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The study shows that 100 percent of mothers have watched TV, been online, listened to the radio or received a direct mail promotion in the last week, while 91 percent have shopped at a retail store, 88 percent have read a magazine, and 86 percent have used a cell phone.

Mothers are also using emerging media, though not as often: the study shows that in an average week, 33 percent of moms watched video-on-demand, 32 percent have read a blog and 17 percent listened to an iPod.

Interestingly, 27 percent of moms would pay to eliminate online advertising, 24 percent would pay to stop email advertising, and 23 would do the same for TV, radio and blogs.

I have heard that blogging about babies is a popular pastime now, and I can see the positive benefits that might come from keeping a record of the baby's growth and development. We used to have scrapbooks for such things, but now the Internet serves as a repository for these records, along with all sorts of thoughts and debates that motherhood brings. For moms, it can be a respite from the isolation some suffer after leaving the workplace. Replies to their blogs can help them feel that they are sharing the "new mom" experience, or quell their worries that their child is the only one with a behavior problem or developmental delay. Blogging while the baby sleeps seems OK.

On the other hand, blogging has a potential for abuse, especially if it becomes a substitute for interacting with the child, or a place to lodge daily complaints against the father, or serves mainly to satisfy exhibitionistic urges. I can't judge your brother's specific case, but in general, diaries and journals have been replaced by the Internet, and your sister-in-law has jumped on the bandwagon, hopefully with taste and moderation.

MySpace, which has been criticized for not doing enough to protect its youngest members from sexual predators, said its partnership with Seventeen, the National School Board Association and the National Association of Independent Schools would target parents, teens and teachers with tips, suggestions and information on safe online behavior.

***

The site, which is owned by News Corp., launched in June security measures to protect 14 and 15 year olds. The measures included preventing a person 18 or older from contacting a member under 16 years old, unless he knows either the email address or first and last name of the minor. MySpace at the time also launched more options for privacy settings and restrictions on ad placements to teens.

The additional security followed within days after a 14-year-old girl sued the site in Texas, claiming she was sexually assaulted by a man she met on MySpace.

Earlier this year, MySpace hired Hemanshu Nigam as chief security officer. Nigam is a former federal prosecutor against Internet child exploitation for the U.S. Department of Justice.

You start by creating your page and deciding which elements to make public or private. You can then customize the look of your Famster using the "theme park" - a gallery of themes to spruce up your site. Next, drop in to the Character Studio to create animated avatars of your family members. There’s also a photo album, a blogging tool, a filing cabinet for your file uploads, a guestbook, a scrapbook, a calendar, a family tree, a way to share your recipes, a video-sharing feature, an address book and free webmail (whew!). Additionally, Famster offers an RSS reader, but you can only choose from pre-selected feeds, which seems fairly useless. One last feature is obviously designed to capitalize on hysteria over MySpace predators - you can search for sex offenders in your area and even receive alerts when new offenders are added. It's hard to comment on that without getting political, but I'm just not sure what value (if any) this provides - apart from propogating a culture of fear.

Backfence.com members will be able to get up-to-date statistics on local crime and then comment on safety issues through the new blog, which Alarm.com will sponsor. The ultimate goal, the two companies say, is to create a nationwide "citizen watch" focused on trends and tactics for protecting lives and property.

Backfence.com, founded in 2004, builds and operates community-focused Web sites that bring together content such as blogs, photo galleries and event calendars.

Alarm.com's technology allows customers to monitor and control their security systems remotely via the Web, and they can receive real-time text messages and e-mail alerts that keep them informed on all types of activity on their property. Alarm.com was founded in 2000.

BLY
My mom always uses the excuse about the internet being "public" when she defends herself. It's not like I do anything to be ashamed of, but a girl needs her privacy. I do online journals so I can communicate with my friends. Not so my mother could catch up on the latest gossip of my life.

The truth is many of these sites are becoming lame because everyone is on them. It's not so cool anymore as teachers and parents like my mom are doing their own pages.

MOM (on tape)
Yes I did have a site on MySpace. I had a few pictures of myself...they were very candid shots that I might not normally hang up in my house or show to my friends. And I am an adult, so I put my true first name and my true age, but I didn’t give too much personal information.
BLY: Did you make friends on MySpace?
MOM: Yes I did. And I didn't even do it to make friends, I did it to stay in touch with some friends. And I was a little weirded out the first time someone I didn't know contacted me.

BLY
She might have been creeped out at first, but Mom ended up going to a hockey game with one guy. What a hypocrite! Especially since Mom is always warning me about strangers online. My mom having a Myspace? So embarrassing!

It also speaks to the tipping point that I think is happening with a lot of the social networking sites that have been getting the most media coverage -- now that everyone (parents, teachers, police, etc.) has discovered them, they are losing their allure with teens. Bly, the teen in this conversation, also talks about how her mom now has a MySpace page (and even went on a date with someone she met there), and how it's SO embarrassing.

The new blog directory will be designed with an eye toward helping mothers find mom bloggers through keyword searches and tags. They'll be indexed by similar interests, number of kids and region of the country. The site will also offer non-blogging mothers advice on how to start. Organizers hope to get existing bloggers to participate by bringing them traffic and offering tips on how to increase their audiences. J&J recruited a panel of "top mom bloggers" to advise the company on this initiative. "We didn't go into this as experts, for sure," Lindsay Kalaw, product director at Johnson's Baby, told ClickZ. "We've learned a lot about the blogging community. We wanted to identify moms seen as influential in this space and we asked them, 'What would you be looking for from a blog directory?'"

In fact, the News Corp. site has recently experienced declines in its audience aged 12 to 17, 12 to 24 and 12 to 34, while seeing increases in the 21-to-34, 25-to-34, and 35-to-54 demographics, according to data from comScore Networks.

"A lot of people have a faulty perception about the MySpace audience,'' says Phil Carpenter, vice president of marketing of Simply Hired, the job-search engine that powers the newly launched MySpace careers section. "It's a lot more diverse than what people believe it to be.''

The change in audience demographics may be attributable to factors beyond MySpace's control, such as the fact that many college students take final exams in May and should in theory be studying instead of hanging out online. Some leveling off in younger users is also to be expected, given the explosive growth of the site, which launched in January 2004.

Instead of walking to each other's desks and trading stories, the plan is to write them down here, so that: 1. Lots of you will check this blog out and tell your friends; 2. Bringing untold riches to the Chronicle, which will; 3. Reward us with huge bonuses, and then; 4. We can all send our kids to Head Royce.

The Poop is Peter Hartlaub, Heather Maddan, Aidin Vaziri and Delfin Vigil. Aidin and Peter have 1-year-olds, Del has an 8-month-old and Heather has a 2-year-old and is due with her second child in late October. (Giving us 3 1/2 months to convince her to live blog her birth!)

Mommy blogs - Web logs by for and about mothers, usually new mothers - have been popping up all over for years. Now, it's the dads' turn.

Mom blogs tend to have a strong personal bent, often featuring pastel colors and a focus on developmental mileposts ("My baby is now 14 lbs."). Dad blogs feel more irreverent, more ironic and are frequently use more curse words. They delve into gadgets (the perfectly named product review site Thingamababy), kid-related news stories (Daddytypes) or information for stay-at-home dads (ModernDayDad), a vocal segment of the blogging community.

And as Generation X makes its passage through the age of childrearing, some think dad blogs are evidence of how this demographic is putting its own stamp on parenting styles.

A Family Runs Through It

Cynical Dad

DadCentric

Daddytypes

Working Dad

Dad Stays Home

The site will charge $3.95 a month if you want your own blog. If you want to just leave comments or send email through the system, it is free. The company recognizes that blogging software is widely available elsewhere on the net for free. But it says the charge is for the parental control capabilities. A credit card is required for registration, which allows imbee to gather and authenticate information about the parent/guardian and their child. This requirement is why imbee says it is different from other youth-oriented sites, such as YFly, Tagged and Xanga. (Most of these other sites, provide tips to younger users, for example, that they shouldn't give out telephone numbers to strangers, but none of it is binding).

Kids can only network with real people they know. An invitation can come in from someone wanting to talk with a child, and the guardian can see it, and decide to approve it or reject it. But you can't search for people to network with by hobby, geography, high-school or other general category. The only way to connect is to have pre-existing relationship with the person, and send them an email to request the connection.

Now MySpace and other social-networking sites like LiveJournal.com and Facebook are facing a new threat: a proposed federal law that would effectively require most schools and libraries to render those Web sites inaccessible to minors, an age group that includes some of the category's most ardent users.

"When children leave the home and go to school or the public library and have access to social-networking sites, we have reason to be concerned," Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican, told CNET News.com in an interview. Fitzpatrick and fellow Republicans, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert, on Wednesday endorsed new legislation (click here for PDF) that would cordon off access to commercial Web sites that let users create public "Web pages or profiles" and also offer a discussion board, chat room, or e-mail service.

That's a broad category that covers far more than social-networking sites such as Friendster and Google's Orkut.com. It would also sweep in a wide range of interactive Web sites and services, including Blogger.com, AOL and Yahoo's instant-messaging features, and Microsoft's Xbox 360, which permits in-game chat.

But, banning the sites in schools and libraries not only isn't the answer, it actually is likely to make the situation worse. In schools and libraries, at least, adults can monitor the students while helping to educate them about the dangers online, rather than pretending they don't exist. This law doesn't protect the children -- it takes away the responsibility of teaching them how to be safe online.

Hastert said on Wednesday that it "would put filters in schools and libraries so that kids can be protected... We've all heard stories of children on some of these social Web sites meeting up with dangerous predators. This legislation adds another layer of protection."

Here's a bulletin I recently found posted to her site:

"OMG! Add this hott guy! He will whore the first 20 people added to his friends list Add him! You can do it in his van!"

Loosely translated, the teenage girl was "pimping" a teenage boy, shown smooching his guitar, as a potential new friend -- or more -- for my daughter. If Taylor added him to her MySpace "friends" list, the tousled-hair teen would be able to look at her Web site and send messages to her.

The soliciting girl made the pitch to all 245 of her own "friends" with a simple keystroke.

In the MySpace world, this is called a "whore code." It's a mild -- very mild -- example of the coarse language and often profane messages that are plastered all over the social networking site like graffiti on bathroom walls.

This is how she responded: "I'm really mad because it feels like you're saying I can't talk to my friends anymore. On MySpace, I get to talk to my friends and see people I don't see a lot. You get to keep in touch with everyone, and it's fun. You took away my fun!"

What if I allowed Taylor to maintain a page while keeping a close eye on it? I would join it too so I could become familiar with the site's benefits and drawbacks.

So I typed out the contract, and Taylor enthusiastically signed it. She created an account for me and assigned me a URL, www.myspace.com/im(underscore)a(underscore)cool(underscore)mom, that reflected the giddiness of our truce.

Taylor was thrilled by this turn of events: "Yeah! I can't believe you're letting me do it. I guess it's OK that I have to sign this thing. I don't want you supervising me. I think I can do it on my own. But I'm glad you let me have my own page. It's a generous thing for you to do."

Taylor had posted shots of herself and two other girls giving a one-fingered salute. I couldn't believe that she would post the photos knowing that I was looking over her shoulder. What was she thinking?

This is what she was thinking, Taylor said: "I was like, 'Should I do this? I don't know.' But I thought you wouldn't care because I didn't say anything on them. They were just pictures. And (the two other girls) already had them up on their pages."

Q. How do I block a user?
A. To block a user you will need to visit that user's profile click 'Block User' (found underneath 'Send Message').

Clicking 'Block User' will block that user.

Blocked users can still view your profile, but they cannot send you a message or communicate with you. There is no way to prevent someone from seeing your profile.

myspaceWatch.com is a service that allows you to monitor login activity, track profile changes, and keep a running history of up to 3 myspace.com profiles. Are you a parent who banned your child from myspace only to see that they keep logging on, or keeping multiple accounts? Is your significant other living a double life? We keep track and monitor activity so you don't have to. We also don't ask for any of your personal information.

With all due respect to scrapbookers, scrapbooking doesn't count -- in my mind, people who scrapbook are artists, and scrapbooking is an art form. I'm talking about those books that have places for you to fill in "baby's first tooth," or "baby's first words" -- do you parents out there still manage to complete these? Or have you found that blogging and scrapbooking have taken over? What do you do to record memories of your children's lives?

Reading an online travel blog will perhaps never have the romance of receiving a dog-eared postcard in the mail, but intrepid travelers armed with digital cameras are finding that keeping a blog on the road can be a compelling and viable way of maintaining contact with friends and family.

A travel blog is a real-time online journal that allows users to post text and photographs to the Internet and share the Web address with whomever they want. As travelers have become more comfortable with the Internet and digital cameras have become more affordable, blogging has become increasingly practical and popular. All over the world, travelers can stop in an Internet cafe, upload their photos and share them with friends and family (and interested strangers) instantly.

"I don't have enough information to comment on the case," says Edward Parmelee, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's cyber crime squad in Jackson. "But (her blog) certainly could have been a factor.

"Blogging, in a sense, is the equivalent of hanging out at the mall. You can be talking to friends, but there could also be someone standing behind you listening to your conversations. Providing personal information for anyone in the world to go online and read increases the potential for something bad to happen."

Adds Robert Mahaffey, criminal investigator for the Mississippi Attorney General's cyber crime unit: "The Internet is the wild, wild West of the 21st century, and it should be viewed that way."

One of the problems with blogging, Parmelee says, is that "youngsters can get lured into a false sense of anonymity by sitting behind a computer screen ... they don't see the creepy old guy in the yellow raincoat who is out to do them harm."

The best analogy is like meeting in a public park. I get into conversations all the time with other parents, or other dog walkers. A shared interest brings people together. You'll find that total strangers on the other side of the world are sometimes very interested in how you got your three-year-old to eat carrots.

"The downside of prohibiting it is worse than the downside of allowing it," Dr. Steinberg says. "A good parent-child relationship is based on trust, and trust is a reciprocal feeling. I think people do get especially worked up for some reason over the Internet. But snooping on what your child does on the Internet, to me in some ways, is no different from snooping through your child's dresser drawers or eavesdropping on your child's telephone conversation or reading your child's diary.

"Any of those things done without cause [for suspicion] are to me violations of what I think is the reasonable right that teenagers have, which is to have some aspect of their lives that their parents are not privy to," he says.