Continuing our coverage of the mainstream web, in this post we look at some of the most popular websites for kids. We've gathered information from a recent report (pdf) from Nielsen Online, via Marketingvox, which studied the online habits of Britons under the age of 23. We also polled friends of RWW via Twitter.

The Nielsen report concluded that entertainment sites have the greatest affinity with under 12s, games sites for 12-17 year-olds, and student and video sites for 18-22 year-olds. We're all familiar by now with the latter 'young adult' demographic, who are big users of social networks and video sites like YouTube. But let's look more closely at what the under 12 and 12-17 year old demographics are using on the Web.

< 12 yrs Like Entertainment; TV Networks Dominate

The above table is ranked according to percentage of <12 yrs in the audience, so the sites listed aren't necessarily the largest ones. Also as it's a British study, somewhat predictably the BBC has the 2 sites with the largest audience. Despite those caveats, one trend is crystal clear here: most of the most popular sites for under 12's come from television. These brands dominate the list of top websites for this age group: Nick, Cartoon Network, the BBC's CBBC and CBeebies and Disney International. So the Internet, for under 12s, is very much about entertainment and unsurprisingly TV networks use the Net to extend their brands.

It's interesting also to note that there is potentially big money for startups targeting kids, in terms of acquisitions by the big tv networks. Just last year Disney paid US$700M to acquire virtual world Club Penguin, one of the sites listed above. And needless to say, kids love it. RWW reader Richard Lusk says that "my daughter (12 yrs old) LIVES on Club Penguin." Many other friends of RWW listed Club Penguin too (see list below).

The site at the top of the list, with 32% of UK Unique Audience Under 12, is Swedish fashion community site Stardoll. At this site, users can dress up and play with dolls virtually. Membership is free and the company states that most of their users are girls between the ages of 7 and 17. Stardoll says that it has around 16M 20M users [Update: Stardoll contacted us to say that they passed 20M members last week]. It's had about $10M in funding so far from the likes of Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital Partners, so it is another example of how big the Internet market for kids is.

Recommendations from Friends of RWW

Many of RWW's readers are parents (including yours truly), so we asked on Twitter what other sites kids under 12 use. In my household, MyLittlePony and interactive pet games have been popular. Here is what others say, and we encourage you to add more in the comments to this post...

Mari Silbey noted that on HighlightsKids.com she can "do hidden pictures with my 2-almost-3-year-old. It's great."

Mikko Alasaarela said that his three under 12's "use game sites like miniclip, orisinal, kongregate, fantage." He also pointed out that "one of the most popular social networks for that age group is Habbo."

Shana Albert concurred with Mikko, saying that her son loves Habbo.

Nathan Hull said that "My nieces (4 and 7 yrs old) love pbskids.org"

Josh Morgan said that "yoursphere is a new one for kids. It's deal is that all participants are vetted."

Lidija Davis told us that her 9-year old boy loves gamespot.com and that he "visits all the time to get cheats for DS, Xbox". Lidija also said that he likes Club Penguin and Runescape and online games in general. Lidija noted too that YouTube is popular with under 12's - although, wary of the dangers, she said that "luckily my little people ask me to check first".

Jonathan Fields told us that his 7 year old daughter likes "club penguin, webkinz, stardoll, myscene, playhouse disney, pbsKids, and, of course, her blog".

Kevin Marks suggested runescape. He also listed toontown, webkinz, neopets, club penguin, and YouTube.

Andy Coffey tweeted that "my 6y/o loves lego.com".

Don Reisinger reminded us that Disney carries a lot of spyware!

Mike Brown said that Club Penguin is "hugely popular with our 6 and 10 yr old and lots of their friends".

Ben Tremblay suggested "http://pbskids.org/ and http://pbsparents.org/ There's also http://www.pbskidsplay.org/ but it's frabbed".

Dara Rochlin said that her "6 yo is a webkinz nut, can get on the laptop by herself and play, pbs kids, disney, build a bearville, starfall." As for her 11 year-old, he "likes addicting games, naruto arena, line rider, runescape, pivot, webkinz (to help his sister). Naruto Arena's a fav. He also likes miniclip, and castlewars (on kongregate)."

Online Gaming Big With 12-17 Year Olds

In this age group we start to see social networks make an appearance. In the UK, Bebo is very popular and so it's no surprise to see it ranked #1 in terms of users in the above table. In the US it would probably be MySpace, although we have no data for that.

But the biggest trend in this demographic is that online games sites - for example RuneScape, FreeOnlineGames, AddictingGames and MiniClip - are most popular with 12-17 year-olds.

The Mobile Web is also popular, with mobile phone social networking site Frengo (our earlier coverage) having the highest percentage (26%) of 12-17 year-olds amongst its audience in the UK.

The Nielsen report noted that "as children hit their teenage years, general entertainment sites tend to make way for games-focused sites".

Conclusion

For under 12's, entertainment rules. But there seems to be social networking aspects to that too, judging by the popularity of Club Penguin and StarDoll. After the age of 12, online gaming becomes more popular, and general social networks like Bebo and Facebook enter the scene. The Mobile Web is popular in the 12-17 age group too.

For more analysis about how kids use the Internet, check out Sarah Perez's great post Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web.

Please add more website suggestions for kids in the comments, and let us know what you think of these Web trends for the younger generation.

Image: pixelrobber

Security company Marshal reports that their latest survey found 29% of respondents willing to admit that they have purchased something from a spam e-mail.

While that number seems pretty questionable, PCMag's Appscout points to a related survey from Forrester in 2004 that found 20% of people say they have bought from spammers. In other words, if you believe these studies - it's getting worse, not better.

Context

Marshal (no relation) says that global spam volumes are around 150 billion messages each day and have doubled for the year ending June 2008. We wrote in December about another study, also from a vendor in the anti-spam market, that concluded that 90 to 95% of all email is now spam.

"A common misconception is that 'regular' people don't buy from spam. But, you have to consider the types of products people are buying," Marshal's Bradley Anstis wrote in the company's release today. "It's pirated software, knock-off watches, counterfeit designer goods, cheap drugs and prescription medicines, pornography and other adult material. The Internet provides convenience and a degree of anonymity to people who want to buy illegal or restricted goods. It is a black market and spam has become a conventional means of advertising to a willing audience of millions of people who are purchasing from spam."

The announcement of the study concludes with these funny lines, from Anstis again: "The other way to look at this situation is from a spammer's perspective. There are approximately 250 million people out there who are interested in these kinds of products and have made purchases from spam in the past. That's equivalent to double the population of Japan mixed in with every other Internet user. As a spammer - how do you reach that market without knowing specifically who these people are and with the bare minimum of expense? Easy, send lots of emails to everyone."

Has The Market Spoken?

If you buy Marshal's numbers, and they have a vested interest in painting a large threat, perhaps the market has spoken. It sounds like people want spam, after all. What other e-commerce channel would 30% of respondents admit having bought something from? Doesn't sound like something that needs to be illegal.

Of course these numbers should be taken with a giant grain of salt. The study was of just over 600 respondents who visited the Marshal website. The question they were asked appears to have been framed in a pretty presumptuous way. "What purchases have you made from spam?"

This author has never bought anything from spam. I swear.

The percentage of people who have clicked on a topical looking ad on a spam blog that showed up in search is probably even higher. The satisfaction with that spam is probably much higher than satisfaction with email spam.

Those of us who want to use online communication channels for serious purposes, and I don't mean serious like S&M fantasies, may be forever forced to wade through a sea of people who are less discerning and the spammers who email us all in order to find them.

There is an infinite variety of things you can do with RSS feeds and a substantial number of those things can be done with Feed.Informer, which was formerly known as Feed Digest and just relaunched today. This super useful service was acquired in a small, unreported deal earlier this year and today comes out of a dormant period when new account creation was limited.

What can you do with Feed.Informer? You can splice feeds together, filter them for keywords and most importantly - display them dynamically on a web page with just a little bit of code. There are other services that do all of these things, but Feed.Informer is so quick and easy to use that a free account is worth checking out and a premium account may be worth paying for.

We Love Feed.Informer

Feed.Informer is a service I've used regularly for years and happily pay for every chance I get. It is the fastest, easiest and most user-centric way to publish items in a feed dynamically on a page. We've used it here on RWW in a number of posts, the best to see how it works is Ten Sites to For Finding Wonderful Things.

Why Use This Tool Instead of Others?

Much of Feed.Informer's functionality can be performed better by Yahoo! Pipes but many people find Pipes intimidating and it gives users no control over the styling of RSS output on a page. It doesn't offer PHP code like Feed.Informer does, so there's no SEO benefit to using the Pipes "badge" for feed display.

SImplePie is a powerful way to parse and display RSS feeds and is probably what you want to use in a production environment, but it requires hosting on your own server and is beyond the technical capabilities of many new publishers.

Feed.Informer is simple, fast and powerful. Unfortunately, that's why a fair number of spam bloggers probably use it. Automated website content by feed? Only recently have reputable publishers discovered good use cases for such technology. Our favorite? Displaying the feed for a user's tag in Del.icio.us on a web page.

There's a lot of things you can do with this handy little tool. It often throws up errors in the admin section of the site and it's not as pretty as it could be - it's not perfect, but day in and day out if comes through for us in powerful ways. Check it out and let us know what you think of the new Feed.Informer.

Apple once again had to accept defeat and has announced that it will extend all subscriptions to its bug-ridden MobileMe service for yet another 60 days. This move comes after the company already gave every subscriber an extra 30 days after the botched launch of the product in July. MobileMe is quickly becoming Apple's most public failure in recent years - when the service first opened, it was basically rendered non-functional for the first couple of days, after that, a good number of users stopped receiving email, calendars disappeared or didn't sync, and the service often simply didn't work.

Even users who are still in the free trial will see their accounts extended. Apple has also posted an FAQ that should answer the most common questions.

MobileMe was supposed to be Apple's answer to Web 2.0 mail clients like Gmail or Yahoo Mail, but instead, it has turned out to be a relatively clunky and slow paid alternative to a lot of free services. While the MobileMe email client has some neat features like QuickReply, it often doesn't stack up against its free competitors.

Besides handling mail, MobileMe also manages contacts and calendars, as well as online storage and photo-management (both of which are pretty much useless for Windows users, by the way). MobileMe users have complained about problems with pretty much every single aspect of the service, so giving everybody a total of three free months of subscription (which is pretty much three times the lifetime of the service so far) is a small consolation for the agony a lot of paying users have had with MobileMe. Thanks to the constant service interruptions, MobileMe even became the target for phishers.

Given that nobody is paying for MobileMe right now anyway, maybe Apple should just have had an open, three-month beta period.

NewsCred garnered quite a bit of attention in its initial private beta launch where ReadWriteWeb was considered by its users to be one of the most credible news sources to read. With less than 20% of readers really believing what their news sources are saying, NewsCred aims to be the solution to this particular problem. With plenty of sources to choose from, we're taking a look at what's new with NewsCred and why it may be the best news aggregator yet.

A Credible Dashboard

NewsCred aims to help users find the most credible content and news sources across the web. In doing so, the service aggregates content from some of the best newspapers such as the L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist.com, CNN, The Washington Post and tons more. They also feature content from various prestigious blogs including ReadWriteWeb, CenterNetworks, BoomTown, Digital Daily, and more. You can select your choice of sources and have your NewsCred dashboard only display news from your selections.

To Credit or Not to Credit

All news is sorted by the source's credibility. To credit a source, simply head to the source's page by clicking on the name of the source, and you'll be presented with an option to credit or discredit the source. You'll also be able to get a graph of the source's credibility trend at the bottom of the page. Overall, it's relatively easy to credit or discredit a source with no limitations or regulations for doing so.

What's New

NewsCred has a ton of great new features. For one, there's a complete dashboard redesign with more content to consume. In fact, the homepage reminds me a lot of Feedly, an RSS dashboard. Other new features include:

• Search


• Topics (automatically generated news pages)


• Related Topics using Semantic technology (co-occurence)


• Breaking News section

Limited Quality

While we like that for once, things can be based off of quality instead of popularity with NewsCred, we're having a tough time overlooking the fact that it's a free for all ratings fest. I can credit or discredit a source or article on a whim and not suffer any consequences for it. There could be some serious brand demoralizing done at NewsCred with its new public launch. While we'd recommend adding some restrictions for crediting and discrediting sources, we honestly like the service. It's a great dashboard for your news and we fully agree that the sources that are available to choose from could be considered credible.

Google Sites, the Google platform for document sharing and collaboration, has been dubbed "SharePoint Light" by many members of the tech community. However, the platform might be getting a new name soon, and one that won't be so nice. Apparently, spammers have adopted Sites as a tool to host spam and malware, and, thanks to the google.com domain name, some spam filters are having trouble blocking the messages.

Here Comes the "Google Spam"

According to MessageLabs, Google Sites spam only accounts for 1% of all spam at the moment, but they expect this technique to become as popular as similar techniques being used to distribute spam using other free Google online services, including Google Docs, Google Pages, and Google Calendar.

The benefit to using Sites for spamming is that it's harder to block the resulting URLs generated by the service. Unlike Google Pages, whose URLs are in the format of accountname.googlepages.com, a Sites URL begins http://sites.google.com/site/. The format of these URLs, which contain "google.com," are more difficult for traditional signature-based anti-spam tools to block. At the tail end of the URL, the spammers' sites will contain site names that are composed of random letters and numbers.

Sites is certainly not the only Google product that has been adopted by spammers. For example, I noticed an increase in Google Groups-related spam messages arriving in my Gmail inbox recently. Google Sites looks to be more of the same. Spammers are certainly clever, so it's up to the makers of anti-spam technology to combat this latest threat of "Google Spam." Clearly, just because something is hosted at google.com, it should not automatically be considered safe or trustworthy.

The bigger question here is how the rise of Google spam is being addressed by Google themselves? Surely, they are concerned about their name becoming associated with sites hosting malware and spam?

Google would not confirm how they were addressing this specific problem or how they address spam in general, saying that they needed to be careful not to provided spammers with any clues as to what they do. However, they did say that they expect spammers to use every means possible to try to send spam and that they have a very robust spam-fighting effort at Google. They also claim that they disable these accounts immediately and will continue to do so.

The conference agenda for DEMOfall 08 has been announced. ReadWriteWeb is one of the media partners for DEMOfall 08, which is on September 7-9 in San Diego. There are 70 companies presenting and they fall into the following broad categories: Moving the Chains ("smart incrementation" of innovation); Television Meets the Web; Web Meets the Television; Words, Pictures and Music; Your Mobile, Your Life; Open Studios ("seamless cooperation"); Protecting What's Yours (security); Getting Embedded with Social Networks; It's Easy Being Green; Managing Green; Activism; Web 2.0 Gets to Work; Defining the Next Web.

Here is the entire agenda. A note that RWW will have a reporter at DEMOfall 08 covering the show.

ReadWriteWeb readers can receive a discount rate of $2,395 ($600 off the standard rate of $2,995 and $400 lower than the July early bird rate of $2795) by clicking here for registration.

One of our favorite Australians, Lachlan Hardy, twittered an interesting question today: What are the three things online that are exciting you most? Lachlan was asked this question as part of a newspaper article in the Sydney Morning Herald. His own answers were interesting, but he also got a great response from commentors on his blog. So we thought we'd ask the same question (well, slightly re-worded) here on ReadWriteWeb.

The three web apps most exciting me currently are: Imeem (I'm enjoying exploring this admittedly trendy music site, especially the playlists), soup.io (an underrated lifestreaming app, better than Tumblr IMHO, with full-text feeds and loads of ajaxy goodness), and... Cuil. No I'm kidding about the last one. The third is Basecamp (the online project management service that keeps our RWW business on track and organized; maybe stretching to call it 'exciting', but as a business app it does the business).

Lachlan said that his favorite 3 things online were Twitter (www.twitter.com), Tumblr (www.tumblr.com) and Fire Eagle (www.fireeagle.yahoo.net).

There are literally thousands of great web apps to choose from, many of which have been profiled here on RWW. Tell us your current 3 favorites in the comments. We'd especially love to discover new things that may be flying under the radar...

Cat photo: Kevin Steele

Yahoo! Buzz, the social news service that launched in February and delivered giant piles of traffic to the lucky few websites that were indexed by the site, is tonight opening up to submissions from any site across the web. We warned that Buzz could eat Digg's lunch and that's never felt as true as it does tonight. The roll out of new open functionality will extend throughout the evening.

All the excitement aside, the most logical question to ask is this: will links that get rewarded by prominent placement on Buzz or even on the Yahoo.com front page be selected democratically by the votes of Buzz users? We don't think there's any reason to believe they will.

The Early Buzz About Buzz

When Yahoo! launched Buzz, guest author Muhammad Saleem wrote one of the only positive reviews of the service here at RWW. He called it brilliant and predicted that Buzz and other similar sites could co-exist peacefully. Admittedly, that was before it opened up to all comers.

A month later Richard MacManus wrote here that Buzz was big and spelled trouble for Digg.

In May RWW hit the front page of Yahoo! via Buzz for the first time and saw substantial traffic and a whole lot of comments, despite making an appearance at an obscure hour. The post that hit Yahoo! was by Sarah Perez, about Wikipedia going to print.

One week later, traffic analysts ComScore reported that Buzz already had more traffic than Digg.

It's all good news for Buzz and the sites that get on it, right?

Questions Arise

Are stories making the jump from Buzz to Yahoo.com based on the number of votes they receive? There's no indication of that and you can't blame Yahoo! for exercising some editorial control in defense of its brand. The story of Buzz may in fact be that user voted news sites are most viable when they operate as a hybrid of voting and editorial. Just what the criteria are remains a mystery, though.

The second question that has to be about the ad sharing agreement that Yahoo! required users to join as a part of being added to Buzz. Yahoo! told selected publishers that they had to be a part of the Yahoo! Publishers Network instead of AdSense. That didn't seem very realistic at the time and presumably the requirement goes out the window now. Or does it? Editorial and advertising weren't separated in the first iteration of Buzz - how separate will they be now?

Buzz is big news, it represents a big shift in the media landscape. Inevitably there will be questions of transparency, etc. that have to be dealt with. We hope they can be dealt with well so that Buzz can be a strong entrant into a new web of collaborative discovery.