The creators of New Moon Girls magazine have created a new social networking site for tween girls ages 8-12. It’s NewMoonGirls.com. The company calls it “a safe, secure and advertisement-free social network where girls can discover, create their own media, and share it with each other.” I wouldn’t call it completely commercial-free since they do advertise their own products, but it is a pretty slick site for young girls.
Like most social networking sites, NewMoonGirls.com provides girl with their own profile page. It’s called “My room.” On “My room” girls can include a picture and an “About Me” section along with …read more

Although the jury could not find her guilty on any of the felony charge against her, Lori Drew was convicted of three misdemeanor charges. Each count is punishable with up to 1 year in prison and a $100,000 fine.
To recap the story, Lori Drew’s then 13-year-old daughter, Sarah, and one of her best friends, Megan Meier, had a fight and ended their friendship; as is common when you are 13-years-old. Lori Drew and two others (an 18-year-old employee of Drew’s and Drew’s daughter) created a fake MySpace account and pretending to be a good-looking teenager named Josh. They had “Josh” …read more

When we were kids we gossiped the old fashioned way. We passed notes or whispered in the hallway between class. We huddled in the girl’s bathroom or talked to our friends on the phone for hours every night.
Today gossip has gone high tech. There’s no need to pass notes when teens can just text each other. Instead of phone calls teens spend their nights on the computer talking to friends on IM or on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. There are even websites specifically for the purpose of gossiping about classmates, teachers or other enemies.
We thought gossip was …read more

Lori Drew was indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles today.
Who is Lori Drew?
Back in 2006, two thirteen-year-old girls, who had been friends their whole life, had a falling out. Lori Drew, the mother of one of those girls, decided to step in. She, along with a teenage co-worker in her store, decided to create a fake MySpace page for a sixteen-year-old boy named Josh Evans. Using this page, she befriended her daughter’s ex-friend, Megan Meier. Lori used this page to find out what Megan was saying about her daughter. Megan and “Josh” started an online romance. …read more

If your kids are on MySpace there is some good news. Today MySpace announced they are participating in a task force designed to increase safety on social networking sites. The task force created a “Key Principles of Social Networking Sites Safety” document with guidelines such as reviewing all images, videos and content, making profiles private for all 14- and 15-year-olds and deleting profiles of registered sex offenders.
Even better, MySpace is going to take safety one step further and add some additional features to their site, including:

Setting 16- and 17-year-olds profiles to private, as well as 14- and 15-year-olds.
Offering tips and …read more

Back in the late ’80s my mom got her first personal computer. It was a big clunker. The monitor was about the size of today’s 20″ TVs, but with only 13 inches of actual screen space. There was no high speed internet, just dial up. It didn’t even have Windows. No, it had MS DOS and you had to get in to programs by typing the name at the command prompt.
But I loved it. I was an only child of divorced parents. I spent the summers with my mom, a thousand miles away from my friends. I was also very …read more

I just read a news article from WLKY about a Kentucky school district that is planning to punish students for MySpace postings.  The school board put the policy in place to combat cyberbullying, but many are already questioning it’s first-amendment ramifications.
“The government or school authority now is attempting to regulate speech that is occurring off-site or off-campus,” Sharp said. “The analysis for the courts will be whether or not the school can reasonably forecast a disruption of school activities because of the speech.”
Personally, I do not agree with the Bullit County school board AT ALL! It is not the school’s …read more

I normally don’t do a lot of speedlinking, but there are quite a few really good topics being discussed on some of my favorite sites right now and I wanted to share them with you.

Somehow I missed this well done post from Linda Moran on the HPV vaccine.  Angela also makes some important points in her post on why she chose to know her HPV status.
Denise at Parenting Teens tackles social networking in her post titled “Is Facebook Safe“. In my opinion, in order to keep our children safe online we need to constantly be educating and monitoring their online …read more

I was checking out the Nancy Drew movie site to get more details on the movie and I noticed that Nancy Drew star Emma Roberts has a blog as part of the main site and she even has a MySpace page, too.

Has anyone seen the movie yet? My girls want to go see it, but I’d love some reviews first!

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is running a series of Public Service Advertisements on the dangers and permanency of posting online at sites such as MySpace, Facebook and other sites. The series of ads are aimed at educating parents and children on the wide reach that the internet has and that you never know who is really looking at what you post.
Here is one of the ads I particularly like – because it shows the effect of the web in a traditional fashion that many more parents are apt to relate to.

Thanks to Trench at MyCrimeSpace for …read more