Its truly fascinating to see the hundreds of comments she gets from faithful readers, ie, pre-teenagers, to every post. She talks about everyday issues these pre teens face in France: the end of year school show, arriving late at school, being nervous about going to summer camp, etc…

–> Lulu’s Blog

– > Astrapi magazine information online

• Tonight, Kevin and Arthur discover what S & * is on their computer screen

• Thanks to her blog, Olivia will appear on a po**o movie

Children’s Internet Use in France in 2005-2007:

* Internet

• 95% of 12 to 17 year olds surf the web and prefer it to television. (1)

• Nearly 50% of children access the Web without adult supervision.(4)

o 60% of 12 to 17 year olds use instant messenging and chats to make friends. (1)

* Mobile Telephony:

• 66% of 12 to 17 year olds use a cell phone. (2)

• With the development of multimedia features on cell phones, use of mobile internet access is exponential.

* Explosion of Online Gaming:

• 60% of chidren connected to the Web do online gaming. (3)

(1) Source : Credoc November 2006 and December 2004
(2) Source : ARCEP june 2005
(3) Source : European Council
(4) Source: Mediametrie study for a the French Education Ministry, December 2006

–> E-Enfance.org blog and TV spots ( in French)

The limitations of child protection software

Yes, you can use child protection software to protect your children when they are surfing, by blocking improper sites. I find this a little cumbersome and necesarily imperfect. It first requires each individual family to acquire, install and configure the software. This is not which easy for all, for financial reasons, and in terms of comfort level with IT.

It also in my view either screens out too much or too little, since it only uses machine generated filtering and has the imperfections associated with this type of approach. Between two sites hat mention the word ‘ Girl’, the ‘machine’ will not know the difference between a site that has photos and text relating to sexual themes and a site that talks about girls education or activities for instance. Unless its truly well thought out, and includes other criteria to help select the proper from the improper sites. But I have my doubts as concerns screening out images. How does an automatic filter see the difference between an image acceptable to a child and another?

A search engine for kids to access the world safely, not a search engine for kids content

I ‘d like to see Yahoo, Google or AOL create a search engine to be used by kids specifically, where I ‘d feel safe sending them. This would not mean only kids’ related content would be on it à la Yahooligans. No thanks to sending my child content limited to the idea a corporation has of child-appropriate content, complete with commercials and product placement. No, I’d like my child to have access to the world, but a safe one, not the real one that we parents access with a Yahoo or Google search.

Common Sense Media non profit tracks quality of media for parents – and they’re liberal

I found a site that partially addresses this need. Its called Common Sense media, and is, you guessed it, out of my dear old San Francisco… Common Sense media has taken note of the fact our children are bombarded with media and that we as families are not very well equipped to manage these various media sources so we keep some control over what our children see and hear. They are not part of the Religious Right either! They provide an old fashioned editorial team’s review of movies, TV shows, web sites, and other media and rate them on criteria like sexual content, violence, commercialisme, message ( what is behind the entertainment?).

Pretty darn neat – and a .org too!

-> Common Sense Media site 

• One is the YummymummyCareers site out of Canada (my home and not native land)

Based on the great idea that moms who dropped out of work to better care for their children ( and keep some sanity on their lives) may just feel the need to go back to wortk after the wee years of their children (say till age 3), this site offers jobs targeted at them – which do NOT include changing diapers.

Bravo! I don’t know how many years it’ll take for this sort of initiative to come to France. Seems they still think here that once you stop working, you’re out for good and have nothing to say for that time spent managing a difficult crowd aged 0 plus a few years…

However to me there’s a need for this sort of service here too. I had thought of this previously as a way for small to medium entreprises ( or even large ones) to get experts on a regular and part time basis.

These companies cannot afford to hire full time the high caliber MarCom or Finance pros that were many of the moms that chose family life over career development. And those moms may not feel the need to go back to work full time, especially in high stress, big corporation situations. However they’d be highly interested in adding value, insight and expertise to developping companies who need these skills.

• Other piece of news is I’ve noticed the San Francisco Chronicle site has a blog for parents, very humourously called The Poop!

I’d suggested this sort of feature in a previous post, which was actually written in 2000 and reposted here recently and their initiative probably has nothing to do with my suggestion but still it’s nice to see I ‘saw the future ‘? I see the first Poop posts are from July 2006, so I was a few years ahead, ey?

Thanks Chronicle, for being ahead of the game ( and catering to us as an audience) as well…

The reason I’m jealous is Yahoo Answers provides a super easy and accessible way to attain this goal. You log in, enter your question and can get an anwer very quickly! Yahoo has a points system that encourages good behaviour, ie, quality answers.

That brings me to one of the limitations I would see to such a seductive system of Q and A:

- Who will respond to my question? Will it be someone I’m close to in terms of background and personality, and even geographically? I mean if my neighbour answered my questions on raising kids, I probably wouldn’t want her advice, because we have so little in common. If someone in the UK answered, whereas i’m in San Francisco, it wouldn’t help me too much either…

The idea behind a closed community like Frenchparents was that:

- It would first of all provide a safe place to ask all sorts of questions, even personal ones
- It would bring together those who took the effort to sign up to the site by filling out a loooong form and to pay a huuuge membership fee ( $20 to $35 a year)!
- It would bring together parents in a given geographical area, with similar references and constraints- like the excessive amount of sunshine and fresh air one gest living San Francisco…

- The other cautionary note to Yahoo Answers is the following. This is another giant mega tera database of us being held by a giant, woldwide company. From the categories we ask our questions in, Yahoo can infer our areas of interest and know yet a little more about us than where we live and our name, which they knew already. It just feels weird to me to have all this personal information held by a large corporate entity thats more powerful than any country governement…

Now with Frenchparents, members know some of the personal information they may provide is stored by a teeny, tiny entity with no power whatsoever!

The web sure isn’t boring these days…