If people feel like a little extra layer of anonymity in their social networking, they can always have their avatars socialize for them. "Koinup.com is a social-networking site akin to MySpace, but for virtual worlds such as SL, IMVU, and The Sims," reports SecondLifeInsider.com. "There are a few such sites, but most of them are […]

University of Toronto researchers not only found that there's a "spatial attention" difference between men and women, but also that women can catch up to men in this ability rapidly to switch attention among different objects by playing videogames "for only a few hours." "One important application of this research could be in helping to […]

Donna Karan's DKNY line and Sephora, the cosmetics store chain, will now be featured on the digital paperdolls site Stardoll.com. "Stardoll's rapidly growing Web site has a large audience of teen girls [6 million monthly visitors] who create Internet personas of themselves and spend hours dressing them up in fantasy costumes and socializing," Reuters reports. […]

Childnet's video is for everybody, including teens. "Adina's Deck" is for girls 9-14. It's "a 30-minute interactive 'choose your own adventure' television pilot series" starring four tech-literate girls who have either been cyberbullies or victims and who "use their experiences to help solve their peers' Internet mysteries." It's also a parent/teachers guide to educating middle-school […]

When people hear about cyberbullying, they usually think of either the bully or the victim. But as we think together about how to deal with this problem (victimizing about a third of all US 12-to-17-year-old Net users and 22% of British teens*), it would be good to consider the third category of participant (yes, participant): […]

Please take a look. We hear the word, and sometimes a definition – the online version of the nasty, mostly pre-adolescent behavior that's been making kids miserable for eons. But, to many adults, cyberbullying is pretty murky. With this new video, "Let's Fight It Together," Childnet International brings the picture into sharp focus (watch Childnet […]

New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram wants all social-networking sites to have the "Report Abuse" button at the bottom of every page, NJ.com reports. Her plan, she told a Gannett New Jersey reporter, "will give users a standard form to report concerns such as suspected child predators or violent or sexually explicit material. Anyone who […]

Former Yahoo engineer-designer Kwame Ferreira compares the current mobilizing of social networking to when cavepeople discovered that the fires over which they'd do their social networking could actually be taken from cave to cave with them, as described in the mobileCampLondon blog. Picture fire-enabled social networking on the fly. So these days, we have online […]

How novel! (Sorry for the pun.) "They say kids these days don't read. In Japan, however, teens are back into reading novels big-time with one major difference: They're reading them on cell phones," reports Switched.com. Hey, if it keeps 'em reading…. Keitai ("kay-tie") are serial novels amazingly written by their mostly young authors on their […]

Grownup Michael Agger's experience as a penguin was quite different from the impressions left by Emily's "focus group" of 11-year-olds (he might've been a little more ingenuous than they – see previous post). Michael, an associate editor at Slate.com, spent enough time in ClubPenguin to observe various behavioral patterns, to understand how the safety features […]