The Social

Universal Music Group has licensed its music videos to Kiwibox, a social-media site for teens that relaunched in August after quietly existing since the late '90s.

Under the terms of the agreement, Universal's music videos will begin being distributed on the "KiwiboxTV" video portal before the end of the year. Universal's labels and artists will receive a cut of ad revenue in compensation.

"Music remains one of the most important outlets of teen expression, and Kiwibox has long been a leader in promoting artists to its rapidly expanding community, " CEO Lin Daisaid in a statement. "This (Universal) partnership validates our long-standing relationship with the music industry and commitment to providing valuable content for teens."

Kiwibox's slant is that it encourages members to create videos, articles, and other content for the site; the best creations are featured in an online "magazine."

Universal appears to have embraced a wide distribution strategy when it comes to social media. Its catalog is already available on a number of social networks and youth-focused sites, including Imeem, and its U.K. arm sponsored an original series on AOL's Bebo. The company has taken a stake in social site Buzznet, and joined other major labels in backing MySpace Music.

Today in teen news: Kiwibox, a social network and editorial content site geared toward the Miley Cyrus set, announced Monday that it's exited beta and launched "Kiwibox 2.0." In the new launch are sleeker drag-and-drop profile pages, a new casual-gaming section, more video content aggregated on "KiwiboxTV," and more editorial content contributed by members.

As with many teen-oriented sites, Kiwibox members earn "points" for completing activities on the site--writing articles for its weekly online magazine, filling out certain profile criteria--which they can then redeem for real-world prizes like iPods. Right now, Kiwibox has about 60 pieces of original content per day,

Something you probably didn't know: the oddly named Kiwibox first launched in 1999, meaning that it's been around since before many of its young members could read. The good news is that it's stayed afloat. The not-so-good news is that its membership count is still only 1.8 million, enough for an active user base but still a fraction of the size of much younger sites like MySpace or even smaller ones like Piczo.

After the relaunch, Kiwibox hopes to rev up its numbers with an impending marketing campaign as well as content partnerships that will syndicate its own content across the Web and bring in new third-party content. There will be technological partnerships as well, including a deal with a video partner to create a branded player.

CEO Lin Dai is confident it'll succeed, too. "We know the content plus social network model really works," he said in an interview with CNET News.com last week.

It's no Facebook, but social site MyYearbook can still play with the popular kids: the site has announced $13 million in Series B venture funding. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners with existing investors US Venture Partners and First Round Capital chipping in as well. Norwest's Sergio Monsalve has joined the site's board of directors.

Founded in 2005 when co-founder Catherine Cook was a sophomore in high school (the two other co-founders are her older brothers Dave and Geoff, who serves as CEO), MyYearbook focuses on a decidedly younger demographic than Facebook and even News Corp.'s MySpace, which is frequently considered to be a teen hub. The site currently has a major partnership, for example, with the Teen Choice Awards hosted by youth sensation Miley Cyrus. Not exactly a pick for the over-21 crowd.

With the new funding round, MyYearbook has raised $16.8 million total. The purpose for raising so much wasn't directly addressed by the site, with a release ambiguously saying that it will be used to "develop new services for its members and continue to drive revenue." Right now, per Hitwise, the site pulls in about 10 million unique visitors per month, and 2 billion page views. That's still small compared with Facebook and MySpace, but nothing to sneer at either.

Rumors swirled last year that the site was going to be acquired by InterActiveCorp; they weren't true, stemming from a misunderstanding after the site gave a "mock pitch" to IAC czar Barry Diller at a conference.

You know you love it: The CW Television Network has decided to start streaming its teen show Gossip Girl online again.

According to The New York Times, free ad-supported episodes of the program will soon reappear on The CW's Web site. They'd been taken down in April as an "experiment" to see how it affected viewership ratings.

(Credit: The CW)

Here's what happened: The melodrama about upper-crust high schoolers in Manhattan, based on a best-selling young-adult book series, had been blessed with the greatest of hype--the star power of creator Josh Schwartz, better known as the guy who brought us The O.C.; regular mentions in Gawker and New York magazine; scandalous sightings of its young cast partying all over the city; and racy ad campaigns featuring taglines like "OMFG" and "Every Parent's Nightmare."

But its ratings had been downright subpar, even as the show's subject matter grew more and more guilty-pleasure-fantastic with sex, drugs, gambling, murder, and the exploits of rakish antihero Chuck Bass.

The CW had said all along that because of Gossip Girl's young, tech-savvy audience--the title character is an anonymous blogger, after all--that traditional television ratings simply didn't apply. Nielsen ratings, the longstanding measure of broadcast popularity, don't measure episodes recorded on DVRs or watched on the Web, after all. But under pressure, the network pulled the show from its Web site to see if TV ratings would improve.

Any gain in ratings was negligible, the Times report said. That said, Gossip Girl episodes had been available for purchase in the iTunes Store throughout the "streaming ban," and it was certainly still possible to record them on set-top boxes.

But with the second season of Gossip Girl premiering September 1, this means that you'll once again be able to get your Upper East Side baby billionaire fix from the comfort of your procrastination-friendly office cubicle.

Chuck Bass would so approve.

Disclosure: The CW is a joint venture between Warner Bros. and CBS, parent company of CNET News.

Social networks like Facebook and MySpace have reputations as time-sucking procrastination tools, but a new study from the University of Minnesota says au contraire.

Social networks build beneficial technological, creative, and communication skills, the study says, leading the researchers to actually describe social networks with the adjective "educational." Who knew?

"What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today," Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher from the school's College of Education and Human Development, said in a release Friday.

Data from the study came from teenagers ages 16 to 18 in about a dozen urban high schools in the Midwest.

"Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout," Greenhow continued. "They're also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology."

As an added bonus, social networks may be part of the reason that low-income students are largely just as technologically proficient as their peers, contradicting parts of a 2005 Pew study that detailed an economic "digital divide." According to the new study, a full 94 percent of students use the Internet, 82 percent use it at home, and 77 percent have social-networking profiles.

The "digital divide," obviously, goes far beyond Facebook profiles, and social networks come with a whole host of new problems like cyberbullying, but at least there are signs that it could be leveling the playing field a bit.

Sprawling new-media conglomerate InterActiveCorp on Tuesday announced that it has acquired StarNet Interactive, an Israel-based company that operates GirlSense, a social site for teen girls. More specifically, GirlSense describes itself as "online dress-up games for girls with fashion sense."

Terms of the deal, which is part of IAC's Consumer Applications and Portals division, were not disclosed.

Other teen-oriented properties in IAC's arsenal, with which GirlSense will likely be intertwined, include virtual world Zwinky and profile customization site Webfetti. GirlSense counts its registered users at 13 million.

"Part of our growth strategy includes acquisition of products and companies that complement our core competencies," John Park, president and CEO of IAC Consumer Applications & Portals, said in a statement Tuesday. "Adding Girlsense.com to our existing teen-targeted product portfolio provides us with broader teen mindshare and access to the coveted tween demographic."

The ad-supported GirlSense--advertisements are currently served by women's-focused ad network Glam Media--is also aligned with IAC's broader restructuring.

Late last year, the company announced that it would be splitting into five separate corporations as an attempt to center its operations on ad-supported media rather than retail or financial services. And after lying low through the spin-off process and a boardroom battle, the Barry Diller-helmed IAC appears to be back on track with its historically aggressive acquisition strategy.

Last week, IAC's Ask.com division acquired the parent company of Dictionary.com.

MySpace can breathe a little easier. A federal appeals court ruled last week that the News Corp.-owned social network can't be held responsible for the sexual assault of an Austin, Texas, teen by a man she met on the site.

The girl, named in the case as Julie Doe, initially filed suit along with her mother, named as Jane Doe, after she was sexually assaulted in May 2006 by 19-year-old Pete Solis, whom she met on MySpace. The lawsuit, filed in a Texas state court, targeted MySpace, parent company News Corp., and Solis. Among the allegations against MySpace were fraud, negligence, gross negligence, and negligent misrepresentation, and the Does claimed MySpace should have had technology in place to make it impossible for someone as young as Julie to create a profile in the first place.

But on Friday, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Does can't target MySpace in the case, which had already been dismissed once before. "Parties complaining that they were harmed by a Web site's publication of user-generated content...may sue the third-party user who generated the content," Judge Edith Clement Brown asserted in the ruling, "but not the interactive computer service that enabled them to publish the content online.

It would have been Julie Doe's parents' job to protect her, not MySpace's, the court decided.

The Does' case might have been able to stay afloat if the assault in question had stemmed from actual harassment on MySpace rather than a real-life assault instigated by correspondence on the site. Had Julie Doe been harassed online and reported Solis' profile to MySpace, only to receive an inadequate or slow response, it'd be a very different story.

That's something that MySpace rival Facebook ran into when New York legal authorities conducted an investigation to see how the site responded to claims of harassment. Claiming that Facebook was slow to action, the office of N.Y. Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo subpoenaed the social-networking site before the two eventually reached an accord.

It also probably didn't help the plaintiffs' side in Doe vs. MySpace that Doe had lied about her age to join the site, claiming she was 18 when she created a profile in 2005, despite the fact that she was actually 13. MySpace's safety regulations bar children younger than 14 from using the site, and profiles of members under 16 cannot be viewed publicly.

Court documents from the February 1, 2007, hearing before the district court show that the legal authorities saw holes in the Does' case early on: "You have a 13-year-old girl who lies, disobeys all of the instructions, later on disobeys the warning not to give personal information, obviously, (and) does not communicate with the parent. More important, the parent does not exercise the parental control over the minor. The minor gets sexually abused, and you want somebody else to pay for it?"

Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act has historically protected Internet service providers and other online communications services, like social-networking sites, from the legal issues that may arise from activity on them. In recent years, courts have increasingly found ways through the implied "immunity." Matchmaking site Roommates.com, for example, couldn't hide behind Section 230 when an appeals court decided it was violating a housing discrimination act by allowing members to filter through potential roommates by criteria like sexual orientation.

But in this case, it really doesn't look like MySpace can be held responsible. Tech-law blogger Eric Goldman agreed with the court in a blog post Monday, writing that "even though the 5th Circuit clearly got it right, and the plaintiffs never should have been brought this lawsuit against MySpace, I remain flummoxed by the number of cases I'm seeing involving teens making poor (and, in some cases, life-altering) decisions using MySpace."

In January, MySpace announced that it was working with the attorneys general of 49 states--the exception, a bit ironically, is Texas--to develop an an arsenal of safety tools on the site. Age verification technology is among the priorities, the social network has said.

Fellow Americans, on January 31, we celebrate the anniversary of what was undoubtedly one of the most hilarious faux-pas in homeland security: the 2007 Boston Bomb Scare.

For those who stepped in late, on January 31, 2007, the city devolved into mass hysteria (well, kind of) when police were alerted to a number of suspicious electronic devices scattered around the city.

Before long, the city realized that the light-up displays were actually promotions for the upcoming film version of the cartoon show Aqua Teen Hunger Force--light-emitting diode (LED) circuit boards shaped like the show's "Mooninite" characters. But by that point, there had already been trains delayed, traffic rerouted, bridges shut down, and press conferences aplenty.

The Mooninites had been installed in a dozen other American cities, including my hometown of New York, where I saw one for weeks on Lafayette Street near Cooper Square and didn't think that it could possibly be anything other than silly cartoon art.

Apparently, some things just don't go over too well in the land of the Red Sox. When the state's attorney general arraigned the marketers in charge of the campaign for planting a "hoax device" in public, the statute used to justify the arraignment actually used the phrase "infernal machine."

As a commemoration of the national-security laugh fest's one-year anniversary, a group of artists have brought LED art back to Boston's streets, this time in the shapes of political figures like George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. The Boston Globe reported earlier this month that the original "Aqua Teen terrorist" remains proud of his work.

Poor, neglected Boston must've just wanted its moment in the post-apocalyptic sun; after all, you sure didn't see that Cloverfield monster splashing around in the Charles River or the megahurricanes from The Day After Tomorrow flooding the Big Dig.

Full disclosure: I am not rooting for the Patriots this weekend.

NEW YORK--A coalition of law enforcement authorities and representatives from social-networking site MySpace.com gathered Monday morning to unveil an extensive new plan for ensuring the safety of minors on the Internet.

Under the agreement, MySpace has pledged to work with the attorneys general on a set of principles to combat harmful material on social-networking sites (pornography, harassment, cyberbullying, and identity theft, among other issues), better educate parents and schools about online threats, cooperate with law enforcement officials around the country, as well as develop new technology for age and identity verification on social-networking sites.

"Today's announcement is a landmark step forward in providing new protections for teenage members of social-networking sites such as MySpace," Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace's chief security officer, said at the press conference here.

The new Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking, led by attorneys general Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, consists of Nigam as well as the attorneys general of 49 total U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The group has released a "Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking," which it hopes will achieve industrywide approval from other social-networking sites and Internet providers.

The lone state missing from the task force is Texas. North Carolina's Roy Cooper, speaking on behalf of the coalition's executive committee--Cooper, Blumenthal, Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, and Marc Dann of Ohio--would not comment on the reason why. The members of the executive committee were joined by Anne Milgram, attorney general of New Jersey, as well as Steve Cohen, a representative for New York attorney general Andrew M. Cuomo.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said later on Monday that his office declined to participate because he didn't consider the proposed safety measures to be strong enough.

In the press conference, the attorneys general acknowledged that existing standards of law enforcement simply don't suffice in the rapidly changing climate of the Internet. "You're in an area where what you are looking at today will not be what you're looking at in six months," Cohen said. "There is an exponential change that goes on with each passing week and month, and you really do need to bring together the best minds and the best ideas."

The task force aims for cooperation from other social-networking sites, namely Facebook, which reached its own agreement with Cuomo's office over sex offender data on the site in October. "We are calling on Facebook and other social-networking sites today to adopt these principles, to put these safety practices in effect, and to join the task force," Cooper said. "We think it's critical that this be industrywide.

When a member of the audience asked why reaching an agreement with MySpace had taken this long--the site was founded in 2004--Cooper said that it had been an ongoing process. "We recognized pretty soon that this was going to be a problem and we began pushing legislation, we began exploring litigation, (and) we've been in discussion with MySpace for about two years," Cooper said. "We talked to other social-networking sites. It has taken us this long to culminate in this agreement." He added that the negotiations significantly improved when MySpace was acquired by the News Corp. division Fox Interactive Media in 2005.

Indeed, MySpace's dealings with law enforcement officials have been ongoing. Last spring, a group of eight states' attorneys general wrote an open letter to the site expressing concern about the numbers of registered sex offenders with profiles on the site. After initially asserting that federal and state laws prevented it from meeting the attorneys' requests, MySpace eventually unveiled a preliminary plan for compliance.

The attorneys general confirmed in Monday's press conference that they wanted to avoid legal action against MySpace and social-networking sites in general. "Litigation is costly, time-consuming, (and) uncertain in its result," Blumenthal said. They also acknowledged that law enforcement officials still don't see eye-to-eye with social-networking sites on a variety of issues, namely the feasibility of identity and age verification. The attorneys general believe it's technologically possible; Nigam and the rest of MySpace say it needs more development.

"We are not papering over or concealing our continued differences," Blumenthal said. "This process of discussion has been difficult, daunting, but also extraordinarily educational."