Great info… and some good advice for parents, families, home owners and business owners as well, that they can use to protect themselves!!

Keeping Your Teen Safe on: Part I – Part II – Part III

With millions of videos on YouTube, your teenager could sit at the computer for weeks on end watching different video clips. Although there is a lot of positive content on YouTube, there is also a lot of negative content as well. Although YouTube and Google strive to prevent negative content from remaining posted on YouTube, Racist, pornographic, and violent videos sometimes seep through the cracks. As with other sites that allow for interaction between different users, there is always the risk of meeting unsavory or dangerous people online.

As this story unfolded and I was left all day without access to some of my favorite social networks and worse yet the tools and 3rd party apps I use, along with millions of other users experiencing those same problems… if large companies and major corporations can have these kinds of attacks, what makes us think we are not just as vulnerable even more so, because we assume we are protected… oh MY!!

“duh . . .”, a 16 year-old girl who has just met the boy of her dreams on Facebook often does not think of the potential consequences of meeting strangers. Not every other user on Facebook is a convicted sex offender, but neither is everybody online a member of the National Honor Society.

Networking and expression — that sums up most of the activity that’s done on the internet today. It’s no more just an information powerhouse. And if the increasing number of social networking sites marks the former, the growing number of blogs across the webspace confirms the latter. Blogs, which till a couple of years ago were assumed to be something meant only for the geeks, have now become mainstream. And social networking sites like MySpace, YouTube and Facebook have been the outstanding success stories of 2006. Why else would Google buy YouTube for $1.65 billion?

In fact, one high point of internet in 2006 has been the rise of social networking sites. There was a strong growth in existing web 2.0 networks like Flickr and del.icio.us. Google’s Orkut too is a hot favourite among youngsters: Over 100,000 users within 48 hours of launch, while MySpace has over 125,000,000 users. It’s so, so hot that we now have close to a dozen social networking sites focused on India: yaari.com, minglebox.com, zhoom.com, DesiMartini.com and humsubka.com, to name a few.