Anne,
There is certainly some great information in those articles. I have a lot of material I have been going through. I am almost done with "MySpace Unraveled" and Chris Hansen's "To Catch A Predator" and just started "Generation MySpace". So I am running on fumes but enjoying all this great information from both sides of the spectrum to find a common ground. There is a lot of passion on both sides. On my web site I tend to have many links to people that probably don't agree with each other, but sometimes in the disagreement people can sift through it to find the right way to communicate with their children. I believe all would agree that communication is key between parent and child. Like I too have always said, The type of awareness that is needed always starts at home with the willingness for all to communicate. I will keep running things by you and Larry here and I so appreciate your input. Take Care.

Hi Larry and Anne...I am happy also to be able to find people who are willing to share their expertise. I will preface my statement with this. I am on page 113 now of the "MySpace Unraveled" book. When I was on page 25 and read "We're not being cavalier. We're just saying that social networking is today's fear of choice. But as in every generation, despite a few casualties, the vast majority of these "users" of a different sort are not being harmed even emotionally, much less physically." Now when I read that paragraph I set myself up for you all too basically take a very light approach to the subject, but as I read I did see that you do seem to cover all the bases. I must say thought that even one child being harmed emotionally or heaven forbid physically is one child to many. I am sure you feel the same way from reading further into the book. I believe you were just not taking the alarmist point of view on your book. You certainly have given parents / adults a great process for becoming familiar with MySpace that is for sure. I am enjoying the book thoroughly. I can already tell that it needs to be longer...meaning I don't want the book to end...That is a good thing. Very informative once I got past the paragraph I quoted earlier. I hope you don't mind me recommending it on my site. I tend to be a bit more dramatic about the whole thing I guess. In our area we have had a few children molested by older men from MySpace and Yahoo. And as I have said before have had a role in capturing one myself to prove to my community that we should be cautious to this threat. I have just started working on a Cyberbullying case, so I will agree with your sidebar that CyberBullies should be something that people need to pay attention to also. I do think it is much more prevalent than Cyber Predators, but none the less I feel both of these Cyber Attacks on our children need to be dealt with in a manner that deters any more such activity from the ones committing the acts. I am working on trying to put together a community information forum to get these topics in the forefront of the parents in my community. If you have any suggestions about that please let me know. I presently have a commitment from the Pa Attorney General's office to have an agent from their Cyber Predator's unit to come there. I believe that is a good start. With the knowledge that I am gathering from your site and book and other books I am presently reading I hopefully will be prepared to take on this task. I will admit that I am taking this from many angles. Though I am a fan of the "To Catch A Pedator" series, I will admit that it seems to be working on ratings a bit more than it was before. I believe the first few were very important eye openers for parents, sort of a shock effect if you will. I also believe that the ones that started involving working with Law Enforcement were very important to prove that Law Enforcement was taking this threat seriously. I have also read Chris Hansen's book about the topic. It was a nice read. It also has its ups and downs. There is no way to please everyone of course. I do feel however going from one extreme to the other will help me find a common middle ground to help people with their fears and understanding of these two threats. I do apologize for the lengthiness of this but once I am passionate about a topic I want to see it through and I see you all care a great deal about this and that is why I will certainly listen to what ever you have to say about the topic. I am glad though that I read further into the book and didn't give up when I read the referred to quote. This is all too important to not hear many angles to the topic. I will stop for now or I just may have my own book going here...Thank You.

Larry and Anne, Since a lot of the topics lately seem to be issues I thought I would create a topic of discussion and hopeful learning. I must say from reading your content here on blogsafety.com I believe I have found a great new place to keep informed. I will say that due to my impatience I had to run to my local B&N instead of Amazon.com to pick up your book "MySpace Unraveled". I am trying to act like a sponge right now, but I have run across a few things in the book that are a bit interesting. I just read the Predators & Cyber bullies side bar on the site also. Would you consider this a place to discuss some of my questions and hear some of my comments on the same?
Thanks for providing this forum for this hopeful discussion. If I want to learn as much as I can, your take on my thoughts of your book and this serious topic I believe will be invaluable.
A bit of information about myself: My name is Bill I come from a small town in Central Pennsylvania. I have been a town council member for over 12 years and I have been a computer technician for over 18 years. I also have a site www.protectchildrenonline.org which is in it's infancy. I have seen the internet grow from it's infancy and have been aware of a lot of it's content. I have used it for both Work and Entertainment. I also know of the issues that can arise from it's content. I can say though I did not pay a huge amount of attention to the dangers it poses to our youth. I pretty much looked at it as another video game type media. Now when "To Catch A Predator" started I was determined to find out for myself if this was real or not. You statistics on the Predators & Cyber bullies sidebar were also great to see. The odd thing is all the media's have jumped on this bandwagon and trying to separate the information is daunting at best. Just in my local area though I have taken part in a Predator Sting and am working on a Cyber Bulling case as I write this. I must add that there have been two cases of Child Sexual Abuse in the local area recently. One in regards to MySpace and one dealing with chatting, AOL or Yahoo not implicated. I guess I really divulged more information here than I had anticipated, but when I am passionate about a subject I just ramble on. Back to sort of the main subject, do you mind me bringing up questions in this forum in regards to the information I read in your book and what I am finding out here in the real world? I consider you both experts and would appreciate any information / light you can shed on this ever so real and sometimes very fearful topic.

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Edited by utinker at 04/14/2007 7:48 AM

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Edited by utinker at 04/14/2007 8:22 AM