Anastasia Goodstein at Totally Wired is taking a look at the latest Pew Internet & American Life Project report looking teens’ online contact with strangers.

Fully 32% of online teens have been contacted by someone with no connection to them or any of their friends, and 7% of online teens say they have felt scared or uncomfortable as a result of contact by an online stranger. Several behaviors are associated with high levels of online stranger contact, including social networking profile ownership, posting photos online and using social networking sites to flirt.

Anastasia then gives three reasons why this should make parents, educators or adults with teens in their lives feel better.

Anastasia also runs Ypulse - a great blog that provides news and commentary about Gen Y.

By Rae Allen

Earlier this month the first Australian Blogging Conference was held in Brisbane at the Creative Industries campus of QUT. At least the organiser quoted it as being the first, and certainly I could find much online about previous national conferences.

I went to the introductory session, a good ice-breaker with speakers or ‘discussion leaders‘, including Senator Andrew Bartlett, Profesor Brian Fitzgerald and one of my favourite Australian bloggers, Duncan Riley. Apart from his own blog Duncan contributes to one of the big the big high profile blogs, Techcrunch.

Axel Bruns at the Citizen Journalism session

Even with it being held just over the road I couldn’t get to as many of the sessions as I would have liked, part of the problem in running concurrent sessions at a conference like this. I did however get the chance to sit in on the Creative Commons session in the morning, and a little longer at the Citizen Journalism session in the afternoon.

More on Creative Commons later.

With a looming election, unsurprisingly the citizen journalism session was dominated by discussions on the role of citizen journalists in the coverage of elections and public policy. Graham Young from You Decide 2007 explained the philosophy they are using to stimulate debate on relevant issues. The site is a partnership between, among others, SBS, The Brisbane Institute, and QUT.

While the discussion may have been about politics and the coverage of civic issues, the discussion leaders admitted that in the blogosphere they were outnumbered by food and knitting writers, and perhaps citizen journalists covering politics wasn’t necessarily the only outlet.

Other Reading:

Des Walsh has rounded up most of the writing done on and about the conference

Kate Davis - Building a better blog

Sci-Fi author and digital rights activist, Cory Doctorow, has an interesting piece at Internet Evolution about the ongoing challenge of finding and filtering the information that’s relevant to you without being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what’s coming at you.

He suggests that computers now have to help us ignore what we don’t need.

It’s as though there’s a cognitive style built into TCP/IP. Just as the network only does best-effort delivery of packets, not worrying so much about the bits that fall on the floor, TCP/IP users also do best-effort sweeps of the Internet, focusing on learning from the good stuff they find, rather than lamenting the stuff they don’t have time to see.

Former BBC online journalism pioneer, Kevin Anderson, has made some sharp - and sad - observations about the BBC’s decision to integrate the BBC News website operations with radio and TV news.

Now with this forced integration of radio, TV and online news, I fear that they will lose - or, at best, relegate to the sidelines - the online management, editors and journalists who have built a world class online news service. Done wrong, this could be a huge step backward for the BBC, back to the bad old days of ’shovelware’ and simple re-purposing.

Steve Outing says that if news organisations want to interact with young audiences then they need to figure out ways to get their content where those audiences are spending time, that is, on social networks such as Facebook and MySpace that spread content via recommendation.

For example, a Facebook user adds an application that includes headlines from a news organization that’s supplying a headline feed. The user’s friends see this when visiting the user’s Facebook profile. The user reads an interesting article and highlights it — perhaps in a Facebook group. This shows up in the “newsfeed” that Facebook users see which alerts them to activities by their friends, and within groups that they belong to. That is, if you add an article pointer to a group, your friends will all see this in their newsfeeds.

This is not trivial. You’re talking about this news going out to maybe a few dozen or a few hundred of the one user’s friends (which seems to be typical friend quantity of Facebook users). That’s powerful because if a friend is recommending something (like a news article), you’re more likely to check it out than if you discovered it in the more normal, non-personal ways.

(Link from Strange Attractor)

Without the artificial market restrictions imposed on P2P networks in the United States by the RIAA and the MPAA, Chinese companies have been free to innovate and are now producing superior web technology in P2P sharing.

And what have the Chinese developed? A P2P file network that’s 50 times faster than BitTorrent, according to Duncan Riley.

(Link from Terry Heaton’s PoMo blog)

I went to the Australian Information Architecture Conference recently, and an early speaker was Iain Barker who had been looking at the debate about the length of web pages, and whether that was a problem. Considering a number of ABC Online brands have just been recently rebuilt or in the process thereof it was an interesting question.

Comparing the old and new ABC News sites

Overall his research found:

• for many major sites web page length runs about 4000pixels
• web page length seems to have increased by 10-20% over recent years.

One of the examples Barker used was the new ABC News site, which he described as of average length, while pointing out the Norwegian site Vg with pages longer than 10,000 pixels

Barker quoted research provided by Clicktale which suggests that talking about “the fold” in today’s web environment is spurious. Their research said:

• the fold is all over the place - their measures put it at 430, 600 and 860 pixels and even the largest of these was only 10% of the total. This makes designing for “the fold” mostly irrelevant
• most readers of a page browse all the way to the bottom of the page. There seems to be little reluctance to use the side scroll bar

Clicktale conclusions:

• Don’t try to squeeze your web page and make it more compact. There is little benefit in “squeezing” your pages since many visitors will scroll down below the fold to see your entire page.
• Since visitors will scroll all the way to the bottom of your web page, make life easier for them and divide your layout into sections for easy scanning.
• Minimize your written text and maximize images, visitors usually don’t read text - they scan web pages.
• Encourage your visitors to scroll down by using a “cut-off” layout.

Other reading: Milissa Tarquini on “Blasting the Myth of the Fold”

Here’s some fun… Ross Dawson and friends have created an Extinction Timeline.

When people talk about the future, they usually point to all the new things that will come to pass. However the evolution of human society is as much about old things disappearing as new things appearing. This means it is particularly useful to consider everything in our lives that is likely to become extinct.

Ethan Zuckerman has an interesting post up on censorship on the web and the differences between social and political filtering by governments, and the emergence of a new type of filtering that’s affecting people’s access to a whole range of quite innocent online activities. (Ethan’s post was sparked by Rebecca MacKinnon’s considerations of China’s efforts to censor access to the web via the so-called Great Firewall).

In social filtering, governments mandate the blocking of content that challenges social norms and mores. Saudi Arabia, for instance, blocks pornographic web content on the grounds that such content is un-Islamic… Political filtering occurs when a country blocks content that’s opposed to the current government, either the sites of internal opposition movements or international critics like human rights groups.

Ethan says there’s now a third front developing in filtering: Generative filtering - blocking access to generative tools (most Web 2.0 apps) - as when the government of Thailand tried to block access to YouTube because of the appearance of videos about the Thai king that were offensive to Thai people.

Blocking generative tools means blocking the possibility of speech, not just speech found to contravene local laws and norms.

Designing for Civil Society reports that the BBC’s Action Network is set to close. The Action Network was set up to help people get involved in their local community, raise issues that they think are important and to form and find groups for local democratic actions.