No ifs, ands, or buts about it. The web is churning out some really interesting playplaces for young children. Places that find ways to keep them safe and keep them creative. It’s a renaissance of the early days of CD ROMs when good content for kids was abundant; the only difference is that the CD is gone and the web has replaced it as the delivery mechanism.

The children’s sites below all have clients that live on your computer, but the bulk of the activity lives on the web. The benefit is a rich experience without bandwidth issues and a gated network that keeps kids in their world, unable to access the web at large. There are no ads on these sites and the experience is personalized for each child.

Stepping up to the plate with giant steps is PBS Kids Play (now in beta testing before its release this spring). Ultimately, PBS Kids Play will be a subscription service for kids ages 3-6 where you’ll find faves like the Berenstain Bears, Mama Mirabelle, Curious George, and others engaging kids on a very personal skills-based level. When it formally launches this spring it will cost $79 annually or $9.95 per month.,

Children personalize their own rooms, where they begin each session. Sessions include entertaining and colorful games that teach everything from art and music to history and math. Even subject matter like rules and fairness are tackled. (You remember the Berenstain Bears’ sense of fairness, don’t you? ) A timer to set limits and a parent’s progress report on what and how your child is doing make it easy for you to keep sure that your kids are having a healthy experience.

The look and feel of the site is a bit disparate since it tries to capture the look and feel of individual characters and properties, but kids will not be bored. Some of the games like Hide Seek, which supposedly takes place on the African Veldt, look a lot more like the deciduous forests of the Northeast to me. And I didn’t relate much to “Dash,” the site’s animated mascot, but that’s me. There’s no chat or social interaction but the familiarity of the characters will make kids feel like they’ve been invited to join the PBS kids programming community.

Kidthing, another new kids’ creative community, is possibly the handsomest I’ve seen to date. The production values, the artwork, the voices, and the music on Kidthing are all a cut above the rest. (I’m reminded of the Dorling Kindersley books that were always so yummy.) In that Sesame Street vein, the site has humor and charm to appeal to parents as much as their kids.

Kids have a choice of reading a book, creating their own book mashups, creating their own books, or playing with a store full of books, games, and workbooks.

Kidthing gives the kids a few sample items in a library to play with, but to do anything substantial you need to buy stuff from the Kidthing store. There, prices scale from 99 cents for a BrainPack activity book to more traditional children’s books for $4. A game like concentration (available in numerous themes) costs about $3.

How will parents feel about this iTunes-like way of paying for individual purchases versus PBS Kids Play’s one monthly subscription price? That remains to be seen. I also found some of the interface a bit age inappropriate–like dragging library elements into a frame or selecting a category. An adult is going to need to be close at hand for this one, but maybe that’s a good thing.

The company says it is releasing a new interface shortly and that the product will not be available as a public beta until March.  I was lucky enough to see an early version.

SecretBuilder.com is also just in beta. It’s probably got the loftiest aspirations of the three sites and it’s also geared to a slightly older (6-12) kid. The idea behind SecretBuilder is to introduce kids to great works of literature and great thinkers by playing games, exploring, and gathering clues and treasures. SecretBuilder’s soul is the right place but it’s a bit of a confusing territory at the moment.

The characters are those wide-eyed animae types and it’s hard to tell which of your encounters are historical figures (Sherlock) and not (William). There’s a lot of complexity in the game and it ends up feeling like a bit of a hodgepodge. It’ll attract more of the pre-Runescape crowd than the masses. Then again, sites like Neopets were messy amalgamations of content and they did just fine.

The good news is that it’s a great time to be a digital kid again.