Happy Friday everyone! I just wanted to let you know about an article that I saw this week. It was from CNNMoney and was about MySpace sending out AMBER alerts. MySpace has partnered with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to enable AMBER alerts. This is part of an upgrade of safety features designed to address some of the concerns of child safety advocates. This is good timing as it on the heels of some sexual abuse lawsuits filed against the site, of which Felicia addressed in her most recent post. The alerts will begin appearing in a small text box at the top of the profile. The alerts will give users the option to get more information about the case. They will be regional and based on the zip code information users provide in their profile. This goes along well with their recent partnership with Sentinel Tech Holding Corporation. I talked about this in the social networking classes held this month. MySpace will be working with this partner to put together a comprehensive sex offenders database, in hopes of blocking those users from the site. This is also why we started to see, in our last classes, the requirement to verify your email address. I will talk more about this when I post the Q&As but this verification process is designed to catch potential predators. New applicants will receive a verification e-mail with a link requiring them to click back and verify their identify. I haven’t played around with this to see how it works but I plan to create a new account and I’ll let you know. Finally, it looks like Senators Charles Schumer and John McCain plan to introduce some legislation that would require convicted sex offenders to register active e-mail addresses, expanding the existing requirements for registering personal information wtih their local minicipalities. This could also help MySpace if they gain access to that information through their new sex offenders database. I wanted you to know what this article had to say because, while there may always be concerns about sites such as MySpace, I truly believe the company is doing everything it can to make the site safe for its users. Now we have to do our part in educating our users.

AS A SIDE NOTE: Felicia and I have been trying to post my powerpoint slides from the Social Networking class and we are running into technical difficulties with WordPress. I have asked our webmaster to convert the file into a web page so I can just add a link to it under the Social Networking area of our TechTracks page. I’ll let you know once it’s up. In addition, the Q&A will be posted soon. Sorry for the delay!