Media

A social networking Web site that targets people who are 50 and older, called Eons, launched on Monday. It features an age-relevant search engine, dubbed "Cranky;" a section called "Obits," which is touted as the largest national free obituary center; a Longevity Calculator; and a way to easily change the font size of the print on the screen.

The site will conceivably compete with Third Age, which was one of the first sites to cater to the baby boomer generation online. Eons was created by Jeff Taylor, who founded job search Web site Monster.com.

I … Read more

There are plenty of options for parents who want to keep their kids safe on MySpace, not the least of which are good old-fashioned self-education (do you know how to translate "m4d sk1llz?"**) and proactive involvement in learning what kids are up to online. But for those who remain daunted by the idea of online social networking, there's the MySpace Guardian, a free downloadable toolbar that's designed to help parents track activity on their children's profiles.

Unfortunately, there's nothing about the MySpace Guardian that offers genuinely new ways to make site use safer. It … Read more

Like any evolving ecosystem, the Web 2.0 world is encountering its share of growing pains especially now that it's past the initial stages of development. And the best way to anticipate where things are going, as we've learned proverbially, is to look at the past.

History is already repeating itself, as News.com showed last week with an article on security risks in interactive technologies. And today, another dark memory from the dot-com boom resurfaced in a story about do-it-yourself Web sites: the specter of lost data.

As we learned the hard way in the those early … Read more

Choose Your Own Adventure, a staple of entertainment for three decades of young readers, has finally made its way to DVD. Upping the ante from the traditional Choose Your Own Adventure books, the new interactive DVDs are expected to compete with video games for the younger set.

Interactive DVDs give kids the chance to direct the outcomes of a story's characters--and see the consequences of their actions. The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) that the first DVD released is Lean Forward Media's "The Abominable Snowman," a classic with a twist. At one point in the … Read more

Being in marketing in the age of Web 2.0 means one thing: Your logo better not be old-school. Visitors to the Yay Hooray! online forum--which calls itself "arguably the best Web site ever"--created a humorous thread that displayed their visions for the future, with different users taking outdated logos and Web 2.0-ifying them.

The creators took the original logos and made them lighter, gave them bolder fonts and created rounder, more bubble-shaped designs. And, in true Web 2.0 fashion, most logos were given a drop shadow or a mirror image. Also, many logos … Read more

Last weekend, the 12-hour outages on MySpace sent the News Corp.-owned social-networking site's young user base into disarray. The site tried to mollify the situation with a game of Pac-Man, but it wasn't particularly effective. Rumors abounded that some profiles may even have been deleted forever. (It appears that those were, well, rumors.) Perhaps not coincidentally, some people started talking up Bebo, a British social- networking site, as a "cooler" alternative to MySpace.

Then, on Monday morning, MySpace regained its server power and things seemed to be back to normal.

But now: They're baaaaa-ack! … Read more

Dell will be giving away 12 notebook computers each day from July 27 until August 31 .

The giveaway is part of Dell's skin-design contest and back-to-school campaign. Skins, personalized laptop covers, have become all the rage among many laptop owners. Capitalizing on the trend, Dell has begun to offer skins for purchase in lieu of owners making homemade laptop modifications.

To enter Dell's contest, people must register at the Dell contest Web site between July 27 and August 20, choose a notebook, and create a skin to go with it. No purchase of a laptop in necessary to … Read more

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences chosen TiVo Inc. as the recipient of an Emmy Award for outstanding achievement in interactive television. Brian Seth Hurst, who leads the Academy's Interactive Media Peer Group, cited that TiVo's early emergence and continued dominance in the digital video recorder market were what led to its triumph over the other three nominees--AOL Music on Demand, CNN Enhanced, and DirecTV Interactive Sports.

Last year's winner in the category was Cablevision in recognition of its iO Interactive Optimum Digital Cable Service.

The "interactive Emmys," which will be presented as part … Read more

Fans of the wonderful sci-fi thriller series "Babylon 5" have three new, albeit different, reasons to celebrate this week.

First, as part of its arrangement to put its TV content on Apple Computer's iTunes, Warner Bros. said it would include the first season of the epic J. Michael Straczynski production.

The show, according to Wikipedia, "is set in the 23rd century on a large space station named Babylon 5 (which) is built to be a gathering place for fostering peace (among planetary civilizations) through diplomacy, trade, and cooperation."

Fans can buy the episodes to their … Read more