Just like playground crazes of yesterday and favourite toys that nobody can get hold of at Christmas, we are now forever likely to be stuck with knowing about the latest flavour-of-the-month social website.
The latest of these is Bebo.com, which The Guardian reported the other day, as muscling in on MySpace.
No, I hadn’t heard of it either. But then it’s, you know, for kids.
Without going to the bother of signing up, I had a bit of a look around. What immediately strikes you is the sheer inappropriateness of many of the ads:
Free Texas Hold’em, Poker Room Rakeback, Debt Consolidation, Hepatitis C, Massage Training, Montreal Bachelor Party, Live Phone Psychics.
These ads seem to be served by such companies as Overture and Google, and maybe they’re using some cookies that are already sitting on my machine. But then again, a child may be logging onto the site in the home. Do these ad companies not have rules about serving appropriate copy? I wasn’t in the cottages part of the site. I was strictly within the schools part.
I don’t want to sit here contributing to scare stories about kids using the internet, but I do think that sites that are aimed at children should take some responsibility to accurately target their advertising and reject inappropriate content.