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No wonder he wants to defend his trademark: http://home.neopets.com/~Malshandir

Kudos for encouraging your daughter to go beyond the usual girly-girl commercial sites. Although there would seem to be a logical progression from imaginary adventures to adventures of an entirely different kind,

There are tons of web-based games out there, aimed at little kids. The best ones manage to integrate some form of competitive nature. I remember way back in the day, when I was a young'n, there was this little site called neopets.

Some of you might be familiar with this child-attracting monstrosity. It is full of minigames which give them points which they can spend on a variety of stuff. Stuff for your Neopet, as your Neopet is kind of like your avatar, or about as close as you're going to get. I find that they did well in attracting to the "Cool & Cute", the two fields that attract younger kids, however in retaining their audience that had to make it fun enough to keep playing. The best way to do this is to make it competitive with other players.

You could open a shop, and little kids would start playing the market like the stock market (despite neopets actually having its own built in stock market) - kids would understand the investment skills of buy low sell high. There was also a combat arena where you could face off your neopet against other people's neopets. A leveling system I can't remember, weapons, gear, all that stuff.

I'm sure its still like that somehow today, but thats about all I remember.

So, if there is any tip I can give to anyone making a web-game for kids: it's appeal to that social interaction and competitiveness that keeps kids playing webgames, keeps jocks playing football, and keeps nerds playing WoW.

OK, this upstart will achieve NOTHING unless he somehow gets an idea of how to dethrone the inexplicably popular NEOPETS from its throne of bones. I "played" Neopets for more than a month back in '04, when I was out of a job and homebound, and it singlehandedly made me want to get out of the house and get into the real world (no small feat). And Neopets remains popular despite the fact that one of its main pet types is sacreligious to one of the world's most respected religions. All aboard to Krawk Island! Avast and set sail to Meridell!

Yup, this machine was probably built for XP. And from your statement I'm guessing that your parents aren't doing anything on a computer that needs to be done. I know if my mom can't get her email or watch a flash video one day she just decides to do something else for a while.

A student, otoh, has work that needs to be done. And in a timely manner. And often using whatever wierd software the school/prof says they will. Things like "CPU" and "RAM" aren't bells or whistles. They're the basic needs for getting work done. The fact that a better CPU or more RAM also makes it possible to play a game doesn't mean that games are all a better machine is good for.

If you're that worried about your kids playing a game on the PC you buy them then you'd better remove all the other bells and whistles too... like Flash... and the web browser... and Java and the OS... because they can be used for entertainment too.

I discussed this with my kids just now, and they agree 100% with the award. After all, this is the man who made barbie.com possible, as well as trollz.com, clubpenguin, and neopets.

Yes, it's getting subscribers and currency exchange that'll be a bitch.

http://www.neopets.com/~Fruzia

Bad things you can do online: -camwhore for strangers -give those strangers your address and phone number -fly to California to meet strangers

Kids don't just endanger themselves. They fuck things up for other people as well:

• Go to sites like Neopets, try to guess or otherwise acquire other kids passwords, and then mess up seven-year-olds' accounts for kicks. Or scam seven-year-olds with fake auctions.
• Go to random websites and troll or flood the forums with spam. Or death threats.

I help out at what's basically a much smaller version of Neopets, and let me assure you: kids can be total dicks. If parents monitored their kids online activities better, I'm certain my job would be so much easier, because permanent grounding would ensue in many of the cases. This is more pre-and-early-teens than six-year-olds, but jeez. When I warn them to stop spamming, they reply with 'fuck you', and when I ban them for continuing to spam, they'll sometimes circumvent it and post that mean Wesc banned them for no reason, or several times that mean Wesc raped them. On various sites I've received the occasional death threat from kids I've annoyed, and worse, and so do other kids. They're obviously not very serious threats, but that's a lot harder to realise when you're young.

While you're telling your kid not to share private information, could you also mention that spamming and death threats and such are not acceptable behaviours even when they're not in 'real life'? Here's a tip: if your kid thinks that the people they talk to online are as real as everybody else and deserve the same respect, keep them offline, because I don't want to deal with them anymore. There are plenty of decent people--both kids and adults--around to fill their place. Thanks.

What worries me about the Flash player update are the people who are downloading it:/

Never heard of sites like Neopets , do you? Their target audience do talk like that, and the site pretty much requires the latest version of flash all the time....

Don't forget NeoPets, which is essentially one big trojan ad campaign targeted at very young kids.

Until someone *wants* to be educated, you cannot teach them anything.

In game ads are generally ineffective as there were plenty of games that included fake ads. Duke Nukem 3D, as one example, littered the first level with ads for upcoming attractions. None of these movies existed (and were considered in-character). The only real advertisements would be in the arcade, where 3D realms advertised there other products as arcade games - and even then, at least one of them was a joke (an ad for Duke "Don't have time to play with myself" Nukem.)

For product advertisements, these are likewise marginally effective. Most people treat them the same way as the othe joke ads and do stuff with them - (e.g. on ads that show a woman, shoot two well-placed bullets) or otherwise make an awkward situation with them.

Of course, Agressive advertisment generates plenty of revenue, but pushes away players in most cases (e.g. having a negative gain.) AFAIK, this single game is the sole exception where ads do not push players away.

The Red Cross has made a similar attempt in the past. Neopets used to have a hospital in it's game world depicting a red cross on the building. Due to pressures, they were forced to change the cross to a green color. The change didn't get a whole lot of publicity, and a quick google search didn't turn up anything on the change though.

or "bean counter extreme" or "Nada III".

Now, if Microsoft change the way Windows works so as not to just hand out permission for any process to interfere with any other process, then the worms and viruses that depend on this behaviour will die off -- but so will all those applications that depend on this broken behaviour.

As easy way to teach users about general scams is to write a game where you simply have to click on a specific icon as much as possible. It's easy at first, but it gradually starts to create pop-ups that impede progress.

There are some people that find this suggestion to be humourous - but I'm dead serious: Follow and distribute the following link - http://www.neopets.com/games/launch_game.phtml?gam e_id=204

The actual game is here: http://www.neopets.com/games/advertattack.phtml

Registration is recommended, but not required, to play the game.

As easy way to teach users about general scams is to write a game where you simply have to click on a specific icon as much as possible. It's easy at first, but it gradually starts to create pop-ups that impede progress.

There are some people that find this suggestion to be humourous - but I'm dead serious: Follow and distribute the following link - http://www.neopets.com/games/launch_game.phtml?gam e_id=204

The actual game is here: http://www.neopets.com/games/advertattack.phtml

Registration is recommended, but not required, to play the game.

Am I the only one who doesn't get the (great) appeal of RSS? I've tried it in various forms (Firefox Live Bookmarks, Google Homepage, RSS plugin for Firefox...) serveral times and I always end up forgetting about it. I really only read three web-pages every day and I like to scan the entire pages, so RSS is a waste of time in those cases as the various methods of using RSS only let you see, say, 20 headlines at once and my main news page, for example, has hundreds well organised in various sections.

So I really am not suprised by the 4% figure, the only thing that is suprising is that anybody else is suprised:)

First, let me recommend Neopets. It's been getting fairly commercialized, but what I saw of it a few years ago looked good for younger children (and adults who act young. :P) Neopets will give you son a pet or pets to take care of as well as introducing him to an economy (through the market place) and allow him to play many fun games. The only thing to really watch out for is the merchandise. :P As for programming experience, I do recommend it. I personally was exposed to BASIC when I was 2 and 8, and I just didn't get the connection between typing in weird "sentances" and the output. For an initial programming language, try Logo. It's cute and simple. Most of the basic "easy" programs consist of instructing the "turtle" what to draw through a series of simple commands such as the example below, which draws a sqaure. Of course, if he doesn't know about degrees in a circle yet, then the LEFT 90 may be above his head, but that shouldn't be too hard to help him with. (I don't remember what school taught me when...) FORWARD 100 LEFT 90 FORWARD 100 LEFT 90 FORWARD 100 LEFT 90 FORWARD 100 The nice thing about Logo is that it's a graphic output that responds to your programs immediately. After he begins to understand Logo, he can move on to BASIC. Frankly, even just having some random simple, yet "cool" programs will help him type better. Learning programming will help him get a better basic understanding of the computer, which will aid him in the long run compared to the next generation of luddites who will always be relative neophytes compared to him!

Well, considering that it was viacom that purchased them (MTV's parent company) I'm afraid you are going to have to block lots of other things from your poor kid.

Lots of movies he won't be able to see.. in fact anything from Paramount Pictures, which is owned by viacom.

Will have to block some broadcast networks as well.. CBS & UPN to be exact, as they are both owned by viacom.

When it comes to cable viewing, you need to make sure to censor channels like:

Nickelodeon
Comedy Central
TV Land
Showtime
NOGGIN
The Sundance Channel

Because all of these are Viacom owned as well.

(not to mention that Viacom has been the company managing the Neopets IP rights for some time now)

http://info.neopets.com/presskit/articles/archive/ viacom.html

Isn't April Fools Day just the best? =] For a 'full' list of sites pulling pranks today check out this list here

Here is a sample:

kellyosbourne.org - Sanctuary records group shut us down
nukefreezone.net - Making fun of atrios.blogspot.com
weebl.jolt.co.uk - Replaced with Cats-By-Mail
telecom.co.nz - Click 2 Brick
ytmnd.com - (NSFW) hacked by teens for christ
wingus.ampedhost.com - Site converted into Mingus' Gently-Used Furniture store. Oh dear. Why won't he be kind?
homestarrunner.com - Now a pay service.
whirlpool.net.au - Australia's biggest Luddite to head Australia's largest telco
thinkgeek.com - Fake product listings.
theregister.co.uk - Bush twins to join Air Force tech unit in Iraq
creativebits.org - Site purchased by Microsoft
ocremix.org - Now partnered with EA (or something like that). Called EA ReMix.
spacedaily.com - Bush Cancels Space Shuttle Program
planet.gnome.org - Switched sites with planet.kde.org
planet.kde.org - Switched sites with planet.gnome.org
ietf.org - RFC: Efficient Transformation Formats of Unicode
beejaysworld.de - Gentoo dropping livecds for x86
nature.com - Apollo bacteria spur lunar erosion
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov - Water On Mars
smh.com.au - (Free Reg Req) SMEGmail offers 1 terabyte storage
smh.com.au - (Free Reg Req) Linux looks to Hilton for exposure
thetoque.com - Canada Builds Own Missile Defense Shield
onion.com - U.S. Dog Owners Fear Arrival of Africanized Fleas
chron.com - Bush Twins in Maxim
ask.com - Jeeves has been replaced by a robot
animenewsnetwork.com - Viz Unlicenses Naruto
uninventthewheel.co.uk - New BMW technology to get around the EU ban on right hand drive cars in Europe.
newgrounds.com - changing to numagrounds.com
neopets.com - neopets adds 50 new pets
www.firstloox.org - The Loox is being recalled
packages.gentoo.org - Adobe doesn't sell products for Linux
pc.ign.com - Microsoft World of Wordcraft (Extremely Obvious)
spamusement.com - Page full of spoof banner ads
gentooexperimental.org - Gentoo using the NT kernel
moddb.com

I think I'd love Pokemon Online, especially if you get a chance to kick Pichachu's butt at some point!

a thousand words.

"To "feed" their pets, Neopets players have to win points in a variety of mini-games, including versions of poker and blackjack."

My 7 year old introduced me to neopets, and I quickly learned two things:

1) Food that you have to pay for is really scarce, no matter how much money you have, and
2) You don't need to BUY food.

There's a section of the site where you can find "donations", and maybe someone dropped some food there. There's also a spot where you can get a free omelette once a day. After I discovered that, I don't have to spend an hour a day just trying to find food. I play a few games (btw, they have some really entertaining and addictive games there), make sure my critter's not dying of starvation, and I'm done.

the advertising comes not necessarily from ads, of which there isn't many, but from branded games and entire sections of the site. Yet they do not attempt to hide these: at the bottom of this page, it clearly states "THIS PAGE CONTAINS PAID ADVERTISEMENTS". My girlfriend, who's been playing for years spends a lot of time there, but I don't think it's a bad thing. It's something to do, she's working towards a goal in the game and she's meeting new people.

For more information on this, see http://info.neopets.com/aboutus/pressreleases.phtm l and http://info.neopets.com/aboutus/page06.phtml.

The market research is particularly interesting. 52% of respondents to a survey liked having "Featured Products" on the web site? The written responses to that survey are also rather frightening.

For more information on this, see http://info.neopets.com/aboutus/pressreleases.phtm l and http://info.neopets.com/aboutus/page06.phtml.

The market research is particularly interesting. 52% of respondents to a survey liked having "Featured Products" on the web site? The written responses to that survey are also rather frightening.

There's games that help with maths skills as well.
Try this
There's just a LOT of games there.
There's a stockmarket, arcade games, action games, card games, luck/chance games etc.
And there are items such as needles and shots to cure your pet when it's sick.

So, this site had the target of making kids workaholics, nerds, gambling addicts, and drug addicts. Burn it.

I mean, for all the porn and REAL gambling you can find online, a kids' site bothered that mom? whatever.

I know it sounds weird... I was addicted to neopets at one time, and I'm 26. I neglected my job, my girlfriend, and even my cat. When I got bored of the neopets games, I wrote perl LWP scripts to cheat.

Here's my old pet... I finally forced myself to adopt my pet, and closed the account permenantly.

posting anon because of the shame of it all...

Last time I looked Cybertown and NeoPets were heavily into the Happy (un)Fun Cult. (Neopets are also marketing survery spammers.)

So that is what happened to my daughter the other day! She was Neopets or some of its 'faeries' affiliate web sites, and suddenly there were all these countless minimized little Konqueror windows.

Thanks for the clue.

just play neo pets, where there's more than one piece of pussy to chooooose from.

Hey, with this announcement I can get my family to switch to Firefox for good. Though they're all IE users right now, dad's concerned about security and asks me for advice on it, so he'd be willing to switch to Firefox. Same for my year-younger brother (he's 18).

The problem is my youngest brother (age 13) doesn't want to switch since Firefox disaplys one of his favorite sites, NeoPets, correctly. Wonder if I should let the shrimp use IE, or bug the hell out of NeoPets until they fix their website.

and none of them really scale well enough to support something like cnn.com.

This thread is becoming a "how to block adds" thread, but we need to remember that these adds are keeping our sites free. I, for one, actually click on adds some times and have been known to purchase goods through the less intrusive adds both because the stuff looked good and I wanted to help that site out with it's free content.

But there's a big difference between choosing how you present your advertisements and simply giving over a larger and larger space to some random ad company whose only goal is to distract from your content. Google and Neopets are both sites that integrate advertising into the use of the site in an unobtrusive manner, and make money providing ad-supported content. (Granted, Neopets is now starting to make bank on merchandising, but that's a different story.)

Once I stumbled across something objectionable and I wrote both of them a short e-mail quietly explaining that I could see everything they were doing over the network, and that it would be in their best interest to make sure they never visited any site that our parents might object to. Problem solved.

Another time my brother, who was 10 at the time, got addicted to this site: neopets.com - he was literally spending 4-5 hours a DAY on that site (so were many kids in his school). I saw it on the firewall logs, my mother and I talked to him, told him he was going to spend AT THE MOST 30 minutes a day on that site. I checked the logs over the next few days, found that he had not changed his behavior, warned him AGAIN, and finally blocked access completely. He wasn't happy, but now he agrees that it had been the best thing to do. Now, like most kids, he's happy just IM'ing his friends and doing other retarded things, but in moderation, which is just fine with me and my parents..

It's fun, very child-friendly, reasonably ad-free (a few small ones in the corners, and the occasional 'sponsored game',) and free.

Oh, and it's addicting for child and adult. (My 30 year old sister got me hooked on it after students in her class told her about it, I got my wife and her son hooked.)

It's kind of a tomagotchi that won't die, combined with a game/fake auction/online-pokemon all-in-one. And you can even play the games (some good, some not so good, mostly 'generic' copies of other simple puzzle or action games) without creating an account.

Neopets

A few years back, my roommate was addicted to neopets. It's basically a website where you play silly little games, some strategic and some mindless, to earn points that you can spend on your "pet". The better your pet was they better your chances of beating up other people's pets. I knew nothing about it at the time, but saw him playing around with it a lot, so I thought it must be fun and I'd give it a try. It was boring after 5 minutes. Instead of playing more, I spent a week writing some perl scripts to play the games for me and max out my points. By the time the scripts were done, I only ran them for one day when I realized that the fun was in writing the scripts, not in using them, so I stuck them in an archve directory and never did anything neopets related again.

My point? To some people, mindless games are no fun by themselves, but it is fun to try and describe the activity of playing the game in code, since it requires you to consiously describe the actions that make the game playable without consious thought. It also adds some chalange to a game that has none. For example, not only did my neopets scripts have to perfect game interaction for the optimal outcome, but they also had to convince the server that there was a real person with a real browser at the other end (they tried to figure that out). Trying to out-wit the server admins was the most chalanging part. Writing the scripts is fun. Of course, the people who download and use such scripts simply to be at the top of the high-scores chart have problems, but that's another story entirely.

BTW, I never distributed my neopets scripts, so don't go blaming me for people "cheating".

"Dad! Nooo! I can't go to bed yet! Blinkyboo423 didn't get to shake the Money Tree yet!"

Take a look at neopets. They're a kids gamesite which offers games, many of which are little more than thinly disguised advertisements. For example, this Disney 101 Dalmations game (you won't be able to play it directly unless you create a login).

A multi-billion dollar market? Not likely. However, it does look multi-million dollar market is in the bag.

Take a look at neopets. They're a kids gamesite which offers games, many of which are little more than thinly disguised advertisements. For example, this Disney 101 Dalmations game (you won't be able to play it directly unless you create a login).

A multi-billion dollar market? Not likely. However, it does look multi-million dollar market is in the bag.

Neopets is an extremely successful website which creates games with a sponsor's product and includes products as items within the game. Most of the games are not product or sponsor related, but you get a little advertisement in the sidebar every time you refresh the page. It advertises both the sponsor games and the non-sponsor games.

only suffering IE on sites that Chimera can't handle...

You know, a lot of sites "Chimera can't handle" are probably sites that don't conform to standards. IE is very "forgiving" as far as standards go, and people have been taking advantage of that. IMO, that is a good thing. Use what is available, right? Standards need to conform to what people want and are using. It's silly to ignore what is most popular in user-land because of outmoded standards. Like everything, they need to be updated.

For example, I use Konqueror on this machine. To play with my cute little neopet, I have to switch to my Windows machine running IE because the Konquerorites (and others) refuse to allow extended text in alt tags. Like language, you have to update yourself to adapt to what users are doing. Otherwise, you'll end up speaking something entirely useless.

Chris

Well maybe there not searching on google because there to busy
or setting up internet sites

All you've shown is search patterns.

Maybe the OSS changes less or has better help/forums than commercial software, so there's less need to search on google to solve your problems?

Seriously, the other less-polite reply to your comment is right. It's one thing to just go around canning suspicious users on web games or M*s... it's quite a different story when the enduser is a paying customer.

My kids love Neopets and Lego. These are great sites for kids and have great navigation -- the never get hung up at these sites. Don't get me started on Disney -- I have to practically navigate for them when they go to Disney.

One thing that kids do a lot (my sample is about 15 kids -- my 2, nephews and nieces and the kids friends) is click all over the webpage if the computer "gets slow" (this kills windows 95 :-). They also tend to get extremely frustrated if they can't figure out how something works. Really bad or complicated user interfaces at web sites that are important to them (Pokemon, Digimon, etc.) can start them crying. If they leave a web site for this reason they may never go back.

Teaching my 6 and 8 year olds about banner ads only took a couple of minutes. The 6 year old once asked if an ad for "increasing your internet speed" was something I wanted him to look into :-)

Of course my wife or I are almost always in the room with them when their surfing so they can ask for help if they get into trouble.

The 6 year old prefers Mac X, then Linux and then Windows 98. The 8 year old likes Windows and Mac X but doesn't like Linux. There's no accounting for taste I guess.

There is plenty of compelling content online for kids, at least as far as hey are concerned. Sites like neopets, Cartoon orbit and many other similar sites keep my 6th grader (and everyone she knows) on the web for as much time as she is allowed .
I guess looking at a coffee pot/fish tank in another state loses its novelty after a while...

"...Does childhood end when computers come into their lives..."

I'd have to disagree. I honestly don't believe that computers have altered the '15' year-old psychological makeup at all. Granted it has provided them with a heretofore undreamed of ability to connect with people they never would have connected with (hence the overnight explosion and dissapation of the fad-of-the-week).

But has it fundamentally altered their worldview? At 13 I was in on the first entrance of the PC into our school system (Tandy I with no casette backup even). And now I have a 15 year old son who currently lives for NeoPets. And I don't see much difference in his interaction, attitudes, and/or culture than that of the 15 year olds when I was in school.

Perhaps I'm missing the entire point here, but I honestly don't think that computers per se are creating any more of a shift psychologically in our kids than did any other technologically revolutionary advance (telegraph, television, radio).