The Internet Safety Task Force is a group of researchers, activists, and businesses convened by the states' Attorneys General to spend a year taking a deep look at online safety, including pre-existing research, research gaps and available solutions.

As a part of the process, Andrew Schrock and danah boyd created an extensive literature review and assembled a Research Advisory Board (of which I am a member) to give guidance and feedback on the review document.

A nearly final draft of the review, titled Online Threats to Youth: Solicitation, Harassment and Problematic Content, is now publicly available. The document will be included as an appendix to the final report, set for public release at the beginning of 2009. Andrew, danah and the advisory board are seeking public comment on the document. We hope that you'll take a look, and give your feedback in advance of its more formal January release. Please address any feedback on the draft to danah through her website at http://www.danah.org/contact.html.

The best take-away for me was Hunter Gatewood's adoption curve illustration which is the visual for his wonderful observation that early adopters are like "happy dogs in a pile of sticks. Late adopters are more like a hesitant cat, waiting to see what works, what blows up in dogs' faces." Who hasn't been there?

I am not a hospital administrator so you might think this conference's lessons weren't for me. But I spend quite a bit of time thinking about technology adoption and how systems are transformed, either from the top (banks' creation of online services transformed the consumer side of that industry) or from the bottom (peer-to-peer transformed the music industry).

Read more at e-patients.net: Happy Dogs in a Pile of Sticks ]]> Susannah Fox The U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, Japan, will host an International Education Week 2008 event on Wednesday, November 19: "Politics and the Internet: The New Medium for Young Voters." I will present the Pew Internet Project's data on participatory media and answer students' questions, along with Henry Farrell of the George Washington University and Crooked Timber and Lauren Lucas, a senior at the University of Texas at Austin.

People in the Washington, DC, area are invited to attend the 6pm event at 400 Maryland Ave, SW. University students from Fukuoka, Nagoya, Naha and Tokyo will be participating from Japan.]]> Susannah Fox From our colleagues at the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press:

Many more Americans are turning to the internet for campaign news this year as the web becomes a key source of election news. Television remains the dominant source, but the percent who say they get most of their campaign news from the internet has tripled since October 2004 (from 10% then to 33% now).

While use of the web has seen considerable growth, the percentage of Americans relying on TV and newspapers for campaign news has remained relatively flat since 2004. The internet now rivals newspapers as a main source for campaign news. And with so much interest in the election next week, the public's use of the internet as a campaign news source is up even since the primaries earlier this year. In March, 26% cited the internet as a main source for election news, while the percentages citing television and newspapers remain largely unchanged. ]]> Susannah Fox The Center for Connected Health's 2008 Symposium was held in Boston on October 27-28, 2008. I gave a talk entitled, "Participatory Medicine: How User-Generated Media are Changing American Attitudes and Actions, Online and Off."

Much of what I said can be traced directly to the conversations we have every day on e-patients.net, as well as to the data that the Pew Internet Project generates. But one of the most important insights came after my speech, in a conversation with Lena Sorenson, RN, PhD, an Associate Professor at the MGH Institute of Health Professions. She pointed out that my 7-word challenge focuses on doctors and should instead focus on "providers" (doctors, yes, but also nurses, therapists, and every other health care professional who cares for people). I updated my slides before uploading them to the Pew Internet site to reflect that important change.]]> Susannah Fox Association of Internet Researchers Annual Conference in Copenhagen. ]]>

Earlier in October, Amanda Lenhart participated in a round table discussion on online social networks at the Association of Internet Researchers Annual Conference in Copenhagen. The discussion, which also included scholars Nancy Baym, Lewis Goodings, Malene Larsen, Raquel Recuero, Jan Schmidt and Daniel Skog, looked at recent research as well as a conversation about effective research methods and challenges to research presented by the networks. Over the course of the discussion, Amanda also previews some forthcoming Pew Internet data on adult use of online social networks.

The 90 minute round table was audio recorded (thanks to Thies Willem Bottcher). Note for those who choose to listen to the unedited recording – the round table discussion begins about 5 minutes into the audio file.

Readers have two opportunities to leave comments: one attached to the article, another in the On Parenting blog.

For more reader reaction to our findings, please see the comments attached to the USA Today story, the L.A. Times blog, and the Tacoma News Tribune blog.]]> Susannah Fox When scholars discuss elements of gaming that hold promise for engaging youth and connecting games to learning, one thing they often point to is modding. Modding involves taking the source code of the game and changing it to alter something about the game – anything from the location and theme of the game, to creating new levels, new characters, new objects for the game. Modding is generally done by a third party – either a game player or someone who did not help to design or build the game. Counterstrike is an example of a mod gone mainstream. The game started out as a mod of the game Half-Life, and was eventually released on its own as a separate (and now extremely popular) first person shooter game. Modding is technical and creative, and allows the user to shape their gaming experience – Web 2.0 brought to games. Machinima, or movies made from games and through the games themselves is another example of user creativity brought into the gaming sphere.

In our recent study Teens, Video Games and Civics, we asked teen gamers about their modding behaviors – had they ever used a mod? - as a way of assessing the basic uptake and knowledge of modding and mods among teens gamers. We found that more than one quarter (28%) of teens who game had used a mod "often" or "sometimes" to change something in the games they play. Boys are more likely to mod than girls, though the differences are not quite as stark as with cheats, with 36% of boys and 20% of girls using mods. Teens who play massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) like World of Warcraft are also more likely to employ mods. ]]> Amanda Lenhart Our tracking data from the end of last year shows that the size of the music downloading audience is larger than ever. In the American adult population alone, some 37% of internet users say they download music files online and 7% do so on a typical day.

It's also the case that music fans have more choices than ever when it comes to digital downloads. While iTunes continues to offer most of its standard tracks for 99 cents per download, consumers also have the option to pay extra for DRM-free files. Amazon offers MP3 downloads free of DRM, and subscription services like eMusic have made DRM-free music a foundational part of their business model from the outset.

One of the later arrivals to the DRM unmasking party was Wal-Mart, which nudged its way into the music market by offering 94 cent MP3 downloads beginning in 2007. However, as blogger Cory Doctorow noted in a recent post, if you purchased any of Wal-Mart's DRM-protected music anytime before February 2008, you may soon find that those files are no longer playable. Wal-Mart recently announced that they would no longer be able to assist with digital rights management issues for protected WMA files purchased from Walmart.com. If users don't back up their files before October 9th, they will no longer be able to transfer songs to other computers or access songs after changing or reinstalling operating systems or in the event of a system crash.

All of this uncertainty over the stability of digital files has some music consumers turning their tables back to the pre-download, pre-compact disc vinyl format. Artists such as the White Stripes and Cat Power have been releasing their albums on vinyl and there are signs that demand among serious music collectors is growing.

To be sure, records won't be the magic spinning bullet that reverses the decline of a struggling industry, but in the age of digital ephemera, those of us who still consider music a long-term investment may start to prefer the steady reassuring crackle of vinyl to a "file not found" message. ]]> Mary Madden Teens, Video Gaming and Civics was a nugget about cheats. Not cheat-ing, but the use of "cheats" or codes to open additional content in the game]]> Somewhat buried in our recent report Teens, Video Gaming and Civics, was a nugget about cheats. Not cheat-ing, but the use of "cheats" or codes to open additional content in the game – anything from a new level, a new "skin" or look for a character or car, a new weapon, or new ways to manipulate game play – content that the developer has hidden within the game for players to discover and then share with others.

Turns out, using cheats is quite popular among teen gamers. More than a third of teen gamers (36%) use these codes. Boys are more than twice as likely to use them than girls, with half of boys (50%) employing them "often" or "sometimes," compared to just 23% of girls reporting the same. Cheats are much more likely to be used by game console owners on games played there – nearly 40% of console owners use cheats, compared to just 9% of teens who game but don't have a console.