Internet safety means so many things. Password choice, protecting your wireless network, etc. All important, but they don’t get soccer moms across the country as excited as Today show segments about kids posting something on Facebook and turning up dead in a river the next day. Yes, I’m exaggerating, but Internet safety “experts” are much happier when talking about how the Internet will kill you, your children, and you family than when they forced to talk about what the Internet does well. To tell you the truth, I’m not interested in password choice or wireless network protection any more than the soccer moms who watch The Today Show because I know that I’m fine on both counts. But I do hope to draw on my experience and speak directly to the thousands of teens on the Internet and parents who want to keep their kids safe by striking a balance between using the Internet to its potential and being safe on the Internet.

This would be so much easier if everyone used common sense, of course. If every teen used common sense, there would be no stories about sexual predators on the Internet, Chris Hanson would be out of a job, and parents wouldn’t be spying on their kids. This would fix a lot of problems, but it’s obvious that those who do use common sense are forced to follow the same rules as the people who don’t, even if those rules were created because of the people who are without any sense, common or otherwise.

My experience with the Internet undesireables is a bit different than many others, perhaps because I’m a little bit more visible than the average Internet teen. (I’m no Michael Arrington, but most teens just read blogs; they don’t write them). I get the occasional interesting e-mail and one person who was dressed in the guise of friendship, but turned out to be a pedophile, using Web 2.0 services to select, then contact victims.

For Teens

I did a Google search for ways to protect yourself online and so many resources focus on parents and not teens themselves. There seems to be a feeling, never explicity stated, that teens are unable to manage themselves online, that parents are the only ones who can protect their children from the dangers of the Internet. Perhaps that’s because the “experts” have assumed teens are incapable of handling themselves appropriately online and have spent time arming parents with spy tactics rather than giving teens tools to help themselves.

For teens, I have just a few pieces of advice. First, don’t talk to people you don’t know, unless that’s what you’re aiming for (i.e. if you’re a blogger), but keep in mind that when you do distribute your e-mail, the undesireable people on the Internet will eventually start talking to you. The second is not to be afraid to use services like Facebook and Twitter, so long as you don’t give away personal information. The first two have been said before, but my last point isn’t said enough. You don’t have to give away your street address to be a vulnerable target. Some people have a tendency to spill out their life stories on the Internet and predators are just as coercive online as they are in person.

For Parents

Unfortunately for parents, this section will have to focus a bit more on what not to do than what you should do. Parents, or at least the ones I have come into contact with, will instinctually try to protect their child’s privacy and put trust in their child. “Experts” (I’m not going to name names because there are too many to single out just one or two).

1. Do Not Put Blocking, Spying, Parental Control Software on Your Child’s Computer

There should always be some basic trust. If you want to know what you child is doing, talk to them, not deploy spy software to read every conversation you child has. Teenagers deserve privacy and the ability to talk freely with friends.

2. Do Not Force Your Child to Keep Their Computer in a Public Area

We deserve to have computers in our rooms, but this is an area where I admit parents have a reasonable argument. If a parents suspects inappropriate online activity, this should be the first right rescinded. I would encourage teens to be as open about their computer use as possible. For example, I have my computer in my room because that’s where I have my printer and textbooks, but I’m writing this post with my door wide open.

3. Don’t Assume All Online Activity is Sinister

Remember the Internet is, on balance, good.

Or everyone could just be more like me.

Let me know in the comments if there’s anything I didn’t cover. I know it exists, the Internet is a very big place.

Computer users are bombarded with ads. It’s hard to go to a website and not see ads. Even websites like nytimes.com or cnn.com have ads. Google has filled search results with so many ads that most of us have been conditioned to just ignore them. Ads and content sites seem to be synoymous.

But now the ads are spreading! Desktop apps are being eaten by them too. Weatherbug swallows your screen with huge, obtrusive ads and videos. Twitterific is more tastefully ad supported (it displays just one small ad every half hour and it doesn’t take up your whole screen).

The good part about both Weatherbug and Twitterific is that they give you the option of paying to opt-out of the ads. For $19.95, Weatherbug gives you more features and no ads. Twitterific is ad-free for $14.95. This is an excellent solution. They can still fund future projects, but they don’t have to give users the inconvenience of ads.

But I think that no matter what options developers give users regarding ads vs. no ads, developers need to keep their ads unobtrusive. Users don’t like ads, but we tolerate ads to an extent. When you pass the threshold of reasonable advertising, users hate the product. A bit like I hate Weatherbug.

Websites are a bit more complicated. Twitter, for example, is not ad-supported yet, but in order to be a profitable company, it will probably have to be. Facebook already went down that road. That’s because there are really only two options to make a website, service, or app profitable: ads or payment of some sort. Twitter has indicated that it wants to be a global communication utility. It’s a lot harder to be global when you cut out the millions of people who can’t pay. So most websites turn to ads, but I really wish they wouldn’t!

I would much rather pay for Twitter than see it go down the ad-supported road. In fact, I would pay to have Google searches with no ads. While a pay-for-no-ads solution seems to be taking hold in the desktop app community, it has not yet reached online services and that’s annoying. In the past year, The New York Times discontinued its paid TimesSelect service which presented articles by certain columnists without ads. It was discontinued for a variety of reasons, but I strongly believe they should have an ad-free version of The New York Times online. I would pay a steep price for it too, if I continue to like The New York Times as much as I do now. There’s really no downside to doing this, unless I’m not thinking of something.

So I have suggestions for ad-supported apps, services, and sites. Number one: Don’t make the ads huge, like Weatherbug. It makes me want to uninstall the app and erase every trace of the disgusting over-adness. Take a leaf out of Twitterific’s book. Number two: Always give people the option of opting-out of ads for a fee.

If the end result is the same for the content or service provider (the end result being revenue), then giving the users more choice is better.

And one more thing in support of my plan, though it’s hard to measure or prove. As I mentioned above, we’ve been conditioned to ignore some ads (in Google searches, for example), so if ads become less common, then the value of the ads that we do see would go up. Whether or not this would actually make a measurable impact on ad values is impossible to ascertain.

If View from a Farley ever has ads (certainly in future plans), I will offer a paid alternative. I’m putting my money where my mouth is.

I would describe the mood in the Internet community as puzzled yesterday afternoon when Amazon.com went down for two hours. When I found out that Amazon was down, I was amazed. Amazon is never down just like Google is never down! Then I started chuckling to myself because it’s almost laughable that only two hours of downtime could cause such a stir on the Internet. Pingdom reports that this is Amazon’s longest downtime since 2006, when Pingdom started monitoring Amazon. Other than a one hour, 44 minute outage in 2006 and today, the longest downtime, according to Pingdom, was 26 minutes in September 2006. Internet users expect a lot more than they used to.

There was a time when 56K modems were considered fast. Online shopping didn’t exist yet. AOL was the industry leader. Google was being run out of a garage. Those were the “good old days.” We didn’t expect webpages to load in a split second. Downloading a one gigabyte file (something like a movie) would take about 41 hours.

Today, we expect instant load time, so when a website doesn’t load at all and instead displays an error message, people tend to freak out. So if the 1990s and early 2000s are the “good old days” now, what will we think of 2008 in ten or twenty years? We imagine ourselves to be so advanced, and perhaps we are, but if there is no limit to just how advanced we can become, then we are just barely scratching the surface of technological development. I’m sure that one hundred years ago Americans considered themselves advanced with such modern marvels as the Eiffel tower (the tallest structure in the world at the time). The French, nor anyone else, could conceive of a time when people were building structures over two thousand feet tall. There is technology that we don’t know about yet and we can’t imagine that will be ubiquitous in another one hundred years.

The next “big thing” on the technological front will be robotics. Much as computers were just beginning to be developed in the 1950s and 1960s, robots are just beginning to be developed now. A lot of great robotic technology exists, but it is prohibitively expensive. The breakthrough will come when robots will be able to learn from behavior, not just programming, and make decisions for themselves. Artificial intelligence will develop alongside robotics and one day, a computer will pass the Turing test.

That’s only the beginning. Robotics and artificial intelligence are already “known.” With those two areas, it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. I’m interested in the technology that hasn’t even been dreamed of yet. As pointed out in an episode of the West Wing, we can’t limit scientific discovery based on what we think will be instantly useful. When Michael Faraday started conducting experiments into the nature of electricity, he could not possibly have know that his work would one day run our entire world. If we keep discovering new things, then we could have a world run on something entirely new. It’s crazy to think of the possibilities because the next revolutionary thing hasn’t been invented yet, but sometime soon, a new technology will do for the 21st century what electricity did for the 20th century.