High Tech Household

Ars Technica posted a quick write-up about an Internet Explorer add-on aimed at helping children be safer while online. It sounds like it’s mostly just a custom search engine and some IE Web Accelerators, but something is better than nothing.

The most important note, in my opinion, is that parents must be aware of what their children are doing online. No software package can be a fool-proof child safety-net. This could be a useful tool, but it doesn’t allow a parent to be uninvolved.

• Ars Technica: Hands-on: Microsoft launches child-friendly IE8

Ars Technica is one of my favorite sites on the web. They can be very technical sometimes, but when they post something relevant to our topic here at HTH, we’ll let you know.

Today’s link is a write-up they did in response to a recent FCC report on parental controls across all sorts of media. The report is very comprehensive, but the article boils it down nicely. It’s definitely a good read for the parents in the audience tonight.

• Ars Technica: A parent’s quick guide to content blocking technologies

Last week I wrote about the first web browser designed specifically for kids, KidZui.  The Makers of KidZui have recently embarked on a new venture, taking their concept of a kid-friendly Internet to a new level by creating ZuiTube, which is essentially YouTube for kids.  Rather than a competitive service to YouTube, ZuiTube works by filtering YouTube content, and aggregating the best kid-appropriate material from YouTube directly to ZuiTube, so that young children can enjoy the benefits of YouTube without the dangers.  Says Cliff Boro, CEO of KidZui:

There’s so much great content on YouTube for kids, but there’s so much horrendous content that’s completely inappropriate. So our goal with ZuiTube is to give kids the best of what YouTube has to offer without parents running and screaming because there’s just so much bad stuff as well.

ZuiTube is positioned to be both an educational and entertainment vehicle, providing elementary-aged school children with thousands of videos and “channels” to view.  With tools like KidZui and YouTube, children can enjoy and explore the vast knowledge base of the Internet with the minds of their parents put at ease.

When I was a child, the Internet was something that existed solely on military bases and at universities.  As I entered my teenage years, managed services such as Compuserv, Prodigy, and America Online became popular.  These services allowed parents to manage what type of content their children could and couldn’t view, and gave children a somewhat structured environment in which they could harness the new online world without much danger of running into inappropriate content.  When the Internet came into the forefront, parental controls became much more difficult.

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