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They used the Internet to encourage people to wear pink and bought 75 pink tank tops for male students to wear. They handed out the shirts in the lobby before class last Friday — even the bullied student had one. INTERNET USED TO STOP BULLYING OFFLINE.
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So, there I was: old enough to remember Voltron, beer in hand, sitting with my laptop, surrounded by (presumed) preteens. Club Penguin plopped me in the town center. Forty or so birds were milling about. Some were dancing, others throwing snowballs. As I gazed upon this scene, I remembered something that I had once read: If your body could stay the same as it was at 12, you would live for hundreds of years. But what about your mind? What if it stayed locked at 12? Club Penguin offers that deeply trippy experience.
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To educate myself—and to find out what the target audience for these sites really thinks of them—I organized a focus group of five sixth-graders, all 11 years old. I set up two laptops and let the kids show me their favorites. At times the project seemed like a demonstration for a gender studies class with the boys at one computer, the girls at another. Anna, a budding sociologist, explained, "Most sites for girls are an online world—it's socializing. For boys, it's gaming."
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Now, it's official: a release from MySpace has confirmed that Quarterlife will debut on its MySpaceTV platform on November 11. A project of Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, who created the TV shows My So-Called Life and Thirtysomething in addition to Blood Diamond, the new Web show will follow the lives of six people in their 20s and "chart the sometimes excruciating, sometimes comic, often emotional experiences that comprise coming of age as a part of the digital generation."
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Photo: Emily Shur
He didn't have much choice but to sell. It was summer 2006, a little more than two years after Mark Zuckerberg had created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room as a way for him and his friends to better connect with schoolmates. In the intervening years, he'd raised $37.7 million from venture capitalists and transformed his modest Web site into a certified social phenomenon.
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FACEBOOK FOUNDING: Both parties seem to have forgotten Aaron J. Greenspan, yet another Harvard classmate. He says he was actually the one who created the original college social networking system, before either side in the legal dispute. And he has the e-mail messages to show it.
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Roanoke's city government is taking on a new approach to boosting the region's young adult population by trying to "friend" them.
The online offensive includes opening accounts on MySpace and Facebook, and posting videos on YouTube, with Stuart Mease, the driving force behind Roanoke's quest for attracting young professionals, leading the charge.
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The US National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) has called on state leaders to work with schools and colleges to ensure that cyber-security, online safety and ethics lessons are integrated into every classroom.
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For longtime users, the influx of grownups means that information once intended for a circle of fellow students is now available for anyone to see. That has introduced a new social conundrum: deciding whose invites should be accepted -- and how much of your profile they should be able to see.
"You can't really unfriend your mom," says Hillary Woolley, a junior at the University of California at Davis. "So I've been upping my privacy settings."
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MySpace.com has found and deleted profiles of 29,000 convicted sex offenders, more than four times the initial 7,000 profiles they claimed in May. The numbers were discovered after MySpace turned over info detailing the offenders they had removed from the service. MySpace turned over the records after states filed a formal legal request.