Kids Love to Surf!

Today's children have grown up with the internet and see it as part of everyday life. A recent study by ABC shows that children now spend an average of 6.5 hours a week using the internet. Comparing this to an aversage of 4.5 hours a week watching television, shows just how popular the internet has become in recent years.

The New Internet!

Recent years have seen dramtatic and rapid changes with how and why the internet is used. Gone are the static, clunky pages that served no more than advertising spots. These have been replaced with rich interactive functional sites.

The internet has seen an explosion of Web 2.0 style website over the past few years. Blogs and forums have been at the forefront of this new wave and have never been so popular. Social networking sites like MySpace and FaceBook are relatively new to the market but command huge memberships.

To illustrate, MySpace was formed in August 2003 and the site reportedly attracts new registrations at a rate of 230,000 per day. As of September 7, 2007, the site has over 200 million registered users! That's some pretty serious numbers.

The Dangers

One of the great attractions of online social networking, is also it's greatest danger, anonmyity. On-line, your child could be conversing with any other human being in the world with no possible means of verifying anything about this person.

Myspace alone has over 200 million members with no real means of verifying anything about any of these people.

What Can You Do?

There are many sites, (some government backed), that detail the various on-line dangers and how best you can minimizes them. Some of the more informative sites are lised below:

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A Safer Environment

As stated above, one of the greatest dangers of social networking is anonmyity. SchoolsOnly is an exciting mew website that aims to addres this danger.