LDS Media Talk

In February 2008, it was reported that comScore ranked Women’s Communities as the fastest growing category of sites on the Internet, growing 35% from Dec 06 to Dec 07.  Below is a list of the top Web sites, at that time, in that category:

comScore MediaMetrix Oct. 2007	Page Views	Visits	Minutes per Visit
CAFEMOM.COM	90,000,000	5,212,000	10.9
BABYCENTER.COM (Johnson & Johnson)	77,000,000	10,863,000	6.1
IVILLAGE.COM (NBC Universal)	67,000,000	8,845,000	3.8
OPRAH.COM	59,000,000	6,947,000	7.0
MARTHASTEWART.COM	39,000,000	3,357,000	7.9
PARENTS.COM (Meredith Corp.)	27,000,000	3,434,000	4.9
KABOOSE.COM	26,000,000	3,810,000	3.2
FAMILY.COM (Disney)	7,000,000	1,990,000	4.8
GLAM.COM	4,000,000	863,000	0.6
PARENTSCONNECT.COM (Viacom)	1,000,000	467,000	1.8

After seeing the data above, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could find some common themes and features among these top women’s sites.  I started by going to each site, and seeing how they describe themselves (see the descriptions of each site in Appendix 1 below).  By analyzing these descriptions, I was able to come up with four high-level purposes/features that nearly all of the sites’ content could fit into.

• Connections/Support (peer to peer, peer to expert, blogs, photo and story sharing, etc.)
• Information/Research (on health, parenting, babies, relationships, beauty, etc.)
• Home Making (coupons, budgeting, decorating, gardening, etc.)
• Fun/Entertainment (games, celebrity gossip and style, travel, etc.)

I found it interesting that, except for the last category, it seems like most  of the purposes and features of these top women’s sites fit well within the gospel.  Relief Society meetings and visiting teaching provide connections and support.  The scriptures, Sunday School lessons, manuals, and Church Web sites provide information and tools for research.  And with the Church’s emphasis on home and family, our sisters, wives and mothers are among the best homemakers in the world.

Though these topics might fit neatly into the purposes of the gospel, the Church has yet to venture into producing a Web site like these, most of which have social networking/online community-type features.  Do you think the Church should build a Web site to address these functions: Connections and Support, Information and Research, and Home Making?  Or, since there are already many other Web sites providing these functions, is this something the Church doesn’t need to venture into?  Or should the Church address these issues through a Web site and, in our unique and inspired way, better serve women?  Your thoughts are appreciated.

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Artwork “Balancing Life” by Stephanie Ackerman of Homegrown Hospitality

Appendix 1: Descriptions of the top 10 sites for women:
1. cafemom.com (CafeMom is a place for moms and moms-to-be to connect with one another. We invite you to take a look around CafeMom and join the moms who are already sharing, supporting, and having fun with one another at CafeMom.)
2. babycenter.com (Find information from BabyCenter on pregnancy, children’s health, parenting and more, including expert advice and weekly newsletters that detail your child’s development.)
3. ivillage.com (the daily destination for women, with horoscopes, health and pregnancy information, message boards and blogs, celebrity gossip, beauty and more.)
4. oprah.com (The place for everything in Oprah’s world. Get health, beauty, recipes, money, decorating and relationship advice to live your best life on Oprah.com. Plus, the home to The Oprah Winfrey Show, O Magazine, Oprah and Friends Radio, Angel Network, Harpo Films and Oprah’s Book Club.)
5. marthastewart.com (Food and dessert recipes, entertaining and home decorating ideas. Find ideas for cake decorating, baking, and kids crafts. Your online source for ideas from gardening to weddings.)
6. parents.com (Parents – Pregnancy, Babies, Baby Names, Pregnancy Calendar, Ovulation, Birth and More. Expert advice about pregnancy, your life, and family time from the editors of Parents magazine.)
7. kaboose.com (Kaboose is the premier family and parenting destination with kids’ crafts, holiday fun and activities, healthy food recipes, free online games, expert health and parenting information, community message boards, parenting blogs, photos, videos, shopping, interactive quizzes and tools, and much more.)
8. family.com (Family.com provides answers for every family’s needs. Find resources on parenting and raising healthy children, activities, entertainment, recipes, family travel and attractions, budgeting, shopping, coupons, and answers from the experts, other moms.)
9. glam.com (Glam covers fashion, celebrity style tips for women. Celebrity photos fashion designer interviews and beauty advice.)
10. parentsconnect.com (Get expert parenting advice, tips, & recipes for all stages of raising your child, plus connect with other parents)

From the title of this post, it might sound like it I’m talking about a horror movie or a sci-fi thriller, but what I’m talking about is actually a very real threat.  I recently read an article called The Zombie On Your Desk by Daniel Suarez where he discusses the threat of botnets. He describes a botnet as “an army of compromised personal computers which have been stealthily pressed into service by high-tech criminal gangs.” Wikipedia says a botnet is slang term “generally used to refer to a collection of compromised computers (called Zombie computers) running software, usually installed via worms, Trojan horses, or backdoors.”  Botnets can be used to launch denial-of-service attacks, to create email relays for spam, and to steal personal information such as login IDs, banking information, and credit card numbers.  Suarez says “an unprotected computer linked to the Internet can be infected within minutes and folded into a botnet army intent on causing harm to other systems.”

In a January 2007 article, Tim Weber of the BBC said that 100 to 150 million personal computers (about 25% of computers on the Internet) were part of a botnet being used by cyber criminals.  The Register, a British technology news site, reports that Dutch police arrested a trio of young men in 2005 in one of the largest botnets ever discovered where they were using 1.5 million computers allegedly to extort a US company and distribute spyware. In March of 2008, in an article called Botnet scams are exploding, the USA Today reported that “botnet-based Internet attacks against commercial and government networks have increased over the past two years from 333,000 to 7.2 million daily — an increase of 2,162% despite a combined major effort by government and the private sector to eradicate them.”

How to Keep Your Computer Safe?

Here are some suggestions for keeping your personal computer safe from botnets:

• Install and use anti-virus and anti-spyware programs. Several anti-virus companies have announced products to stop botnets.
• Try not to leave unused computers running, especially when they are connected to the Internet.
• Make sure to apply software security patches for your individual programs and your operating system (i.e. Window’s Automatic Updates), as Suarez says ”out of a sense of civic duty, if nothing else.”
• Consider setting up a non-administrator account on your computer for everyday use and especially while surfing the Internet. A non-administrator login with reduced privileges can prevent a wide range of viruses from installing themselves.
• Never buy or use pirated software.  Experts estimate that 50% of all pirated Windows programs come with trojan viruses pre-installed on them.

Disclaimer: I am not a computer security expert, so those of you readers who are experts in this area, please correct anything that I might have said wrong.

I was recently looking at some research that discussed how men and women use the Internet. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project report, How Women and Men Use the Internet, men and women use the Internet equally to do many activities, but there are also several activities with gender differences worth noting. Women lead men in use of email, looking for health information, getting support for personal problems, and getting religious information. Men lead women in usage of the Internet for product research, checking news and sports, and downloading software and music. (see more detail in the chart below)

Online activities: Where men’s and women’s use of the internet differs
Activities where Women lead	Activities where Men lead	Activities done Equally
Send email	Research product/service	Use a search engine
Get maps or directions	Check news, sports, weather	Get info on hobbies
Look for health and medical info	Use do-it-yourself website	Get travel info and make reservations
Get support for a medical issue or personal problem	Get financial info	Surf the web for fun
Get religious/spiritual info	Do job-related research	Buy a product
	Download a computer program	Get political campaign news
	Rate a product, service, person	Research for school/training
	Download music files	Watch video/listen audio
	Do online auction	Look up phone/addresses
		Get Info on a job
		Take a virtual tour
		Get info on a college
		Instant message

 Here are some other interesting tidbits from the Pew report:

• “Men like the Internet for the experiences it offers, while women like it for the human connections.”
• “Men value the Internet for the breadth of experience it offers; women value it for enriching their relationships.”
• “Parents are more likely to be online than nonparents… There is a dramatic 80% online rate for both mothers and fathers, compared with about a 60% rate for others.”
• “Women emailed more than men about getting together, to discuss worries, to pass along personal news and information about jobs or other activities.”
• “More women than men said email expands their circle of colleagues at work; makes them more available to co-workers; helps them stay current with events at work; saves them time; and liberates them from being tied to the office.”
• In times of emergency, more men than women said the Internet helped them learn what was going on, while more women than men said it helped them connect with people they needed to reach.
• Significantly more women than men feel overloaded by the growing volumes of information online.
• “Men are more enthusiastic than women about using the Internet as kind an entertainment center.”
• “More men than women try the new technologies… Men push the tech edge more than women.”
• “Teen girls are breaking the online mold for women… trying out the newest and more challenging online technologies as much as boys are.”

I was doing this research in an effort to find answers to a couple of questions: 1) How can the Internet be utilized to help parents teach the gospel to their children? and 2) How can we use the Internet to help members in remote areas (who do not have access to Church buildings) learn the gospel and serve one another?

The research cited above didn’t completely answer our questions, but it did give us some further insights. For example, the data shows that women use the Internet more than men to find gospel resources, get support for personal challenges, facilitate communication and strengthen relationships.  With the growing number of single mothers in the world and in the Church, perhaps the research indicates that the Internet could be a medium to give these sisters greater support in their efforts to raise their children in righteousness.  For members who live far from a Church building, perhaps the communication and relationship findings indicate a need for the Church to provide a robust set of two-way communication tools.  The Internet could be a way for remote members to serve and strengthen one another with virtual home teaching, online webinar-like Sunday School classes, and so forth.

What do you think?  How could the Church better utilize the Internet to help parents teach the gospel to their children?  And how could the Church better utilize the Internet to help members who live far from Church buildings learn the gospel and serve one another?

Being a parent means that using the Internet is becoming increasingly helpful. According to three separate studies, over 85% of parents are now online. (Sources: Pew Internet & American Life Project survey in late 2006, US Department of Commerce study in October 2007, and Experian Consumer Research consumer survey in spring 2007.)

Percent who went online at home or at some other location:

• 94% of women who expect to have their first or second child in the next year
• 85% of parents with at least one child in the household

Compare that with

• 73% in family households without children
• 59% among non-family households

Mothers are part of an adult female Internet user population that is predicted to grow from 80.9 million in 2008 to 91.3 million in 2012. Adult females already outnumber adult males in both the general population and the Internet user population.

Read more about what moms do online at eMarketer.com