Community Building Ideas from my notebook: Can the web be kid safe?

 

Of Media, Culture, and Community:

Media isn’t neutral. It has an impact on people’s lives, or else mass media, advertising, books, and blogs wouldn’t exist. I wonder how safe the web is in terms of child navigation. Why should parents have to drop $30-50 on a web filter. A compassionate and ethical response in terms of business would be to facilitate such a community. With the I’m curious what exists on the web in terms of opening up the world in terms of:

• Family safe blogs

• Family safe media/music

• Family safe podcasts

• Family safe tv

• Family safe music

• Family safe magazines

The Current State of the Web and Online Communities

I’ve talked about the need for better, more targeted filters so that our searches and web life are more helpful and human. With the barrage of information exploding, its difficult for kids and parents to keep up. And as much as we would like to admit and despite it being light years ahead of most alternative, Google is imperfect at search. (or else Mahalo wouldn’t have any viable business model)

Possibilities for the Future: Moving Beyond “Bowling Alonge” and Leveraging Social and Crowdsourcing 

I wonder if a social media version of Citysearch (although not necessarily of the traditional social networking variety) could work centered around “my community” is a workable model. With the decline of the community as described in Bowling Alone and felt on a daily basis, something must be done to reverse this ominous decline.

Certainly you have that in terms of Yelp and Outside/In. However, these options are not framed in the family friendly context and only viable in primarily in major cities (at the moment). Facebook networks offers some of this and I noticed that a very minimalist app version of this in the Facebook environment called Your Neighbors. However, user adoption and usage doesn’t appear to be particularly high. I wonder if Meetup and/or Upcoming could be leveraged along with such a community oriented site. [I further wonder if this could be built around a crowdsourcing version of community like Beta communities such as the ones facilitated by Cool Town Studios in DC and leveraged in various communities around the US]

What do you think? Can the web be community, family, and kid friendly (or at least just one)?

(image credit: a4gpa on flickr)