CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--A grassroots organization is working on a help line to support kids dealing with cyberbullying and other online issues, particularly on social networks.
In an interview Wednesday following a meeting of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force at Harvard University, Parry Aftab, the director of the national advocacy group WiredSafety, said her organization had started working on a pilot project to support cyber-bullying targets in West Chester County, New York.
Aftab and three student volunteers from WiredSafety's Teenangels program spoke at the conference. Teenangels was started in 1999 as a mentoring program that trains teenagers to teach Internet safety issues to kids, parents, and other adults.
Work on the help line project just started Tuesday. It will begin with Teenangels student volunteers from two high schools in West Chester County, and Aftab hopes it will be up and running in that county by Christmas. It will start as text- and instant-messaging only and will be staffed by teens.
"They know what the issues are," Aftab said. There's no timeframe for going national with the program, but Aftab hopes it can grow in the same grassroots or viral method her organization has grown--one community at a time.
Aftab said she had considered doing a help line for years, but had resisted because of liability issues. She now believes that with assistance from Pace University, a planned "escalation" policy will help teen volunteers deal with (or more appropriately, refer to the right emergency resources) anyone who raises issues such as cutting, suicide, or sexual exploitation.
She said she hasn't yet had a chance to discuss how to best work with social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and MyYearbook. But, ideally, she would like to see some sort of widget or application right on the sites that refers to the help line. (In its pilot phase, it would only be available to social groups in West Chester County.)
The Teenangels students and Aftab brought a dose of reality to the ISTTF conference held here at the Harvard Law School. After two days of presentations from academics, companies pitching age control mechanisms for Web sites, and 30-minute presentations from both Facebook and MySpace, it was the students' turn to speak. And what they had to say brought home just how difficult cyberbullying is to deal with.
Perhaps the biggest reason for that is students' behavior: A recent survey of high school students done by the Teenangels found 70 percent of the kids surveyed share passwords with other people. The reasons are often innocuous, such as asking someone to check their e-mail for them, or to find a homework assignment for them. Often, teens in relationships will share passwords to assure one another they're being faithful.
But that can lead to cyberbullying such as changing passwords or posting something on the Internet under that person's name. More troubling, the bulk of cyberbullying is done by friends, and the victims often protect the bullies from getting into trouble.
With that behavior in mind, it makes sense to offer peer support, rather than massive (that critics say could nonetheless be ineffectual) technological expertise (as the ISTTF is investigating), as a method to deal with the problem.
Add the University of Michigan's annual American Customer Satisfaction Index for the e-business sector to the list of surveys that show Google is doing really, really well.
The ACSI, set to be released early Tuesday, puts Google at the top of the heap for customer satisfaction in the big search and portals category. Google's score of 87 out of 100 (based on interviews with 3,000 customers) is one of the highest scores ever recorded by the ACSI.
For the e-business sector as a whole (including search and portals and a second category for news and information sites), the survey paints an improving picture: customer satisfaction improved 5.5 percent from 2007 to 79.3 this year on the ACSI's 100-point scale. That's a 25.9 percent jump since e-businesses were added to the survey in 2000.
"Satisfaction," of course, is a tricky thing to measure or even define, said Larry Freed, the author of the report and CEO of the consulting company ForeSee Results. The ACSI is based on a methodology researchers won't disclose and is used to measure customer satisfaction in 40 different industries, both online and offline. Researchers believe that what they arrive at is a fair assessment of consumer expectations and perceptions for a company matched against that company's ability to deliver.
In 2008, Google returned to the top slot Yahoo had held in 2007 thanks to a significant redesign. Freed believes Google's strong showing may be a sign that the search king's innovations, whether it's as simple as improved weather results on searches or "universal" search (which blends maps, news, and other stuff into the list of text URLs in search), are starting to have an impact on mainstream customers. "It takes a while before people pick up on it," Freed said.
Yahoo's drop shouldn't be surprising, given the distraction of the Microsoft takeover bid, rapid executive turnover, and a perception that it isn't churning out interesting, new products as quickly as Google, said Freed. "They've got to stay focused on the customers as hard as it is with all the distractions," he said.
As for the rest, Microsoft still has problems differentiating itself; AOL's appeal continues to dwindle as consumers become more search-centric rather than portal-centric when interacting with the Internet; and Ask is still managing to carve out a small but loyal customer base.
A second category for news and information sites shows that not much has changed in terms of customer satisfaction for big news sites, with scores hovering in the 70s, a result researchers call "mediocre and undistinguished for a mature and crucial e-business industry."
The goal of the University of Michigan's survey has less to do with figuring out who does what for customers and more to do with predicting future financial performance. Researchers maintain that a stock fund consisting of companies that performed well on the ACSI has consistently out-performed Standard & Poor's 500.
There's no great mystery to that: happy customers translate to successful companies.
Don't call Google's search business a monopoly, the company's executives have reminded us.
Unfortunately, we're running out of other ways to describe it. Researchers at Hitwise released new data Monday indicating that Google in July topped a 70 percent share of U.S. Web searches (70.77 percent to be exact). That's up 10 percent from the same month a year ago and 2 percent from the previous month. Yahoo search was second at 18.65 percent, MSN search was third at 5.36 percent, and Ask.com came in fourth at 3.53 percent.
At 70 percent, Google is joining a club of tech giants that really know how to dominate a market, including Cisco Systems in routers, Intel in chips, and Microsoft in a whole bunch of stuff.
Now before I get e-mails from Google's lawyers, let's add these caveats: There's probably no magic number at which trustbusters decide a company must be brought to heel. But with increasing dominance, comes increasing scrutiny by folks in Washington.
A few weeks ago, my colleague Charles Cooper discussed the "M" issue with Google's general counsel, Kent Walker, and Dana Wagner, the company's U.S. competition counsel. Their take, not surprisingly, is that it's inappropriate to compare Google's search dominance to IBM's mainframe business in the 1960s or Microsoft in the 1990s.
"The nature of the Internet is just a fundamentally different world from the sale of packaged software or the bundling of software with OEMs (original equipment manufacturers)," Walker said. (It's a terrific audio interview that's worth listening.) "The standard line we have is that competition is just one click away."
Maybe so. But that competition is starting to look mighty small by comparison.
Updated at 9:22 a.m. PDT
Amazon.com could become the e-commerce engine behind the MySpace Music service expected to launch in September, according to a report on TechCrunch.
In April, MySpace, which is already used by young acts trying to promote their music, announced it was working on a music service that would handle songs from at least three of the four major record labels. The labels will get an equity stake in the new joint venture and a share of all the revenue the service collects.
TechCrunch reports that Rhapsody and (interestingly) Apple are also bidding for the business.
The MySpace service is expected to offer free streaming music, unprotected MP3 downloads, ring tones, and e-commerce offerings such as merchandise and ticket sales, MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe said in April. Among the top four music companies, EMI has so far been the lone holdout.
Can MySpace Music become a welcome alternative to iTunes dependency? No other music site has had either the audience or the clout with the labels to offer a strong option to Apple's wildly popular music service. But with well over 100 million users, 30 million who already listen to music on the site, and 5 million music acts already promoting their music on the site, MySpace could have the heft to give iTunes a strong challenge.
Update: Our music industry sources say Arrington's story is right on, that Amazon is in talks to provide music downloads to MySpace Music, and indeed, MySpace executives are telling the recording companies that their target launch date is Sept. 15.
CNET News' Greg Sandoval contributed to this report.
It must have been a sight to set even the jaded billionaire hearts attending Allen & Company's Sun Valley conference fluttering: Spotted at a barroom table Wednesday night were none other than Google co-founder Larry Page, his new business partner, embattled Yahoo president Susan Decker, former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, and Bill Miller, who manages a fund at Legg Mason that's one of Yahoo's biggest shareholders.
Unfortunately, we don't know what they said. But, according to The New York Times, the consensus among lip readers in the room was that Page and Miller were dominating the conversation (Miller, by the way, has intimated he would be happy to sell Yahoo to Microsoft at $33 per share) while Decker and Semel chimed in from time to time.
Also at the bar were Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch's wife, Wendi, Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, various and sundry money types, and Google's Sergey Brin, who strolled in at one point. It's not clear how many wicked big body guards were also in the room.
Were Steve Ballmer's ears burning Wednesday night?
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News)The Times has been following the Sun Valley conference on its Sun Valley Diary. Among other highlights of their coverage so far:
• Ning's Marc Andreessen delivered some over-the-top advice to divest of all non-digital media, including print, television and movie studios. (Note to Marc: The international box office take for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull so far has topped $737 million. That's just a tad more than almost-as-hyped Facebook is expected to make this year. So let's not write off everything non-digital quite yet.)
• The Yahoo price game: The endless, passive-aggressive, Mean Girls, Jerry's so-out-of-the-club, fight between Yahoo and Microsoft and its new friend, Carl Icahn, has plenty of people talking about how much money the embattled (there's that word again!) Internet company could fetch.
Who wants to make a bet that's what Page and the gang were discussing over cocktails (assuming they were cocktails) Wednesday night?
The economy may be lousy, but the amount of money spent on online advertising should continue to grow at double-digit rates all the way through to 2013, according to a report released Monday by JupiterResearch.
Total online ad spending is expected to increase just a little less than 20 percent this year, from $19.9 billion in 2007 to $23.8 billion. By 2013, Jupiter expects total online ad spending to hit $43.4 billion. (For you stat aficionados, that's a compound annual growth rate of 13 percent. By comparison, offline advertising is only expected to have a CAGR of 4 percent over the same period.)
The online world's share of advertising is also expected to increase, but there's still plenty of room to grow. Last year, Jupiter says online ads accounted for 8.4 percent of total ad spending in the U.S. That's expected to grow to 9.6 percent this year, 10.7 percent next year, and 14.3 percent in 2013.
Not surprisingly, search advertising should continue to be the largest category, growing from $9.1 billion in 2007 to $20.9 billion in 2013. But there's an interesting caveat to Jupiter's research: The growth rate for search advertising should slow toward the end of their forecast because of an "inability to tap into small local US advertisers and a steady maturation of the U.S. paid search market."
Display advertising and classified advertising aren't expected to fare quite as well. Because of short-term economic problems, display advertising growth should drop slightly, but rebound for 14 percent annual growth over the full period of the report.
Likewise, classified ad spending is forecast to be 20 percent of the total online ad market, while growing at annual 9 percent rate.
But look out for video advertising. Jupiter predicts that static and text ads will account for 63 percent of banner advertising in 2008, but that share is expected to drop to 41 percent by 2013 as advertisers look to rich media and video. Video advertising, in fact, is expected to quadruple to $5.1 billion in 2013.
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