Amazon Wish List New Feature Great for Parents...

I was told by a creditable source that Amazon is enhancing their Amazon wish list feature to allow you to “remember” a hidden wish list. As a mom of two wonderful children with two very different needs and wants, this new feature will significantly reduce my time, frustration and repetition.  Every holiday or special occasion (e.g., birth present, baby shower, birthday, Christmas, just because, etc.), I will not need to send an updated email with the kids’ “private” Shared Wish List URL to my family and friends of their (our) latest gift requests.  I will simply be able to share the list and my family and friends who will be able to “remember” it. My very first blog post “Gift Registries, Are They Worth The Drama?” I discuss the benefits of having a wish list for my child. When my son turned one, I made C2 Amazon Wish list public for his 1st birthday because I had so many people ask me what C2 wanted and I found myself copying/pasting the links into an emails and repeating that process several times.   So to be more effective, save time and reduce frustration, we made the decision to go Public (anyone can search for and see this list. You can also share using a link.). I did have hesitation not only because I did not want people to think we were greedy, rude or ungrateful.  But, the main reason was I did not want some predator checking out my son’s wish list and deriving Intel about our family through the wish list.  Being “public”, left us vulnerable.  The day after his birthday, I did change the privacy setting back to “Shared (link only).  Only people with the link can see this list. It will not appear...

Mom, you told everyone! Kids Privacy Online...

Being that Educause, a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology, coined January Data Privacy; it got me thinking about kids’ privacy online.  With so many people blogging about their day-to-day lives, especially new parents wanting to document their child’s milestones online and share them with family; I wonder how we go about ensuring their privacy online. As of July 2011 according to Mashable, the two largest blogging sites Tumblr and WordPress.com, together hosted more than 20,958,182 blogs (Tumblr had 20,873,182 blogs and WordPress.com’s had approximately 85,000 blogs). So to me, the question arose do you have “rules” about what you will and will not post in blogs, forums and other online spaces such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Babycenter.com, etc.? Someone once told me that anyone could find out anything about me because my life was so public on the web.  I said, “Yes, you can, but there are a lot of things you will hopefully never find out about me because my husband and I have  house “rules” for social media (more guidelines because use of mobile technology and social media change daily) about how, what, where and when we choose to share our personal information. As my hubby and I have become more actively engaged in social networks and in combination with the our son’s birth, we decided it was time to have family “rules” (guidelines) for social media.  Our rules are constantly  being revised based on new security and privacy issues that arise daily, especially with regards to our son’s privacy online. According to comScore.com, social networking sites now reach 82 percent of the world’s online population, representing 1.2 billion users around the world.  In my opinion, that is a...