Where YouTube fears to tread
p2pnet.net News:- Right at the bottom of Stickam.com FAQ, you find this:
Stickam is concerned about the safety and privacy of all of the members of our community, especially minors. However, it is important to keep in mind that Stickam is intended for broad general use and some users may consider some content available on Stickam is offensive, indecent or objectionable. AVC can not be held responsible for any content Posted by Stickam users. While Stickam has established rules keeping children under the age of 14 from becoming a member, it is easy for children to lie about their age and thus gain access to Content which may be inappropriate and unintended for them. It is up to parents to properly supervise their children’s online activities. Certain parental control protections are commercially available which can assist parents in supervising their children’s online activities such as computer hardware, software, and filtering services which can be used to block a child’s access to websites such as Stickam.com. You can find tools that will assist you in supervising your children’s online activities by clicking here.
Why? Because it exploits areas GooTube and others of its ilk fear: the steamier reaches of the video Net.
“Even enthusiastic Stickam users say the site often feels lawless,” says The New York Times, quoting Chelsey, a 17-year-old from Saskatchewan, Canada, as saying, “People are very vulgar and like to ‘get their jollies’ from harassing people, mainly girls, to take off their clothes.” Chelsey signed up after her 13-year-old sister violated the sites age rules and joined, says the story.
Many of today’s new surfers sign up and log on because they’re drawn by what they think they’ll find on sites such as YouTube. But to their disgust, when they arrive, they discover the online copyright and porn cops have pretty much closed everything of interest down,
And that spells money for 21st digital century entrepreneurs.
“Increasingly, to new Web sites like Stickam.com, which is building a business by going where others fear to tread: into the realm of unfiltered live broadcasts from Web cameras,” says the NYT.
Few of the new video sites, though, worry child-safety advocates as much as Stickam, which mostly attracts young people comfortable with the idea of a continuous self-produced reality TV show starring themselves, says the story, going on that Stickam, based in Los Angeles, says it has 260,000 registered users – 50,000 of them say their age is 14 to 17 – and is adding 2,000 to 3,000 each day.
In October, MySpace blocked the Stickam service citing, “safety implications for our users,” says the NYT, but by then, “Stickam was testing its own social networking service to compete directly with MySpace” and according to ceo Hideki Kishioka, the rules at the bottom of the site’s FAQ are “unenforceable,” states the NYT. Stickam is, “relying on users to monitor each other”.
“I`m pretty sure none of their parents know or even think about the things that they are doing on this site,” the story has Chelsey saying.
Meanwhile, “At least one major media company has embraced Stickam,” says the story, going on:
“Warner Brothers Records opened a page on the service for two of its artists, Jamie Kennedy and Stu Stone, and trained a Web cam on them as they recorded a music video. More than 9,500 users watched the event and chatted with the performers during breaks in filming.”
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
Also See:
The New York Times – Young Turn to Web Sites Without Rules January 2, 2007
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January 19th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Stickam is definitely getting more popular, and the unique visitor numbers prove it. The Compete.com blog today shows that they might not “stick” around though – their session time is low compared to the other social networking giants, and this is a good measure of popularity in the market. The post is worth checking out… http://blog.compete.com/2007/01/19/stickam-myspace-youtube-facebook-friendster/