Sarah Evans is the director of communications at Elgin Community College (ECC) in Elgin, Illinois. She also authors a PR and social media blog.

The inaugural celebration of International Baby Wearing Week also serves as a platform for the Motrin brand’s launch of their new ads (below) targeting what else, “baby wearing moms.” Touting the tagline “we feel your pain,” the Motrin IB ad in particular takes a snarky approach towards moms who carry babies in a pouch or sling.

And on the surface at least, the company accomplished the ultimate in outreach goals:

1. Reach target audience

2. Get them to engage in dialogue about your brand

3. Find way to track message and outreach

The Wrong Move

Sounds great, right? Wrong. While the ads are the number one discussion trend on the microblogging platform, Twitter, the overall grade? A great big “Fail Whale”.

Avid Twitter user and mom, Jessica Gottlieb is the originator of the conversation via her Twitter network. The dialogue (and overwhelming outrage) is growing exponentially. Already there are thousands of comments on #motrinmoms and almost all are negative with many saying they will no longer use the brand name product.

It took only a few short hours to go viral. Katja Presnal, founder of SkimbacoLifestyle.com and LadybugLandings.com, wants Motrin to know that the ads themselves are giving moms headaches.

Presnal says, “Moms have brains, don’t treat us like that and learn to market for us. We spend 75% of our families’ money.”

Will Motrin Respond?

The world of social media is reaching a tipping point and my bet is yes, they will respond.

This is their opportunity to engage and connect with a powerful (and influential) audience. (Perhaps the one they should have consulted before launching the ads?) So, what should they do first?

1. Deliver an apology. (From a person, not just the brand.)

2. Offer an outlet for people (not just the target audience) to share their feelings and emotions – especially important – let people share how they felt when they watched the ads.

3. Talk about what will change or be different (and incorporate feedback)

4. Get a social media presence!!!

If they do respond, their response will be blogged, chatted and tweeted about and will serve as a case study for social media engagement for years to come. No pressure.

I’m waiting with baited breath.

Sarah writes her own blog PRsarahevans.com and is the director of communications at Elgin Community College (ECC) in Elgin, Illinois. She also worked for Advocate Health Care, the largest health care system in Illinois, as the manager of communications and government relations at Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital. She brings a comprehensive background in the knowledge of non-for-profit and health care management. 

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Windows Live Launching Niche for MomsMom Central Empowers Moms and Tests Products for CompaniesMomJunction, Another “MySpace for Moms”, Raises $1.5 MillionCafeMom Gets $5M in Latest Round of FundingMommyBuzz Launches MySpace for MomsMothersClick is LiveMothersClick to Launch a Mommy-Based MySpace

Playing off the age-old “Peek-a-Boo” game played by kids and adults near and far, Keepaboo is a semi-3D digital book creator that lets users share unique and beautiful memories.

Most anything can be included in a collection - photos, diary notes, growth charts, etc. And in addition to a shareable custom-made volume, Keepaboo also manages to establish a timeline for viewers to observe, regardless of how a book might be laid out. The availability of this alternative is definitely nice to have.

Finding movement

At first glance, a book made with Keepaboo, called a “LifeBook,” may seem a little too simple and fairly slideshow-like. Text and colorful graphics can certainly help establish the feel of a book, but when all is said and done, an interactive bar situated below the lower edge of a particular story line may not do enough to emphasize the 3D nature of the service.

Instead, it is the way individual pages behave in accordance with movement of a cursor that really captures your eye.

Just mouse over the corners of an open book, and you’ll see movement just as you would if you were handling them for real. To some extent, no clicking is necessary to trigger these occurrences,  but if you want to complete a full page turn like so, a combined click-and-drag action will make it happen.

A small suggestion

Of course, it’s really so basic a thing to do that it shouldn’t warrant heaps of praise. But if I were the individual pulling strings behind the proverbial curtain at Keepaboo, I would quickly work to de-emphasize the buttons and slider bar that sit separate from the main attraction and allow viewers to discover on their own this elegant method for experiencing snapshots.

Doing so would also serve to put Keepaboo even further into its own niche of the baby journaling world, populated by the likes of Kidmondo and others, making it an instant highlight for Web-savvy parents everywhere.

It was this past Thursday, in our review of another review service, when I figured that Google should seriously consider generating automated translations for YouTube clips to build on its relatively young captions capability. Well, today it began to do just that.

Before you become giddy for this fresh new option, it must be said that this is Google’s Translate service being worked into the picture. Which means the world flow is more or less abysmal to anyone with a reasonably firm grasp on one language or another. The good news, though, is it can only get better as development progresses.

The way the Translate feature works is for you, the video uploader, to create a caption from which the translation engine can feed from. …And that’s pretty much the extent of it! It’s all automated and on-demand from there onward.

Naturally, it depends on the source language and the translation being requested that determines the quality of the switch.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Google Translate Now Eats its Own Dog FoodYouTube Launching Chinese VersionGoogle Spreadsheets Gets Translation AbilitiesGoogle’s Translation Engine Now LiveFacebook’s Translation Application Now Available to DevelopersFacebook Launches Community-Driven Project to Add Foreign Language SupportMashable.com Banned in Thailand

Source:Mashable!

Families have collectively jumped on the Web with gusto. Online tools have given them the ability to do everything from track the family schedule to keep in touch with distant relatives, monitor their children’s browsing, and more. Many of these services are even becoming available on mobile platforms, which is critical for those parents on the go. Here’s a rundown of some of the sites available for you and your family.

Tell us in the comments about which services you and your family use.

Family-Friendly Browsing

Glubble - Provides much more than a safe browsing environment for the kiddies. They also offer a Twitter-like platform for family members to keep in touch, photo sharing, schedules, etc. To learn more about Glubble, read Mashable’s previous coverage here.

Kidzui - Offers a safe browser for kids, along with a slew of games, videos and websites that are kid-friendly.

KidRocket - Another safe browsing platform for your kids.

Pikluk - Not only provides safe browsing but also safe email.

BuddyBrowser -  A safe browser for kids with an appealing look for the younger child.

Totlol - Almost like a safe YouTube for children.

Content Sharing

ZOOOF - Family members can share their biographies, childhood memories, photos and much more here.

Story of My Life - Focuses on capturing your memories and family history

Stixy - Share documents, photos, to do lists and more with family and friends.

Wamily - For teams, families, clubs and everything in-between. Share photos, run a wiki, etc.

Shwup - Allows family members to create and share multimedia photo albums with music and videos.

LifeSnapz - Lets you document your family’s history on a timeline and share it with everyone.

Famster - Allows you to upload and share photos and videos and have safe Web-based online instant messaging with family members

Respectance - Allows you to pay tribute to dearly departed members of the family.

Schedule Management

Commily - Lets you keep in touch and arrange activities with families in your local community.

Famundo - Appears to offer the most features with their free ad-supported version, as well as their premium $9.99/month version. They offer their premium version for free to organizations such as schools, churches, etc.

Famiva - Offers some unique features the others do not, such as a map tool that shows where everyone is located, a family network diagram that shows how everyone links together, and blogs where you can embed video and images.

FamilyCrossings - Has one of the best looking sites and easiest interfaces (here is a Virtual Tour). They offer 6 core features with the free account and 15 features for the $10/month premium account. Free features include: News, Photos, Calendar, Address Book, Live Chat and Gift Center.

Cozi - Has a meager set of features such as a calendar, shopping list maker and the ability to send text messages to family members. Though this might be enough for some families.

SchoolPulse - Manages your family schedule along with your children’s school calendar of events. Here’s our previous coverage.

TripCart - lets family members have fun planning their next family trip with lots of visual tools and maps.

Note: In “Top 10 Tools for Soccer Moms and Weekend Warriors“, we covered schedule management for families with children active in sports.

Parenting & Newborns

baveo.com - Basically a blogging platform ala WordPress for expecting parents. It’s a great way to document the entire experience and provides a number of options for keeping family and friends updated.

BabySpot - Captures your baby’s precious moments to share with anyone you want.

Lil’Grams - Lets parents capture milestone moments as they occur for the first time.

Kidmondo - Offers an online diary and growth charts to track your baby’s progress and much more.

AboutMyBaby - Offers an online scrapbooking platform for new moms that they can share with others.

TotSpot - Parents can blog about their baby and share it with family members.

SavvyAuntie - You don’t have to be a parent, you can be a savvy aunt. This site offers great resources, as well as a community for aunts.

Family Trees

www.ancestry.com - A well-known genealogy site. Great place to research family tree information. Some searches and information are free, but most aren’t.

MyFamily - Lets you add audio narration to photo slideshows. From the same folks behind ancestry.com, which gives it a strong advantage over the others when it comes to genealogy and family tree building, because it can exchange information with the massive ancestry database.

KinCafe - Has a much more pleasing interface than Famundo, but nowhere near the amount of features. Still, many will prefer the less is more offering here.

Geni - Has a powerful and elegant family tree maker online. It includes photos of family members and contact information. Though it needs the ability to connect, search and download from an ancestry database of some kind.

GeneTree - Provides family tree building with a twist. They introduce the concept of connecting to relatives through DNA on a global level.

MyHeritage - A popular family tree creation service.

Genoom - Families can create their family tree together and share memories, photos and stories, too.

Amiglia - Offers a little of everything; Photo albums, Stories, and something they call the Family Facebook.

Conclusion

Social networking has come to families in a big way, enabling relatives to take full advantage of these tools to stay in touch. While some attempt to provide families with everything they need, others are trying to carve their own little niche by providing a single service. Ultimately, every family will need to try different services to see which one will best suit their needs.

Imagery provided by iStockPhoto/pkline

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Genoom: Geni’s Identical TwinSampa Launches Private Blogs for FamiliesiFamily Facebook App FundedSampa Turns Your Address Book into a Family TreeCraveOnline Wants More Basketball: Acquires Two Niche SitesCreate Family Trees with FamillionFamiva Launches Family Networking Site

Semantic Web startup AdaptiveBlue is launching a new service today called Glue. The concept is sort of similar to MyBlogLog – showing recent visitors to a certain webpage – except it’s more like recent visitors to a given concept. So, for example, if you’re looking at the Wikipedia entry for the movie Iron Man, the Glue bar will show people that have visited webpages about Iron Man all around the Net, for example, on Netflix or IMDB.

This all works through a combination of a Firefox add-on (Get Glue), AdaptiveBlue’s contextual technology, and analyzing your existing social networks on services like Facebook, Twitter, and Friendfeed. In turn, if you’re visiting the Iron Man page on Wikipedia, you’ll see which of your friends from those sites (who have also installed Glue) have explored Iron Man content, with options to see additional metadata like comments, reviews, or “likes.” Additionally, Glue wants to help you discover new people, so you’ll see other members of Glue who are interested in the concept you’re viewing. This screencast explains how it all works a bit more in-depth:

In addition to launching Glue, AdaptiveBlue has also announced $4.5 million in Series B funding from Union Square Ventures and RRE Ventures. The company previously raised a Series A from Union Square in early 2007. AdaptiveBlue’s first product, BlueOrganizer, also utilizes the company’s semantic technology to recommend similar content when browsing the Web, also via a browser add-on.

As for Glue, it’s a very cool concept. Instead of thumbing through your friend’s reviews of different products across sites, or aggregated on a service like Friendfeed, Glue brings them together and puts them all in context while you’re browsing the way you typically would. However, even moreso than many other services, to be really useful, Glue is going to need to have a big-time user base. While it may work OK with a small network of friends when viewing really popular movies or music, in places where reviews are most helpful – the long-tail of content – the Glue experience could be a bit sparse until your whole social network (and beyond) has signed up.

Source:Mashable!

Company Name

BabySpot

20-Word Description

Facebook for babies with a focus on safety, health and development, economical empowerment and fun.

CEO’s Pitch

Combine a safe and secure online space for parents to share and store their baby’s precious moments with a stimulating social network and a fun, yet educational environment, and you get BabySpot. 

Catering to the busy lifestyles of modern day parents, Babyspot provides a one-stop shop where they can easily and frequently share baby’s growth with family members, socialize with like-minded individuals and learn about and share how certain matters will affect them. Babyspot fosters opportunities for parents and families to learn about things that will ultimately have a positive growth effect on their lives.

Mashable’s Take

There are a couple of things about BabySpot which immediately reveal themselves as primary drivers for the service. Media sharing is one of them. It clearly has a special place among the various features provided. Videos in particular. The other is network activity, be it public or private, which is pretty much how things go insofar as interaction among parents today. Memories are shared at nearly every moment possible. So life goes.

In that sense, BabySpot is a good option to choose when online networking with your infant or toddler in view sounds like something you’d like to get involved with. It’s very easily learned, and makes nearly everything you might want or need quickly accessible. It sports a top-to-bottom layout, which places your main set of services across a header display, followed by items pertaining to whatever section you’re focused on at any one time.

I must say it’s a little peculiar to have a Profile URL box (to embed in places elsewhere on the Web) situated front and center on your BabySpot dashboard, rather than some widget that might have more lasting value to the average user, but there’s a good chance you won’t spent much time at this page to quibble about it one way or another. Individual utilities will demand virtually all your attention.

Such utilities include a friend list, chat box, forum, journal editor, groups directory, message roll, and a video and photo gallery. If you wield a still-shot or video camera with any regularity, the last area is where you’re likely to spend considerable amounts of time. You and your closest relatives and associates together. The journal may get its fair share of activity, too. The same with user groups and the site forum.

Setting up basic information for your infants and toddlers can be accomplished quite speedily, and even done immediately after sign-up. Register an account, and the following pages will reveal multiple fields provided for one or more children, and if invites to family members or family friends are in order, you’re given the option to easily invite people from your Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, or AOL contact list(s). Alternatively, if you prefer inputting names without grabbing them from one of these webmail services, there is a form that allows you to enter addresses manually. Once you complete your initial account setup, you’ll be asked to login once more. No need to check your mail for any verification messages.

Based in Miami, Florida, BabySpot was launched this past summer, and it is evident that the community remains a fairly small operation. But you can interpret this one of two ways. Either it is too little a player in the market, or it is nicely manageable, “exclusive” and fresh-faced. I see it through the latter lens. It’s elementary and comprehensive all at the same time. And that’s the right recipe for any network of this kind to have. Besides, who can say no to a network whose spotlight is babies?

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

If you’ve had brothers or sisters or cousins older than yourself, there’s a reasonable chance that you’ve been the recipient of objects most frequently described as hand-me-downs.

Rarely would such an exchange elicit happy thoughts. Except for your parent or guardian, who saved some cash in the process, as well as the giver of said object, who could net some so-so karma for passing it along. (Major feel-good moments are had with Good Will donations and the like.) Well, there is now a service crafted to accommodate precisely this process. Fittingly, it’s name literally spells out Handmedowns.com. And quite frankly, it may actually be worth your while.

Alternatives to the service can be somewhat treacherous to browse, after all. There of course is eBay, where the idea of second-hand shopping for years has taken on a life of its own, and from which many small businesses have formed. But besides the option to browse auctions and Buy-it-Now items, or, if you’re an adventurous individual, a journey through the immense classifieds warehouse that is Craigslist, your options are quite limited. Particularly if you wish to search specifically for children before they’ve even reached their pre-teen years.

For instance, Freebabyhandmedowns.com is all but unusable. Swaphandmedowns has nothing to do with the concept we associate with the phrase. And Thehandmedowns.com I suspect has something to do with music. Apart from a logo, its front page is blank with no interactivity to speak of. So, on the whole, Handmedowns.com appears to be fairly unique.

I for one would advise against the use of the website’s subtitle, “classifieds for moms,” simply to keep things as welcoming to mothers and fathers and whomever else need advertise their wear. But that is the card the public has been dealt, so we’ll take it for what it is: a place to buy, sell, give freely, or donate to charity anything to do with gear for young children.

Technically speaking, Handmedowns.com is fairly well engineered. It’s easy enough for most any user to understand, making one’s effort to browse a real walk in the park. Items are segmented as you’d want them to be, and the attachment of a discussion groups (so far void of activity, apart from a single safety recall mention) might be helpful to those who not only seek or post product information, but wish to talk about matters with fellow members.

As far as product listings go, you have one of three options, which I mentioned briefly in the lines above. Selling involves all entry points that the Give option will present users, albeit with an extra field for setting a price. The Donate button offers information about a Los Angeles-based charity called Baby2Baby.

It’s not certain that Handmedowns.com, currently in “beta,” will become immensely popular given the state of the American economy. Yet, just this weekend, The New York Times delivered a report on the increase in garage sales being conducted. Put two and two together, and you may well make a positive-leaning prediction as to the fate of Handmedowns.com.

It could take some time to truly hits its stride, seeing as it only caters to the cities of Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. But the necessary foundation has been laid. If nothing else, its connections to engines like Craigslist, Kijiji, and Oodle definitely makes for a thorough roundup.

If you use Google Reader, you’re probably familiar with “Canvas View,” a way to read the full text of all your new feeds from multiple sources on one Web page. Today, that view is coming to iGoogle, allowing you to view Google Reader and dozens of other applications and websites in full within the iGoogle interface. This is a big change versus the widgets (or gadgets in Google terms) that most start pages employ, which simply provide a snippet of content and link out to an external site.

In addition to Google Reader, you can now access canvas view gadgets for applications such as iLike and Flixster, as well as Google products including Docs, Maps, and Google Talk. A number of content partners like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are also offering canvas view gadgets, allowing you to read those publications in-full from within the iGoogle interface.

Essentially, the canvas view gadgets are like iFrames on steroids, allowing you to access a whole bunch of services without ever leaving iGoogle. Compared to links that pop open stories in new windows, the user experience is certainly more enjoyable, and for companies that are able to become highlighted partners, it should be a way to gain more traffic.

Technically, I still use My Yahoo as my start page, primarily because of its integration with Yahoo Finance that allows me to track dozens of different stocks, industries, and model portfolios. But, considering all of the Google services I keep open all day (Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs, GTalk), iGoogle suddenly looks like something that could save me a lot of time. It’s a simple change, but one that currently makes iGoogle a bit more attractive than many of its competitors.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:iGoogle Gadgets Get Social with New Developer SandboxiGoogle Tests Chat, Open Social, and Activity FeedsiGoogle Themes Directory is LiveiGoogle Gets Five New ThemesiGoogle Gets Optimized for the iPhoneiGoogle Has A Bunch Of New ThemesFacebook Apps: iGoogle, LivePets, Vuvox

Source:Mashable!

Company Name

PikLuk

20-Word Description

The safe way for your kids to use the Internet. Show only websites and emails that you allow on the Parent Dashboard.

CEO’s Pitch

PikLuk helps parents provide their children with a safe and responsible means to use the Internet’s resources for their growth and education. We offer a free downloadable Web browser and email solution designed for small children and pre-teens.

Mashable’s Take

If you’re torn between giving your Web-connected child free license to roam the Web with a browser like Firefox or IE, or you feel it imperative to restrict them to a safer and very select supply of websites, this development might appeal.

PikLuk, launched out of Austin, Texas, is in and of itself a Web browser. The project’s modus operandi: to give parents the ability to locally or remotely control what it is their children can see. This means any websites that parents deem suitable for their kids’ exploration can be designated as safe. Don’t mind your son or daughter signing on to a particular social network? You can specify what is and what isn’t okay to be viewed with your PikLuk installation. Restrictions can also be set for email correspondence. If you only want family members and/or immediate friends to be able to contact your child, you can make sure this is the case.

To start, three sites are active by default. Kerpoof, PBS Kids, and Yahoo Kids. You can add to or remove picks at will, however. Per your convenience, the PikLuk website showcase a roll of sites labeled popular and recommended. Some of these include Disney XD, Club Penguin, LEGO, and Funbrain.

For registrants, there is a free option for very casual users. But if you don’t want to be encumbered by limits as to the number of sites accessible by your children, you can sign up for an annual subscription of $19.99/year, or $29.99 for lifetime membership. Keep in mind that only Windows users can download the PikLuk browser at present. The company states that a Mac-compatible option will soon surface. The same goes for support for Spanish language use.

While PikLuk is a fairly ordinary browser and standalone download, it presents users with a full-screen experience. There’s no URL entry to speak of. Neither is there any tabbed browsing or other common modern accouterments. Strictly safety and simplicity are first and foremost on the menu, which is just fine for the young age bracket that it is geared towards - at least for parents who cannot monitor their child’s Web usage every moment that they are connected.

On the whole, this is really for the youngest of Internet users. And for the price of unlimited use, it seems qualitatively worthwhile. You can of course “try before you totally buy in,” but chances are you’ll think it is worth the cost of admission. Compared to Kidzui, another kid-friendly Internet browser we’ve reviewed, and one which runs users $5.00/month and under, PikLuk may be a bit less graphically refined and entertaining from the get-go. Yet the option to customize your child’s browsing experience from home, work, or elsewhere, is perhaps a more appealing investment.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

As Paul noted this weekend, Jaiku was completely down for scheduled maintenance over the weekend, with very little explanation other than it was a good time to go speak with a loved one. A lot was made of this by the few left in the blogosphere who use the service to fill their status microblogging needs, particularly how interesting it was that a Twitter-ish bird was doing the downtime notice, and how insulting it was to be told by Jaiku that they perhaps don’t spend enough time functioning in meatspace.

They’re back now, and they’re purporting to be offering unlimited invites to the private beta service. I’m still skeptical this is the case, since I’ve been on the “waiting list” to join Jaiku since the months before they were acquired by Google. I even re-submitted my application for an invite the moment I saw their blog post on the re-opening hit my feed this afternoon. Clearly the process hasn’t been fully automated yet, as I haven’t received a confirmation email.

Regardless of the true status of the open-ness, they say they’re ready to handle any volume. The purpose of the downtime was to move the service “to a Google data center,” something “that [they]’d planned to do anyway, as part of the future transition to Google App Engine.”

If indeed Jaiku throws wide open the doors to the service for the masses, this will be an interesting real-world stress test for not only Google’s version of Twitter but the Google App Engine itself.  So far, very little in the way of high profile, high traffic stuff has proclaimed itself to be running on Google’s cloud computing option. Those looking to evaluate it as a solution for their company would do well to watch how Jaiku performs in their “new nest.”

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Jaiku Releases New Microblogging Tool for Nokia S60Jaiku on Your iPhoneA Day Without Jaiku…WidSets to Launch Jaiku WidgetJaiku Hosting Markku’s Channel for Eurovision 2007Will Google Use Jaiku to Collect Data on You?Jaiku’s New Mobile App to be Unveiled at Supernova

Source:Mashable!

In a lot of ways I am really glad that my children have grown and left home. When they were growing up all we as parents had to worry about was sex, drugs and rock n‘ roll. Now parents have to worry about sex, drugs and the Internet – or at least the bad and evil Internet as propagated by the mainstream media.

Where once the evils of IRC (internet relay chat for you young ‘uns out there) and ICQ are now replaced by MySpace stalking, Bebo suicides, and Second Life drugs and porn. Next, it will be the dangers of Twitter and the hidden terrors of Facebook. It is all about using scare tactics to drive up rating but in the end parents are left scared and not knowing what to do.

The fact is that with our constant push forward with social media and the increasing move to live our lives openly on the web the truths behind some of these big media scare tactics will happen more and more. Michael Masnick points to a recent study bemoaning the fact that the parents aren’t living up to their responsibilities by monitoring their kids.

As Michael says though

Of course, the simple fact is that parents are never going to be able to fully monitor what their kids do online (at least without seriously pissing off their kids). If kids want to chat online, they’re going to find a way to be able to do so. Perhaps rather than focusing so much on spying on everything that kids do, the focus should be more on educating them to the dangers that are out there, the laws that they should be aware of and the risks of not obeying them.

As easy and intellectual as that might be to say it is an entirely different matter if you are single mother raising your children who are constantly texting who knows who or chatting online with people who the mother has no idea of who they are. Half the time the kids themselves may not even really know who it is on the other end of that high speed connection.

It does no good though to scare the parents or to blame them for the conditions under which their children are growing up because they have no control of their own in many cases. Parents in fear will react in so many different ways and not all of them good or even beneficial for helping their children learn the right and wrong way to deal with an online life. Parents need to understand as hard as it maybe that just as there were bad things when they were growing up their children are facing the same things.

Just as our parents were terrified by the changes they thought rock ‘n roll and long hair were evil and would be the death of us we feel the same way about the technology that our children deal with everyday.

There are no hard and fast rules here for parents and don’t let anyone kid you otherwise. Like our parents we’ll be struggling through on a wing and a prayer trying on one hand to make sense of this technology ourselves; and other the other hand teach our children how to use it responsibly. The only thing one can really do is try your best to learn along with your kids but gently add your life experience to those lessons. Learn to trust your kids because spying on them won’t do any family any good in the long run.

Most of all though don’t succumb to the fear that people who profit from making you afraid will be trying to shove down your throats. And remember like Allen Stern said on his post about the Second Life scare story by NBC:

Again, while I don’t use Second Life, my guess is that you can find these things anywhere online even outside this “dark side” virtual world.

That, my friends, is a given. Just as you can find them on any street in any city in any country on this planet.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Qik’s Parent Company Raises $3 Million in FundingFanNation Acquired by Sports IllustratedMurdoch Bids $5 Billion for Dow Jones and the Wall Street JournalImbee Launches MySpace for KidsiPhone to Launch in Germany on T-MobileRuining ****Pedias For Fun and ProfitSecond Life Teams Up With IBM for Virtual World Interoperability

While Disney devotes most of its resources to entertainment for the youth of the world to consume and grow zealous over, the people dishing dollars for the company’s attractions - from theme parks to movies to books to toys and, more recently, online destinations - are naturally the adults of the world. So, after having constructed a thoroughly glitzy network on the Web called DxD (short for Disney Xtreme Digital), it has deemed it appropriate to launch another space, Disney Family, designed for use by “moms and dads to share the pride of being a parent, and have a lot of fun while (they’re) at it!”

The differences between Disney Family and Xtreme Digital are stark. While XD has no pretensions of being reserved in terms of the sheer volume of stuff presented for users’ eyes and ears, Disney Family is more basic. Its layout and color wheel are far more gentle on the senses. It is clearly meant for generations of people responsible for the those who spend their hours of playtime in XD land.

Disney Family is, in short, a content network. It does hold social aspects, mind you. But a quick glance at where among the main menu of options the ‘community’ tab is listed shows what Disney is prioritizing on the site.

Not that its slight understatement of the community feature is a bad thing. Disney is after all good with delivering material - whatever material it might be. So it is naturally going to trumpet reading material wherever it can. Sections for Food, Parenting, Travel, and Entertainment are all filled with things that typical Disney-aware family would likely appreciate. And the way each section is structured makes for an easy time. Dare I say appreciable as well?

Even if the Disney Family community isn’t writ large upon the site’s front page, it is there among the links. And like other facets accessible across the broader network, it is elegantly designed. Nothing alpha or beta about it, really. Everything seems to work as it should, and it’s all very intuitive to browse and operate. The only quibble I can make at this moment is that the site is very slow to load. Whether an intense traffic surge is to blame or that Disney Family requires more work behind the stage, I’m not sure. But going about the network is definitely not something I would currently call a speedy experience.

Also, though the sign-up process is simple enough, it is a bit tedious. Unless you desire to have your inbox stuffed with daily and weekly newsletters of all sorts, you’ll be unchecking at least a half dozen boxes before you’ve agreed to Disney’s terms and hit the registration button. And for those who tend to scramble through sign-ups on the Web, Disney Family by default selects female gender before male. So, all the dads out there, watch where you click. Of course, you can change this if you mistakenly choose wrongly out of habit of ignoring such particularities.

In all, I approve of Disney Family. I would certainly wish the site performance to be greatly improved, and soon, but the design itself is commendable. If Disney’s promotion of the new venue is effective, it will presumably fare very well.

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