Yuck, two dreadful pieces of news from TechDirt. They are interesting, I think, because they demonstrate what a struggle it really is when these new technologies hit mainstream use. There are some real issues to wrestle with!

The first story is perhaps good news, about vindication. A school in NJ today decided to settle out of court for $117,500 with a student who had been suspended for blogging critically about his school.

Second story I’ll just repost verbatim from the original story:

…from the blame-it-on-the-web dept…
All but 400 of the 3,000 students at a San Antonio high school didn’t show up yesterday after somebody posted some messages on MySpace saying some kids were going to show up at the school with machine guns. This sort of stupidity is nothing new, but apparently, since it went out over a web site, the clueless school administrators want retribution, saying MySpace should be held “accountable”, with the district’s lawyers deciding if they should file a lawsuit. An administrator says that letting kids post unmonitored messages is “asking for trouble” — so should all these kids’ phone conversations be tapped and their face-to-face conversations be monitored as well? MySpace and other internet services aren’t creating these problems and aren’t to blame for them; they just make the spreading of information (sometimes known as communication) quicker and more efficient.

Please, do us all a favor and try to tell one person you know who is less web-savvy than yourself about this story and how inane it is. Blogs enable some serious work to be done in the world, and the only thing worse than people saying “blogs? isn’t that just people writing about their cats?” would be “blogs? is that like that MySpace thing that kids use to say they’re going to shoot up the school?”

According to the original story on San Antonio’s WOAI.com News one school district official says, “This particular web site has been a pain for all Bexar County schools for a long time now, and it just seems that the owners of MySpace-dot-com should be held accountable.”

What if said post had been made on Blogger-dot-com or on En-dot-Wikipedia-dot-org or any other stinkin’ place in the world that is no longer a one-way means of communication? Terribly sorry Mr. school district official, if this giant shift in human communication has the entire Bexar County school district frightened then maybe you should sue. But I hope you know what you’re getting into!

Not to only make light of such things; I don’t know what the answer is. But for an educator to be so provincial as to so completely miss the boat about the last 3 years of the web is a real disservice to the young people he is supposed to be preparing for the world around them.

If you need a reminder about the seriousness of blogs, or a shot in the arm to remember their potential, go visit my friends at The Committee to Protect Bloggers.

Ps. Dear dumb kids, stop posting things like that.

Technorati Tags: MySpace, web2.0, blogging, censorship, control, education, kittens

Notorious for small sample sizes, but interesting none the less, the Pew Internet & American Life Project has released another study. This one is about teens and online content creation/sharing. Based on 1,100 families, findings included:

• Some 57% of online teens create content for the internet. That amounts to half of all teens ages 12-17, or about 12 million youth. These Content Creators report having done one or more of the following activities: create a blog; create or work on a personal webpage;
  create or work on a webpage for school, a friend, or an organization; share original content such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos online; or remix content found online into a new creation.
• 19% of online youth ages 12-17 have created their own blog. That is approximately four million people.
• 38% of all online teens, or about 8 million young people, say they read blogs.
• 7% of adult internet users say they have created their own blog and 27% of online adults say they read blogs. (Note: Data for adult blog readers comes from the May- June 2005 Pew Internet Project Tracking Survey.)

Say what you will about what most teenagers use their blogs for, but what this study says to me is this: blogs are going to only get bigger in the very near future. Young adults will increasingly demand communication that is open, frequent and two-way. What percentage of these young people will grow to read and write blogs about serious subjects as a primary means of communicating with the world around them? What’s your strategy for maximizing relevance?

Thanks to Ruby Sinreich for pointing to this Pew study.

Technorati Tags: blogs, teens, adoption, future, trends, media, Pew, studies

Sign the petition to keep Iranian blogger Omid Sheikhan out of prison

From the Committee to Protect Bloggers.

Omid Sheikhan has been sentenced by the Iranian court to one year in prison and 124 lashes.

Omid was first arrested last year, confined for two months, including one in solitary confinement, and tortured, due to his blog which featured satire on the Iranian situation.

When he was brought to court on October 8 he faced different charges, due to the fact that even in the Iran judicial system it would have been difficult to convict him on charges relating to his blog. Instead, he faced, and was convicted on, charges stemming from “morals” violations, including “having unlawful relations, drinking wine, corruption of morals (for having a birthday party) and possessing satirical pictures of Iranian politicians.”

Now this blogger in his early twenties will be beaten half to death and join Mojtaba Saminejad as a felon in the general prison population. The Iranian government should be as ashamed as the Iranian people no doubt already are. Please sign the petition for Omid.

Omid now faces a second trial, presumably an appeal, not unlike Arash Sigarchi’s.

In addition to signing the online petition, please consider visiting the Committee to Protect Bloggers website. There you will find the code to put this graphic and link to the petition on your own site. The Committee also has an RSS feed you can subscribe to so as to keep up to date on issues like this.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, web2.0, nptech, Iran, prison