Parents fear their daughters are becoming addicted to social networking sites, a girls’ school leader says.

Girls seem to be “permanently connected” to sites like Facebook and Bebo, president of the Girls’ Schools Association Jill Berry said.

This issue now tops the list of parents’ worries by some way, she told the association’s annual conference.

Mrs Berry also argued that girls’ interest in fashion should not be mistaken for being “shallow”.

The leader of the girls’ private school association said there was no contradiction in girls being interested in fashion and wanting to be seen as intelligent feminists.

“Girls can be highly intelligent and interested in being seen to be attractive – the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

“Caring about physical appearance and fashion and wanting to look good doesn’t have to be a betrayal of some feminist ideal. I love shoes but it doesn’t make me shallow. Girls can have fun and also be taken seriously.”

‘We hate x’

Mrs Berry, who is head teacher of Dame Alice Harpur School in Bedford, highlighted concerns about girls spending too long on networking websites.

“They [parents] worry about the addictive nature of networking sites and the fact that their daughters seem to be permanently connected.

“They ask us what to do about their daughters being on the receiving end of ‘We hate x’ sites or ‘honesty boxes’ where comments about each other can be posted anonymously,” she told the conference.

These problems had overtaken their concerns about the girls’ face-to-face contact in school, she said.

Mrs Berry added: “Our schools now need routinely to advise parents about internet safety, in addition to working to educate the girls and to encourage them to be responsible in their relationships on and off line.

“We do have to educate girls – we can’t simply protect them.”

A Facebook spokeswoman said: “It’s equally convenient to characterise TV and video game usage as time-consuming distractions.

“Yet there’s academic research that touts the benefits of these activities and services like Facebook. Regardless, it’s in the hands of users, to define priorities and decide how to spend their time.”

She added that Facebook had a range of safety tips to ensure users remained safe online.

These include, users being careful to only accept friend requests from people they know and to report any messages or profiles that look suspicious.

taken from

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8362568.stm

There is way too much information on Twitter — lately, it defies navigation. In January, there were 2.4 million tweets a day, according to Alessio S. ignorini, a researcher.

Why should we care about information overload at Twitter? Isn’t Twitter about the individual experiences — a Tweeter and her followers — not the totality of millions of Tweeters around the world?

Twitter says it could unveil in the next few weeks — “geolocation” — holds such potential to make the Twitter rapids navigable.

The idea is to take advantage of global positioning systems on cellphones to allow Twitter users to include a precise location with each tweet. Users would be able, right off the bat, to limit their searches to tweets from a particular location.

“Proximity can be this proxy for relevance,” said Ryan Sarver, the director of the Twitter platform, who led a “fairly small team” of programmers who after a few months are close to completing the geolocation project. “We are about delivering the right information to the right people.”

Improvements like geolocation have the potential to make the Internet suddenly relevant to society as it is lived, not just relevant to what happens online. Mr. Sarver imagines features like “local trending topics,” a list of subjects popular in a particular area; or searches for happy hour in a neighborhood of Dallas that will intelligently link tweets about happy hours to the place they were sent from.

Because GPS will provide the ability to become very “granular” with locations, you could mimic through Twitter the banter at the local diner or a barbershop, by limiting a search of tweets to a two-block radius.

There is also the fear of loss of privacy and loss of security as once-local chats become globally public. That is why Mr. Sarver said Twitter would require two “opt in” decisions — at the profile level and again through the application.

For the technological optimists, the cures for information overload, in essence, are better filters and greater context. The more you know about a message — who sent it and

 why — the better you understand it.

Creating navigation tools for digital information is the next big challenge, said Erik Hersman, a co-founder of Ushahidi who has been in contact with Mr. Sarver’s team at Twitter.

 

When I was a little girl, I had to walk over to a friend’s house if I had something to tell him. Or I could write him a letter. With a pen.

O.K., that’s a slight exaggeration (there were phones, after all). But children today have a plethora of high-tech gadgets they can use to phone and — more commonly — text with one another. The question most parents have is what type of texting gadget is appropriate for which age group.

Some parents have a very simple answer to this query: None. Cellphones and smartphones are for grown-ups only.

What do you think ?

Are you a Facebook addict ?

Well, you’re not the only one  

Watch this funny video !

Shut out by the near totalitarian powers of the Islamic republic, the mainstream media tracked the stream of consciousness produced by new media. Some of the material is powerful, even indelible.

Particularly haunting is the 40-second YouTube video that shows a young woman, wearing jeans but otherwise dressed conservatively, suddenly falling to the sidewalk, shot in the heart. Her eyes turn to what must be a cell-phone camera, wide and shocked and dying as we stare at her. Men rush to her side and try to stanch the wound, but blood trickles from her mouth as an older man — later described as her father — cries and cries. Hours after the video surfaced, people on Twitter said she had not been part of the demonstration at all. Just a bystander.

By the end of the day, the Tweets had given her a name: Neda, which means “the voice” or “the call” in Farsi.

But who shot her? A soldier? A member of the notorious Basij, the volunteer militia that supports President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Were they aiming at her? Could this have been an accident or a random act of violence?

read more about it here

This article deals with the links between political revolutions and communication tools.

Social networking, a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, has already been credited with aiding protests from the Republic of Georgia to Egypt to Iceland.

Iran : the “Twitter Revolution” ?

Twitter did prove to be a crucial tool in the cat-and-mouse game between the opposition and the government over enlisting world opinion. As the Iranian government restricts journalists’ access to events, the protesters have used Twitter’s agile communication system to direct the public and journalists alike to video, photographs and written material related to the protests. (As has become established custom on Twitter, users have agreed to mark, or “tag,” each of their tweets with the same bit of type — #IranElection — so that users can find them more easily). So maybe there was no Twitter Revolution. But over the last week, we learned a few lessons about the strengths and weaknesses of a technology that is less than three years old and is experiencing explosive growth.

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Chinese censors blocked access to Twitter and other popular online services today , two days before the twentieth anniversary of the democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.

Read more about it here

Independent film is thriving on television thanks to video on demand

Read this article about films and video on demand.

from : http://www.economist.com

CANNES was quiet this week. Although the stars and the paparazzi went through the usual red-carpet routine, there was less extravagance and a smaller contingent of film-buyers than usual. Yet for makers of independent films, that was not the end of the world. In their business the action increasingly takes place not on the French Riviera but in American living rooms. Tricky, intelligent films are finding a home in the least glamorous corner of the television business.

Getting independent films into cinemas, never easy, has become much harder in the past year. Some specialist distributors, such as Warner Independent Pictures, have closed and others are buying fewer films. The credit crunch and the strong dollar have cut foreign sales. Meanwhile cheap digital-video cameras and editing software have produced a flood of content. Some 5,500 films are chasing buyers in Cannes this year. Last year just 606 new films were released in American cinemas. Many lost money. “The economics just do not make sense,” says Jonathan Sehring of IFC Films, an independent distributor.

Hence the rapid growth of an alternative. This year IFC will release about 100 films “on demand”, meaning they can be called up for a fee in most households that get their television via cable or satellite.

The reason for the rush is that, for low-budget films, the economics of video on demand do make sense. Cable companies, which take a cut when they sell a film, help with advertising. Mr Sehring says IFC makes about as much when a film is sold on demand as when a punter buys a cinema ticket, even though the ticket costs almost twice as much. He reckons he recoups his costs and returns money to filmmakers more than half the time—not bad for films that might otherwise have disappeared without trace.

It also makes sense to concentrate on a single marketing push. Heavy advertising helps keep blockbusters in people’s minds. But small, independent films are easily forgotten.

EPAThe action is on TV

By launching their creations on cable, filmmakers must give up the dream of creating a hugely profitable surprise hit like “Napoleon Dynamite”.

Distributors are learning what kinds of films are best suited to video on demand. Eamonn Bowles, Magnolia’s president, says it helps greatly if films are susceptible to brief synopsis. That means well-known names and obedience to genre conventions.  Documentaries may be better suited to the internet, since it caters so well to special-interest groups.

Whether accessed via cable television or the internet, video on demand is likely to grow. America’s suburbs are becoming much more diverse places, with more ethnic minorities, more people with degrees and more gays, according to Gary Gates, a demographer at the University of California, Los Angeles. The potential audience for independent films is thus dispersing beyond the places where independent cinemas are concentrated. Not everybody lives near an art-house cinema, but almost everybody has a remote control.

An interesting article here

Microsoft Corp. and Verizon Wireless are in talks to launch a touch-screen multimedia cellphone on the carrier’s network early next year, in an ambitious effort to challenge Apple Inc.’s iPhone, according to people familiar with the matter.

Microsoft is a major player in software for cellphones, but it is working hard to develop a new device that will rival Apple’s.

Microsoft’s project, which is code-named “Pink,” aims to produce a phone that will extend the tech giant’s Windows Mobile operating system, adding new software capabilities. It would also likely include Microsoft’s new Windows Marketplace for Mobile, a store for cellphone downloads along the lines of Apple’s App Store, these people said.

read more about this here