LDS Media Talk

About 1 percent of Web sites indexed by Google and Microsoft’s MSN are sexually explicit, according to a government-commissioned study. The US Department of Justice commissioned the study by Philip B. Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took the US government to court over the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

From a random sample of search engine queries, Stark estimated that 1.7 percent of search results at AOL, MSN, and Yahoo Inc. are sexually explicit and 1.1 percent of Web sites indexed by Google and MSN fall in that category.

About 6% of searches yield at least one explicit Web site, he said, and the most popular queries return a sexually explicit site nearly 40 percent of the time.

Filters typically block 85-90% of the pornographic sites, based on the quality of the filter and the user settings. Less restrictive user settings may only block 40%.

Learn more by reading copyrighted stories by the Associated Press at ABCnews online and MSNBC.

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According to the online security firm IronPort Systems, 62 billion spam messages a day clogged US e-mail systems in October–twice the volume of the previous October.

They report that unwanted e-mail is currently 91% of all e-mail.

The problem isn’t limited to the US, either. The European Commission reports that 50-80% of all e-mails sent in the EU are spam.

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I thought you’d enjoy this video published on YouTube by a user named “ldsteencenter.“ It is powerful. The primary audio track is a female singing “I know that my Redeemer lives.” The video track consists of natural disasters, wars, and calamities, interspersed with pictures of Jesus, Gordon B. Hinckley, Book of Mormon quotes, etc. The secondary audio track contains excerpts from general conference talks. The end shows hundreds of new converts on baptism day, climaxing in more pictures of the Savior.

Robert Millet, BYU Professor of Religious Understanding, encourages us to not be afraid to share the gospel: “As Latter-Day Saints, you already know more about God, and Christ, and the Plan of Salvation than anyone who would attack you. You already know more than your attackers will ever know.”

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12% of Internet users download video, audio, and text at least occasionally according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

As downloadable content becomes more available, the audience and desire for the content increases. The Pew survey finds that 12% of Internet users (roughly 17 million adults), say they have downloaded a podcast so they can listen to it or view it later. This is nearly double the number who reported doing so in their February-April 2006 survey.

However, few Internet users are downloading podcasts with great frequency. Just 1% report downloading a podcast on a typical day. Men are more likely than women to download podcasts (15% vs. 8%). Those with 6+ years of online experience are twice as likely as those with less than 3 years of Internet use to have downloaded a podcast (13% vs. 6%).

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There are now more than 100 million active Web sites on the Internet–double the number we had in May 2004.

In 2006, we saw dynamic growth with 27.4 million new sites — 3.5 million in October alone!

Blogs and small business Web sites drove the explosive growth this year, with huge increases at free blogging services and strong demand for low-priced domain names and shared hosting accounts.

Read more about the explosive growth of Web sites at Netcraft.

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I enjoy listening to the Glenn Beck radio talk show on the way home from work each day (570 on the AM radio in the Salt Lake area). It’s the third most listened to talk show in the country. Glenn doesn’t hesitate to mention he is a Mormon when the subject is relative. Watch an 8:44 min. video of Glenn Beck talking about his religion, family, God, and wife.

There are several Web sites of famous Mormons, such as

http://www.famousmormons.net/

http://www.adherents.com/largecom/fam_lds.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latter-day_Saints

How can we better promote heartfelt testimony of the gospel where people (famous and infamous) explain in their own words how the gospel makes them better people? The above-referenced clip by Glenn Beck is a good example of that. Are there sites that compile positive video testimony about the Church?

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In 2004, 57 million U.S. adults received phishing e-mails. In 2006, that’s up to 109 million. I get several a day among the dozens of spam e-mails I receive.

Why? Because phishing works! Financial losses from phishing attacks rose to more than $2.8 billion in 2006. Even though people are getting wiser to phishing scams, and fewer people say they lost money to phishers, when they did lose, they lost more. From 2004 to 2006, the average loss per victim has grown from $257 to $1,244. In 2005, victims recovered 80% of their losses, but in 2006, they only recovered 54%. To learn more, visit eMarketer.

Even if you receive an e-mail from a company you do business with, DON’T CLICK ON THE LINKS. Go to the Web site yourself and log in to do your transactions. To learn how to avoid becoming a victim of such scams, see www.antiphishing.org.

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On November 9, 2006, we added the following to beta.lds.org:

Redesigned Gospel Library

• We have provided improved navigation and organization of content.
• To help you find different format options (audio, video, PDF full layout, printer-friendly format, etc.), we have included a format bar directly above the content area of each page. For example, on the Table of Contents page for each magazine, you’ll see a “View as .pdf” option that allows you to see the full layout of the magazine. Over the next several weeks, we will be adding more PDF files, including files of individual articles in magazines.

Improved Search

• You can now search for content in the whole Gospel Library or in just parts of the Gospel Library (scriptures, magazines, lesson manuals, or general conference). The search feature also allows you to search “all Church content,” which will search all Church Web sites.
• Once you see the results of your search, you then have the option to filter those results to see only those from the scriptures, magazines, or lesson manuals. You can also narrow your results by a specific book of scripture, by a particular Church magazine, or by a category of lesson manuals.
• You can also use advanced search features that allow you to specify the dates, such as “magazines from 2004 to the present,” or the author (either by name or by position, such as “Presidents of the Church” or “All General Authorities”).
• Over the next several weeks, we will refine the search results so that searches for terms such as “meetinghouse locator,” “humanitarian services,” or “distribution center” will find the specific Web pages on Church sites.
• Search also has a “Did you mean?” feature to suggest misspelled search terms.

As always, we welcome your feedback as we continue to test and improve this beta release.

Note to LDS Webmasters: We will keep the old Gospel Library running for some time. If you have links on your Web sites to content in the Gospel Library, we will provide instructions on how to change those links to the new library. See recent information on the status of the old Gospel Library.

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A recent study by comScore Networks across five European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK) and the USA showed that 29% of European Internet users regularly access the Internet from their mobile phones, while only 19% of US users do the same.

The highest mobile Web penetration was in Germany, Italy and the UK (at 34% each), followed by France and Spain.

It was evenly split between men and women.

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