I want to take a moment to encourage you to branch out and get to know other blogs that might match your interests. There’s something called FeedaPalooza that’s designed to do just that.

The man behind the concept of FeedaPalooza is Aaron Abber, an online marketing whiz who I’ve been getting to know. He came up with this promotion based on RSS Appreciation Day that took place May 1 (yeah, I didn’t know about that day either), but this promotion runs until May 15. It’s meant to encourage people to get to know other blogs and have them subscribe to their RSS feeds, like mine right here.

So in addition to broadening your collection of online topics, you’ll also get a wide offering of freebies like Domain Secrets Revealed, Adsense Income Blueprint, and Beat Cancer Now, and many more.

It’s good to get out a little and with Summer coming up, visiting a good blog is just like reading a good book to spend your time. If you’re a new visitor to Family WebWatch, I welcome you as a regular subscriber, too.

I’ve been running several projects since late last year, and then, of course, there were the holidays to contend with. So I thought I’d kick the dust off by giving Family WebWatch a makeover and bring with it renewed energy to post more regularly.

I welcome your suggestions on what topics you’d like to see covered here. In the meantime, I’ll be working behind the scenes to bring more content to the front.

Stay tuned!

Like other online family-sharing sites, parents have the choice of inviting other family member and friends to view what they upload. Sounds like a great idea for families whose members live far away. You can also choose to make the artwork part of a public library. Personally, I don’t see the benefit to this because who, outside of family and friends, would want to see somebody else’s artwork? I suppose it could be argued that it could boost a child’s self-esteem knowing that they’re among a group of other kids showing their hard work on the Web.

But what really makes Artimus unique is what parents can do with the artwork offline. You can choose to make a 11″x11″ hardbound copy of the little one’s masterpieces. And if you’re really wanting to show off their work in style, why transform their art onto a 12″x16″ canvas? Check out their site for details on price.

As the name implies, they have a ton of online books for your reading enjoyment. As of this writing, they have 18,624. There’s bound to be something of interest for even the most scrutinizing of readers.

This free collection of online books can be downloaded in a number of formats so you can choose how you want to read them: PDF, ebook reader, PDA and others.

I can see this coming in handy for homework when classics are being studied like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But, of course, there’s always the rainy day reason.

[tags]free,online books[/tags]

MintEmail is a temporary email address creator that can help you fight off spam. It’s by no means the cure to spam, but like other disposable email services, it can definitely help. When you first access their site, a unique email address is generated automatically. You don’t even have to copy it because it’s already saved to your clipboard when you get there!

When you use that email address, all the email that’s sent to it will appear on that Web page. Don’t worry, it’s not meant to show to the world, but if you’re like me, you’ll want the extra convenience of having the email forwarded to another one of your email accounts.

You can also choose the amount of time the address will “live”. By default the generated addresses last four hours, but you can choose to have it expire from one hour to one month. And you can customize the address somewhat. Why would you want to do that? It can be helpful to modify the address to something that will help you remember what you’re using it for. So if you’re registering an account on “companysite.com”, then you can enter “companysite” before the “@mintemail.com” and you’re set.

[tags]email addresses,spam[/tags]

Protecting the American data infrastructure is an important job, and to do that you’ll learn about vulnerabilities that exist and the variety of methods used to exploit those weaknesses. Not only can you earn this bachelor’s degree in cybersecurity, but there’s also a follow-up master’s program in cybercrime investigation.

The economic crime degrees that Utica offers will help you safeguard against the following cybercrimes that government and corporate networks face every day:

• credit card fraud
• intellectual property theft
• terrorism
• hacking

Though not listed above, but just as important is the fight against pedophilia. I’ve written here before about the twisted minds that are out there who wish to do harm to a child. What a rewarding feeling it must be to know you’d be part of a team protecting children in danger like that.

[tags]cybersecurity,college,degree[/tags]

I own three blogs and contribute to two others. As I became more involved with those, I had to divert my energy away from the site. So I made the decision to take the site down and move this blog in it’s place. If you’ve come here expecting to see my site, that’s why you’re now looking at my blog.

But fear not, I think it’s a change for the better. Granted, posts have been few and far between on FWW and I don’t like that. It’s an issue of time management, but rest assured, I’ll continue to pump new content here.

Thanks for hanging with me. Blogging forward!

FWW: As you know, I’ve written a review of K9 Web Protection here before. In fact, since its posting last September, it continues to receive comments from readers. Tell us how that product has evolved and where it’s headed.

John: I have to say, I’ve never been associated with a product like K9 before. We get love letters. We get messages from adults who tell us we’ve saved their marriages, their lives (even their souls!). It’s very gratifying. And we get our share of hate-mail from kids (which we take as a sign that we’re doing our job…)

In the beginning of this whole process, we decided to create K9 as solution for the home because we saw how powerful our commercial solution was, and, as parents, we’re all sitting around the table saying things like, “Geez, I want that for MY house…!”

There are a variety of reasons we’ve decided to make K9 free for families — good ones. But one unfortunate reason is that there really isn’t a strong enough market to create, maintain, and sell a high-quality filtering solution for the home. It simply can’t pay for itself.

So, we continue to invest in making K9 better and more available as a community service – but because it doesn’t pay for itself, there are limits on what we can spend in development. And of course we continue to invest in the back-end filtering functionality of K9 (known as Blue Coat Web Filter). The Internet is constantly evolving and we have to hustle to keep up.

Our most recent release of K9 was primarily to achieve compatibility with Windows Vista. Our next release will be to deliver K9 for the Mac. OS.X Leopard is arriving at roughly the same time. We want to be ready. Anybody out there who is technically savvy, and is looking for K9 on the Mac, Blue Coat needs YOU to join our Beta program! We’re also moving ahead working away on the key technologies for Chat and Peer-to-Peer controls within the year so stay tuned.

FWW: As a complement to using a web filter such as K9, what other strategies would you recommend to individuals and families to protect themselves online?

John: For now, I suggest folks find a high-quality Chat/IM control product and a good anti-spam solution as additional tools.

Take a look at some of the back-issues of TheInternetParent blog for some different perspectives on how the Internet is impacting our ability to parent.

And engage your kids by LISTENING to them. What is it that they get out of their “crazy” Internet-driven lifestyle? If you don’t understand what they’re experiencing, you can’t expect them to follow your advice.

FWW: What are some online resources that you look to for Web safety news and tips. Why?

John: For parents of younger kids, I like IKeepSafe.org. For those with older kids, I like Netsmartz and iSAFE. These sites have useful materials for parents, and helpful tools to engage kids. In particular, I encourage your readers to check out the cyberbullying videos at NetSmartz, under their Real-Life Stories.

I also like Children’s Way, of course, for the reasons I’ve identified earlier.

I do have one frustration, though – and I’m sure your readers do too. There are SO MANY organizations out there trying to help us get educated, that I’m often not sure where to turn. I wish we could collect all the efforts and energies of all those passionate people into one coordinated push. I feel like as a community, we could do more if we worked together. This is a COMMUNITY issue, and it requires community action. Emphasis on the real, deep, and honest meaning of the word community.

This concludes my interview with John Carosella. I want to thank him for his time, his effort into making the Web a safer place, and his great feedback.

[tags]web safety,parenting,family[/tags]

I asked John to participate in my first interview here on Family WebWatch and he graciously accepted. In fact, he has so much insightful information, I wanted to break it up into a series of posts this week. So here is the first installment of three.

FWW: John, tell us a little about yourself please.

John: I started working at Blue Coat in early 2004, after spending several years at a tiny startup. Prior to that, I worked at Nokia in their Silicon Valley unit. I was responsible for the Nokia/Check Point secure firewall appliance product – very popular with IT organizations around the world because it was secure, reliable, and very easy to use. As the product architect, I placed the “user experience” at the top of the priority list. Without a good user experience, your product doesn’t get used. And “user experience” is much broader than “user interface” – it’s about the behavior of the product throughout its lifecycle, and is revealed in the simple question: “Do you like this product?” We’ve tried to bring the same discipline to our work on K9 Web Protection.

FWW: Over the years, kids have always shown an affinity toward technology especially if it makes them cool in the eyes of their friends, or allows them to express themselves and interact with others. With so much technology surrounding us today, what do you see as the greatest challenge to parents? Is technology to blame? Parent involvement? A little of both?

John: It would be easy to blame parents. We’re all too busy to really connect deeply with our kids, and co-experience the world with them, at the level we “should”. But that’s not a helpful perspective, because so much across our culture interferes with that connection. Technology is one very large element, along with aggressive, in-your-face media, companies who are “marketing” to kids, and a general dissolution of “community” in our cities, towns, and neighborhoods. Sounds like I’m painting with a very broad brush, but as I’ve looked at the roots of our challenges in this area over the past two years, I’m increasingly convinced that it’s not a simple (or short-term) problem with a simple fix.

Alvin Toeffler, in his 1970 book “Future Shock”, wrote about the impact of rapidly evolving technology on society and culture. Toffler defined future shock as “too much change in too short a period of time”. So, without question, the rate of change is the biggest challenge for parents. How do we provide enlightened guidance to our kids when they’re living in a different universe than we are? It’s not even that they’re childhood is different from ours. Their TODAY is different from ours. That’s how fast change is bearing down on us.

Interestingly, humans are the species that is most adaptable to change – we’re supposed to be good at this kind of thing. And in fact, we are, overall. It’s just hard to be a parent in the middle of it!

FWW: In the wake of successful sites like MySpace, Facebook, and the like, online social communities seem to be popping up every day. We sometimes hear in the media where these types of communities played some role in what ended up as a tragic event in some young person’s life. In general, do you think online communities are doing enough to protect their members?

John: No, I don’t. And in some cases, they’re reducing the protections in the interests of increasing market share. You know, whenever we expect an organization (of any kind) to “self-regulate”, we have to look at whether there is an inherent conflict of interest in the regulations we’re asking them to apply. If your business is selling cigarettes, for example, how effective are you going to be in setting up limits and controls to a) not create demand for cigarettes, and b) not sell them? Laughable, if it weren’t tragic, right?

The same goes for social networking sites. If you’re in the business of making social connections as dynamic and frictionless as possible, how effective are you going to be in creating friction that slows the process down, or creating roadblocks that prevent that dynamism? Can we honestly blame these players for “not doing enough”? On their own, without a sensible social policy backed by legislatively-imposed regulation, they’re bound to fail us.

So they’re not doing “enough”, but then, I think it’s naïve of us to expect them to, on their own.

FWW: Could you give us examples of sites that you think are doing a good job at making their environment safe and educational for kids?

John: I’ve had the opportunity to watch the evolution of Children’s Way. I’m fascinated by this company’s model. They combine the best intentions of child online safety, a lesson in Civics, and education on proper Internet use with a fun online environment for kids. Kind of like “Club Penguin”, but with a higher social purpose. The kids enjoy it, and learn a bunch along the way. But perhaps the most important aspect of the Children’s Way initiative is that it incentivizes kids to grab Mom or Dad by the hand, and sit with them to do certain exercises. Kind of like earning a merit badge, the kid gets credit when Mom or Dad learns something that makes him/her a better “Internet Parent”.

As I look at the challenges we face as parents, this model is really fundamentally correct. The only way to get the parents to be educated enough to be helpfully involved is to have the kids drag them, kicking and screaming. Children’s Way is a great model for making that happen.

Children’s Way is for younger kids, and teaches “online citizenship” to both kids and parents in the context of play and challenge, which is why I think it works so much better than so many other “child-safe” sites.

FWW: What do you see as the biggest threat to families today when it comes to their online activities?

John: Broadly speaking, it’s the lack of knowledge; lack of knowledge of the kind of content, experiences, and dangers that are out there. We are seduced by the simplicity, (false) intimacy, and dynamism of the online experience. And it seems so friendly, fun, and harmless. Sheesh! Nothing could be further from the truth. Internet behavior is PUBLIC behavior. If we really understood that EVERYTHING we do online is done IN PUBLIC, I think our behaviors would change; pretty dramatically in many cases.

FWW: Overall, do you think parents are getting involved enough with their children and the way they spend time on the Web?

John: No, I don’t. But again, when you look at the realities of the culture we’re living in, it’s hardly surprising, and barely remediable. As I said, we’re living in different worlds. And that’s why I like the premise behind Children’s Way so much: for the kids to make progress, the parents have to be involved.

This concludes the first of three installments with John Carosella. Tune-in later this week when he discusses his viewpoint on a topic every parent should be sensitive to: cyberbullying.

[tags]interview,blue coat,k9 web protection,web safety,family,parenting[/tags]

I enjoy posting articles of interest here on FWW, and like to think that I’m helping my readers in some way. And to be awarded by a person like Christy makes it extra special. I encourage you to visit her blogs as she’s quite a writer, providing information on all sorts of topics.

Thanks Christy!

[tags]awards[/tags]