives...you cannot rely on software."
I agree with Cooley's conclusion. Online safety for teens is a complex issue that cannot be covered in one blog post, but the CBS Evening News series gave me a lot of food for thought. They posed the question, is parental spying on teen Internet use an "invasion of privacy or smart parenting?" and I wish the CBS series had given more consideration to the possibility that digital spying is a misguided parenting practice.… Read more
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