Read/Write Web Dog and Pony Show

Last night my wife arranged for about 20 of our friends to come to the local computer club to get a two-hour overview of the Read/Write Web and some of the more interesting tools out there. The weather was awful, and only about eight showed up, but the reaction was pretty much unanimous.

Mercy.

The reason we did this was because we knew they didn’t know much about what was going on “out there”. There was a board member from a local district, a few local businessmen, a brother in-law, and a couple of teens in the “audience.” We created and published an agenda/list beforehand using Writely, which I’m starting to like more and more. (Who needs Word?) And the pace was pretty fast and furious. Just a couple of observations:

The board member immediately brought up safety concerns when I started in about blogs, and I told her that we were in the midst of quite a debate regarding the banning of blogs and teaching ethical, safe use. One of the teens from a high school up the road reported that his school now bans all Blogger, MySpace, Xanga, etc. sites. “Anything that has a URL with more than one name in it (i.e. girlygirl2.blogspot.com) is basically gone,” he said. Whoa. In response, one of the local tech gurus said something along the lines of:

“You know, this is like swimming. We can hire all the lifeguards we want, build big walls around the pool, hang life jackets and those long poles within easy reach, but the absolute best way to make sure your kid doesn’t drown is to teach him how to swim.”

Amen to that.

Toward the end when I was wrapping up, one of the other teenagers, a girl, came up to me and said “I have a My Space site and it’s not have as bad as IM. As long as you don’t tell your whole name and don’t give out too much information, I think it’s perfectly safe. “I asked her “How is IM worse?” I was really struck by her answer. “Well, you just have to be more careful when you’re talking face to face.” I looked at her quizically. “What do you mean face to face? Aren’t we talking face to face right now?” “No, you know what I mean,” she said. “When you get into conversations with people who you don’t know, it’s a lot harder to tell whether or not they’re good or bad.” Hmmm…

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