The toy business is getting out of toys, the New York Times reports. Toy manufacturers and retailers think toddlers want tech devices, not toys, because they want to emulate Mom and Dad with the real thing, not "fake" phones, music players, and computers – of concern to some educators and pediatricians. We can see for […]

Amid growing flak that its new advertising system reduces users' privacy, Facebook made some changes this week. Now users can "opt in" to having their online shopping broadcast to friends; before they had to "opt out" – a problem if they didn't know their purchasing decisions were being broadcast and they were, for example, buying […]

Sixty percent of kids 8-17 expect to 1) get a game they didn't want or a game for a console they don't have, or 2) not get any or all of the games they asked for, according to a study by Weekly Reader Research cited by USATODAY. It also found that 80% of kids said […]

The two hottest videogame (console, not computer) titles of the season, according to the San Francisco Chronicle – Rock Band and Guitar Hero III – are also among the most social. "The fun ramps up considerably with more players." On the other hand, "there's something mildly distressing about living in a society where cash-strapped public […]

For once, 30- and 40-somethings may be leading a trend: the blending of social networking and online games. Some analysts call MySpace and Facebook "massively multiplayer games in disguise," the Daily Globe reports. The article's about sites like Kaneva.com that are "less about skill levels and escapism and more about joining friends and strangers in […]

I've pointed before to stories on the "Give 1, Get 1" program for Americans to help get laptops to kids in third-world countries, but this one in the Washington Post goes in-depth and shows the scope of the challenges. One challenge for the MIT people behind Give 1, Get 1 is competition at home. What […]

We – parents – are the winners in the "showdown of new parental controls in Apple's Leopard versus Microsoft's year-old Vista," CNET's Stefanie Olsen reports. The reason is, filtering, monitoring, and time-control features are increasingly built in right at the operating-system level on both PCs and Macs now. That means it's all easier for parents […]

The benefits of social networking "can far outweigh the potential dangers," wrote Dr. Brendesha Tynes in the latest issue of the Journal of Adolescent Research. The assistant professor of African American Studies and Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign further argued that "banning adolescents from social networking sites – if this were […]

Social media researcher danah boyd caught some flak for similar observations last July (see below), but now research at Northwestern University agrees that "college students’ choice of social networking sites is related to race, ethnicity and parents’ education," a PsychCentral.com blog reports. The survey of 1,060 freshmen at the University of Illinois, Chicago (among the […]

It's South Korea's first "Internet addiction" rehab camp and it may be the first in the world too. The Jump Up Internet Rescue School is "part boot camp, part rehab center [and] resembles programs around the world for troubled youths," the New York Times reports. "Drill instructors drive young men through military-style obstacle courses, counselors […]