Please note: The reports in this section are not product reviews or tests; they're meant to spotlight options for you to consider, as well as milestones in children's online-safety technology development. Comments from readers on their own experiences with these products and services are most welcome - and, with your permission, we publish them. Do email us your own product reviews anytime!
From our overview of new kinds of online-safety options - and products that represent them - on display at the June '99 Digital Kids conference in San Francisco...
Kids portal + filtering (June 18, '99 issue)
Zeeks.com, a brand-new service targeting 6-13-year-olds, wants to be Entertainment and Communications Central, as well as a rose-colored window for kids on the World Wide Web. Young users can play more than 100 games (some multi-player ones soon), create and display their own Web projects and pages, keep a calendar (or personal journal), chat, and do e-mail.
With its content and bright graphics, Zeeks is a little bit of the very multimedia JuniorNet, with some community and member-provided content thrown in. The participatory, clubby focus will probably be good for Zeeks. A major theme in the online-kids area is how they love to use the Internet not only to connect with each other, but to share and display their work.
By definition, Zeeks can't be quite as "safe" as a closed online service like JuniorNet, but it is targeting slightly older kids (as opposed to JuniorNet's 3-12-ers). Zeeks has thought through the safety issues thoroughly. They include filtering software; monitored chat and every project page a child posts; have time-out technology so parents can control online time; give parents a password that is the only way to disable Zeeks on the computer; and allow parents to monitor kids' online activities, add sites to the filtering list, and determine who's on the child's e-mail pal list.
Their filtering software, which is proprietary, uses the "spidering technology" that a lot of search engines use (it unceasingly "crawls" around the Web looking for key words), so Zeeks's lists of sites to be blocked are constantly updated. On top of that, they say, four humans review almost everything the spider turns up as inappropriate, and eight people oversee those four people. Seems a little top heavy, but good intentions, certainly.
Remember KidDesk? It kept kids away from everything on the family computer except their own stuff? Zeeks reminded some of us of our KidDesk days - it's a kind of online KidDesk. Kids just access the child-appropriate stuff on the computer as well as on the Web. Unlike with some children's browsers, they can't simply minimize Zeeks and launch Netscape; Zeeks has to be disabled with a password by a parent. (BTW, KidDesk does now have a kids browser called KidDesk Internet Safe, with filtering built in, that works with whatever browser the grownups use.)
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