social media | i cannot focus...

how young is too young to be social online?

June 11, 2010 Leave a comment

Last week, I returned home and went to see Carter, my 7yo – who of course has a propensity for all things techie as well as all things game-like. We sat down and started talking about what he was learning in school as well as the ferocious pace at which he was reading a series of books, fantastic I thought to myself. He then went off on this tangent about this new penguin game he started playing online, the short of it was he’s a penguin and goes into training and battle with other penguins to earn belts, very similar to the karate belt system. I thought to myself, great another game, perhaps it’s similar to his adoration of Pokemon or Bakugan characters – another outlet of challenging personalities and figurines that he can mentally catalog and pin against each other – harmless enough. That’s when I was wrong. Turns out this penguin game is part of Penguin Club, a website run by Disney – a social network for kids to explore, play, battle online assuming the
identity of cute little penguins. There’s a lobby, and other penguins walking around ready to engage however they see fit.

Troublesome. Troublesome indeed. Luckily he picked an innocuous handle, but still in my social paranoid parenting hat I quickly put on, I was not one bit amused, not surprised just caught off guard because the question had already been posed “should I be on Facebook dad?” a matter of weeks prior by the same 7yo.

Sure there’s parental oversight to ensure his privacy and Internet safety is abound but the entire concept bothers me as a parent and digitally savvy professional. It shouldn’t bother me as I am well aware there is just about any social network out there for any flavor of the week but the realization that 7yo’s are frolicking online poses the question when is too soon for the social web?

Of course this post assumes we are all vigilant parents and monitor our children’s internet habits, teach them right and wrong, as well as not to talk to strangers (even in igloo lobbies) or divulge any personal information.

Filed under digital, random thoughts, social media, technology Tagged with children, governance, parenting, social networks

wordpress for the iphone …

June 10, 2010 Leave a comment

So I’ve had my iPhone for well over a year now (Blackberry prior to that) and my blog for a longer while. When I got my iPhone, like everyone else, I spent 1400 hours the first two days – yes that’s possible – on the Apple iTunes store downloading every single app that looked remotely interesting or even not interesting. Some downright stupid – how many times have you ever really used the light-saber app, I mean really? One of those apps I installed back in the day was WordPress for the iPhone. Never ever used it, didn’t even configure and sign into my blog from my mobile device, because quite honestly, I couldn’t fathom conceiving to write a blog post from my phone.

(Tangent rewind – couldn’t use mobile WP because I was on blogger)

Well low and behold a few weeks ago, I looked at my phone, realized I needed to clean up all the nonsensical apps, and stumbled back upon WordPress mobile. Clicked on it to configure my blog, and it’s actually quite useful. All the posting features are built I , it’s great for quick/short posts (i.e. when i got more than a tweet) has all the tagging mechanisms one could want on the go, and now I have no real excuse not to post. Typing relatively short blog posts are a breeze, no need to completely whip out the laptop. And you can still write drafts without an internet connection.

Of course, this post was written on an iPad, but that’s another post – though the review is the same, except bigger keyboard possibilities.

ps – I’ve had to give up on the all lowercase type, these mobile devices auto-correct too much and it’s not a battle I want to tackle anymore with going back and correcting i’s. Thanks Apple for being such punctuation-nazi’s!