Jane Hitchcock knows firsthand how damaging online harassment can be. In 1996, after a fake literary agency tried to con her, she tried to put a stop to its scam. The scammers didn’t appreciate her efforts and came after her ”” virtually and physically.

“In January of 1997, they began posting controversial messages … and listed my home phone number and home address and it went from there,” she says.

Hitchcock, who is now president of the volunteer organization Working to Halt Online Abuse, reports about 75 cases of online harassment a week. She says that a large number of the victims range in age between 18 and 30. Most are women, and the harassers are largely men, she says.

Listen to it all from NPR.

What won’t I be doing?

I will not be sitting in front of the 6:30 network news.

More importantly, neither will any of the college students in my classes.

They are the news consumers of the future and the evening news has no place in their lives. I teach Politics and Media with reading assignments from the most widely used textbook in the field, but the students don’t know what to make of it. To them, it reads like ancient history. The author writes as if the world still looked up to news anchors. She refers familiarly and respectfully to Brian Williams and Katie Couric in a tone that assumes her readers – the students – also worship them.

Wrong. The students worship Jon Stewart. They have never watched the 6:30 news, not even once. They have never watched the local 5:00 news shows either. I have to actually assign students to watch the local news in order to get the students to watch those shows, so they will know what their textbooks are talking about. I might as well have asked them to go to a museum.

My anecdotal evidence is supported by research. In a recent study, Thomas Patterson from Harvard found that young people ”“ surprise! ”“ don’t tune into Katie or any other traditional news anchors. They don’t have the same daily news habit that their parents had.

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Natasha Randall was 17, had a large circle of friends and was studying childcare when, without any indication that she was unhappy, she hanged herself in her bedroom.

Her death last Thursday was the latest in at least seven apparent copycat suicides in Bridgend, South Wales, that have alarmed parents, health authorities and police, who believe that they may be prompted by messages on social networking websites such as Bebo.

Within days two 15-year-old girls, both of whom had known Tasha, as she called herself, had also tried to take their lives. One cut her wrists and was later discharged from hospital into the care of her parents. The other tried to hang herself and spent two days on life support before showing signs of recovery. Police have since visited the families of 20 of Tasha’s friends, urging them to keep an eye on their daughters.

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But the phenomenon of creating online “hate crime” registers is not confined to Britain. For example, UCLA’s website has a “Hate Crime and Hate Incident Reporting Form” with the ominous disclaimer, “ALL information submitted will be maintained as confidential to the extent permitted by law” (the italics are mine). If you run this Google search query, it will be evident that there are literally thousands of ways of report criminal activity online.

The police have solicited tips from the public since time immemorial. And it would probably be impossible to mount an effective defense against terrorist activity without enlisting community informants. But as anyone familiar with well-protected databases understands, records unless deleted are forever. Somewhere, someplace a record that Robin Page was arrested for “hate crime” exists. It’s part of his reputation. And as far as anyone with the smarts or legal authority to access his records is concerned, it is part of his online reputation. For now and all time to come, for better or worse, you are in part what other people think you are. Even legal action cannot wholly define an online reputation. The action itself becomes part of the reputation and the derogatory information may be repeated and spread even more by the very process of challenging it. Unless a way can be found …

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I will consider posting comments on this article submitted first by email to Kendall’s E-mail: KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

My Christmas story ”” the one I’ve been telling and retelling these last 10 days ”” began on Friday, Dec. 21.

It was early in the morning, and I had awoken with the sudden, sinking realization that a present I had bought for one of my sons hadn’t yet arrived. It wasn’t just any present either; it was a PlayStation 3, a $500 item, and a gift, I happened to know from my sources, that he was hoping for.

Like most things I buy online, the PlayStation had come from Amazon.com. So I went to the site and tracked the package ”” something, thankfully, that is a snap to do on Amazon. What I saw made my heart sink: the package had not only been shipped, it had been delivered to my apartment building days earlier and signed for by one of my neighbors. I knocked on my neighbor’s door, and asked if she still had the PlayStation. No, she said; after signing for it, she had put it downstairs in the hallway.

Now I was nearly distraught. In all likelihood, the reason I hadn’t seen the package earlier in the week is because it had been stolen, probably by someone delivering something else to the building. Even if that wasn’t the case, the one thing I knew for sure was that it was gone ”” for which I could hardly blame Amazon.

Nonetheless, I got on the phone with an Amazon customer service representative, and explained what had happened: the PlayStation had been shipped, delivered and signed for. It just didn’t wind up in my hands. Would Amazon send me a replacement? In my heart of hearts, I knew I didn’t have a leg to stand on. I was pleading for mercy.

I shudder to think how this entreaty would have gone over at, say, Apple, where customer service is an oxymoron. But the Amazon customer service guy didn’t blink. After assuring himself that I had never actually touched or seen the PlayStation, he had a replacement on the way before the day was out. It arrived on Christmas Eve. Amazon didn’t even charge me for the shipping. My son was very happy. So, of course, was I.

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Senator Conroy says it will be mandatory for all internet service providers to provide clean feeds, or ISP filtering, to houses and schools that are free of pornography and inappropriate material.

Online civil libertarians have warned the freedom of the internet is at stake, but Senator Conroy says that is nonsense.

He says the scheme will better protect children from pornography and violent websites.

“Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road,” he said.

“If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree.”

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Read it all.

To its true believers at small businesses, it is a low-cost, high-return tool that can handle marketing and public relations, raise the company profile and build the brand.

That tool is blogging, though small businesses with blogs are still a distinct minority. A recent American Express survey found that only 5 percent of businesses with fewer than 100 employees have blogs. Other experts put the number slightly higher.

But while blogs may be useful to many more small businesses, even blogging experts do not recommend it for the majority.

Guy Kawasaki, a serial entrepreneur, managing partner of Garage Technology Ventures and a prolific blogger, put it this way: “If you’re a clothing manufacturer or a restaurant, blogging is probably not as high on your list as making good food or good clothes.”

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Connecticut high school students can now enroll in online courses taught by state teachers.

The pilot program offers courses in basic subjects for students who need credits to graduate. It also offers other electives, such as Mandarin Chinese and “Shakespeare in Film.”

The idea is to allow students who have fallen behind to catch up online rather than in summer school and also to provide interesting electives that are not widely available.

“We want to use online courses to increase access to high-quality content so that every student in Connecticut will have access to the courses they need when they need them,” said Gov. M. Jodi Rell.

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Holiday shopping online could save more than time. Researchers say it might also help save the planet.

A holiday-themed study by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory suggests that even a modest number of shopping trips to the mall can create a large volume of carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles – the so-called greenhouse gases linked to global warming in the atmosphere.

“Using several assumptions and data from several authoritative sources, we can reasonably estimate that nearly a half-billion kilograms of carbon dioxide are kept out of the atmosphere by shopping online,” environmental researcher Jesse Miller said Thursday.

That’s roughly 500,000 metric tons, according to the scientist at the Department of Energy research complex.

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Check it out (hat tip GetReligion).

Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.

Professor Lewin’s videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond who stuff his e-mail in-box with praise.

“Through your inspiring video lectures i have managed to see just how BEAUTIFUL Physics is, both astounding and simple,” a 17-year-old from India e-mailed recently.

Steve Boigon, 62, a florist from San Diego, wrote, “I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics-colored eyes.”

Professor Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube’s greatest hits. He is part of a new generation of academic stars who hold forth in cyberspace on their college Web sites and even, without charge, on iTunes U, which went up in May on Apple’s iTunes Store.

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Facebook’s network of 58 million active users and its status as the sixth-most-trafficked Web site in the United States have made it an irresistible subject for many types of academic research.

Scholars at Carnegie Mellon used the site to look at privacy issues. Researchers at the University of Colorado analyzed how Facebook instantly disseminated details about the Virginia Tech shootings in April.

But it is Facebook’s role as a petri dish for the social sciences ”” sociology, psychology and political science ”” that particularly excites some scholars, because the site lets them examine how people, especially young people, are connected to one another, something few data sets offer, the scholars say.

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“w00t,” an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was crowned word of the year on Tuesday by the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary.

Massachusetts-based Merriam-Webster Inc. said “w00t” — typically spelled with two zeros — reflects a new direction in the American language led by a generation raised on video games and cell phone text-messaging.

It’s like saying “yay,” the dictionary said.

“It could be after a triumph or for no reason at all,” Merriam-Webster said.

Visitors to Merriam-Webster’s Web site were invited to vote for one of 20 words and phrases culled from the most frequently looked-up words on the site and submitted by readers.

Runner-up was “facebook” as a new verb meaning to add someone to a list of friends on the Web site Facebook.com or to search for people on the social networking site.

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As millions of travelers prepare to fly home for the holidays this year, a few thousand can expect to try out a new generation of onboard e-mail and text-messaging services using their own cellphones and portable devices.

Starting this week and over the next few months, several airlines in the United States and Europe are due to begin testing these new services on some of their planes, with plans to roll out the technology across most of their fleets over the next 12 to 18 months.

Eventually, a few plan to enable voice calls, too.

On Tuesday, the U.S. carrier JetBlue Airways will begin offering a free e-mail and instant messaging service on one aircraft, while American Airlines, Virgin America and Alaska Airlines plan to offer a broader Web experience in the coming months, probably at a cost of around $10 a flight.

Read the whole article.

I am after audio or video, and would love to hear why you like the ones you mention.

Most parents with a teenager in the house would be aware of the allure of social networking sites such as MySpace, especially for girls. Responsible parents try to monitor their children’s digital activities in order to protect them from potential predators or inappropriate influences.

But in the case of American mother Lori Drew, responsible parenting mutated into such obsessive involvement in online teenage life that it set off a train of tragic events culminating in the suicide of her daughter’s former best friend.

Megan Meier was 13 when she hanged herself in her bedroom closet last year. Her parents, Tina and Ron Meier, say she had been driven to despair that afternoon by cruel comments posted on her MySpace website by “Josh Evans”, a 16-year-old boy she believed was her boyfriend, although she had never met him in person.

For weeks he had been showering her with compliments on MySpace but, that day, he turned nasty, writing: “I don’t want to be friends with you anymore.” Others in Megan’s MySpace group then taunted her about her weight and called her a “whore”. Mrs Meier says Josh’s final barb was: “The world would be a better off place without you.”

But, as the Meiers discovered six weeks after their daughter’s death, “Josh Evans” did not exist.

He was the creation of Lori Drew, the mother of a 13-year-old girl down the street in their small Missouri town.

Read the whole article.

George Cornell, the late and revered religion writer for the Associated Press, did one of his best stories before he died in 1994: An account on how people spend millions on sports, but billions on religion.

He added up the gate receipts in a given year of the 10 most-watched sports in America and compared those with giving statistics in the country’s 10 largest denominations. Religion outspent sports by far as peoples’ biggest source of weekend entertainment.

Not only is religion big business, it’s big news, which is why we felt it was about time this newspaper premiered a religion blog. It’s not the first to do so in the secular media. About 30 outlets are ahead of us on this one. But, better late than ”¦

Today, Dec. 3, is an appropriate launch date for Belief Blog, one day after the first Sunday in Advent and one day before Hanukkah. We did some mulling over the title and decided for alliteration and simplicity (although I do think one editor’s suggestion of “Papal Bull” could have attracted attention a lot quicker.)

I plan to make this stand out amongst many of the current faith blogs, many of which are little more than daily religion digests with uplinks. Not here. I’m aiming at something closer to Ruth Gledhill’s Articles of Faith blog in the London Times that has juicy details not in the dead tree version.

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THE CHURCH of England is taking advantage of the boom in social networking on the internet by launching a range of Christmas cards for users of the popular website Facebook.

A selection of cards blessed by the Church are hoped to take Facebook by ”˜snowstorm’ this year, offering Christians the opportunity to share their faith with their friends through the website. The virtual cards, based on religious themes, can be sent on with a personalised message and are freely available to any of the seven million active users in the UK registered on the website.

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When 92-year-old Ruben Edmond passed away this past summer, not everyone could make it to Norfolk, Virginia, to say goodbye to the man whose family includes five children, 28 grandchildren, 29 great-grandchildren, and five great-great grandchildren.

So while some mourners streamed into the funeral home to pay their last respects, others from North Carolina to Hawaii watched a streaming video of the ceremony online and visited a tribute page produced by the funeral home that helped organize Edmond’s last rites.

“We used technology to pay our last tribute – it was just awesome,” said Edmond’s daughter, Estelle Edmond-Bussey, 64, of Chesapeake, Virginia. Family members regathered later to watch a replay of the ceremony, giving her a chance to remember “the things I was numb to the day of the service.”

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When today’s college graduates get together for a reunion someday, they may decide to do it by computer. That’s because right now, nearly one in five college students takes at least one class online, according to a new survey.

For professors, the growth of e-learning has meant a big shift in the way they deal with students.

Take professor Sara Cordell of the University of Illinois-Springfield: Her day doesn’t end at 6 p.m., as it does for some college professors.

Cordell sits at her computer in her campus office to chat with a half-dozen students gathered in front of their screens: One is in Tennessee, another in California’s central valley, another in Ohio. They’re all here to talk about Thomas Hardy’s 19th-century novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

Cordell has a microphone hooked up to her PC, and her students listen from home. All but one of them type their responses, which appear in chat-format on Cordell’s screen.

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“For Christ’s sake, stop!” declared the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Rev. Frank Page, pleading for civility in the Baptist blogosphere.
Episcopalians and Anglicans duel incessantly over their faith and future in the Anglican Communion.

Catholics focus on every topic from liturgy to law to spirituality.

These are faith bloggers ”” uncountable voices who contest, confess and consider religious beliefs, doctrines and denominational politics in their posts.

Although every faith has its bloggers, U.S. Christians may be among the most vociferous of the watchdogs, philosophers and ecclesiastical groupies.

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Given Amazon’s recent release of the Kindle ebook reader, the timing of Jeff Gomez’s Print Is Dead couldn’t be better. Regardless of your beliefs about print vs. e-content, you need to read this book, especially if you’re in the publishing business. You might not agree with Jeff’s opinions but I guarantee you he’ll make you think about the industry in ways that you’ve never thought about it before. Even if you’re just a fan of reading in general you owe it to yourself to read this excellent book.

The way I test the value of a book is by looking back and seeing how many times I’ve folded over a page or highlighted a passage that got my attention. My copy of Print Is Dead has so many folds and highlighter marks that it looks like it’s been read by 10 different people. Here are some of my favorite excerpts:

Many of those in publishing see themselves as guardians of a grand and noble tradition, so much so that they sometimes suffer delusions of grandeur.

…pretty much anyone under the age of thirty qualifies for being accustomed to a ‘constant stream of digital stimulation.’ And so to expect future generations to be satisfied with printed books is like expecting the Blackberry users of today to start communicating by writing letters, stuffing envelopes and licking stamps.

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A video of a four-year-old girl reciting Psalm 23 from memory. A parody of the ’90s hip-hop hit “Baby Got Back” called “Baby Got Book.” “A Letter from Hell” to motivate Christian students to share their faith in Jesus with their friends. These are three of the more than 25,000 videos available on a new video-sharing Web site called Godtube.com that features over 1.5 million hours of Christian video, more than any other Christian broadcast platform, according to Chris Wyatt, Godtube’s CEO and creator.

Godtube was the fastest growing U.S. Web site in August. It experienced 973 percent growth between July and August, and there were 4 million visitors to the site in October alone. It combines many of the well-known features of other sites (Myspace.com, Facebook.com, Youtube.com) popular among teenagers and those in their 20s and 30s, such as opportunities for social networking, video chats, and user-submitted videos that range from cute home movies to music videos to church presentations.

Wyatt, 38, says he knows “the power of video” and understands the need to make Web sites user friendly. He worked as a producer at CBS before deciding to go to the evangelical Dallas Theological Seminary, where he is now a student. He says he created Godtube as a class project because he was alarmed after reading in a 2006 evangelism magazine study that the percentage of Christians who attend church regularly will drop 50 percent by the year 2025.

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Microsoft has abruptly closed down four “pro-anorexia” websites in Spain following a complaint that they were endangering the lives of teenage girls.

The websites, which offer tips such as “take up smoking” and “if your stomach rumbles, hit it”, were accused of teaching teenagers how to starve themselves.

Internet companies usually wait for a court order before closing any sites that they host. But Microsoft acted swiftly after complaints from a Catalan watchdog that several blogs on its Live Spaces community glorified starvation as a lifestyle choice.

Such sites worship “thinspirational” celebrities such as Victoria Beckham and refer to “my friend Ana” instead of anorexia to avoid discovery by parents.

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The tragedy of Megan Meier will take another twist Wednesday night when officials in her home town vote on whether to make online harassment a local crime.
Meier is the 13-year-old suburban St. Louis girl who met a cute 16-year-old named Josh Evans last year on the social networking site MySpace. They became close, but suddenly he turned on her, calling her names, saying she was “a bad person and everybody hates you.” Others joined the harassment ”” the barrage culminated in Megan’s Oct. 16, 2006, suicide, just short of her 14th birthday.

Weeks later, Megan’s grieving parents learned that the boy didn’t exist ”” he’d been fabricated by a neighbor, the mother of one of Megan’s former friends. The girls had had a falling out, police say, and she wanted to know what Megan was saying about her daughter.

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See what you think of it.

WHILE riding in the back of a Cadillac Escalade recently, I made a video call to a friend (“Hey, guess where I’m calling from!”). Then I checked my ranking in an online football pool. And then I sent e-mail messages to my editors, explaining my tardiness in filing this article. I was still testing mobile high-speed Internet access to show how to get the Web on wheels.

And while I discovered that the mobile route to the information superhighway has some potholes and detours, surfing the Web as a passenger in a car may someday become second nature.

Certainly BlackBerry and iPhone adherents can get basic online access while perched in the passenger seat. However, smartphones like the BlackBerry were designed to deal primarily with e-mail, and the iPhone uses a slow connection to the Internet, so you can’t make video calls with it or quickly jump from Web site to Web site. To do that you need a high-speed wireless data service, like those offered by AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel.

For my Web rides, I used a laptop and a wireless data PC card that slides into the side of a laptop to get high-speed Internet access. The three major cellphone carriers offer unlimited monthly subscriptions for about $60, including a compatible PC card with a two-year contract. All three also offer similar maximum data speeds ”” speeds of about 600 to 1,400 kilobits per second (Kbps) to download and speeds of about 500 to 800 Kbps to upload. It’s not quite as snappy as some broadband cable or DSL services, but it’s close.

For example, I was able to make video phone calls using a Webcam and the Skype Internet calling software on Verizon and AT&T. However, the picture quality didn’t match that of a broadband cable connection, delivering a grainier image and choppier motion. Nevertheless, the experience of jumping from news to sports sites or even playing N.F.L. video clips was usually comparable to that of a home high-speed Internet connection. And all three wireless services are certainly reliable enough to shuffle through e-mail so that you can make excuses to the boss.

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Give him a look.

The YouTube killer who shot dead eight members of his school in Finland before turning his gun on himself had internet contacts with an American teenager who was planning a shooting spree in a high school in Philadelphia, it was claimed yesterday.

The disclosure could turn upside down previous assumptions about the dynamics of school massacres. Until now, teenage killers were regarded as depressed loners whose imagination had been stoked by aggressive computer games. Now it seems that information may have been shared by potential killers over the internet: a virtual community of young people who idolise the 1999 Columbine High School murders.

“It’s highly probable that there was some form of contact between Pekka-Eric Auvinen and Dillon Cossey,” a spokesman for the cyber crime department of Helsinki police said. Dillon Cossey, 14, was arrested last month on suspicion of planning to storm his old school, Plymouth Whitemarsh. Police acting on a tipoff found a 9mm semi-automatic rifle, handmade grenades, a .22 pistol and a .22 single-shot rifle at his home. Less than two weeks later Auvinen, already a member of a shooting club, was buying his first gun ”” a .22 pistol ”” and expressing interest in a 9mm semi-automatic.

Police do not believe this to have been a coincidence. The two youths are thought to have made contact over two MySpace groups, “RIP Eric and Dylan” ”” a reference to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed 12 schoolmates at Columbine ”” and “Natural Selection”.

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