It’s raining new websites for kids, and ZooKazoo is one of the newest in the shower. ZooKazoo is both a social network and a casual gaming site. It’s housed inside a safe environment that you enter with a subscription bought by parents.

Nintendo’s Wii is the Barak Obama of the video game world. Nintendo said if you give families a game that’s fun for the whole family they will come. Change will happen. And so we came and enjoyed as the Wii transcended age and gender barriers.

Here’s a column that I wrote a few years ago. In light of the new Pew Internet Life study that shows the differences between boys and girls in terms of use of social media, I thought I’d look back at how we’ve mentored and helped girls while we’ve let boys flounder. I […]

Are cheaply made toys more dangerous than expensive ones? As much as I’d like to say no, the answer is probably yes. After all, we don’t manufacture toys in China because we think they do a better job of creating safe toys. They do a better job of making them inexpensively. Producing cheap […]

This would never happen in New York; the police are otherwise occupied. But in Holland, where there’s obviously less real world policing to do, a Dutch teenager, age 17, was arrested in real life for stealing virtual furniture in a virtual world.

A year ago David Pogue, the NY Times technology columnist, wrote about the new Nintendo Wii. It was a complete sellout before the holidays. Most people were talking about flying nunchuks smacking into their TVs, but a prescient Pogue nailed it. “What surprises me most,” he said, “is how few people are commenting on the […]

The good news is that kids are not just sitting in front of their PC screens in isolation anymore. They’re involved with networks of friends as the Internet has become a social meeting place. This season many Internet sites will require the purchase an offline toy–a stuffed animal or doll—to gain access to […]

As the holidays approach (yes, that would be earlier and earlier each year), those who watch can detect the hot trends in kids’ digital toys. This year I’m betting on four hot areas in the high tech gaming world.

Offline toys with online worlds: Webkinz started it and now every furball and doll in creation has […]

What’s next? Brick walls?
I Googled the words fence-plowing today and there were 63 news mentions (now 64), so far mainly in the greater New York area. Fence- plowing involves humans (well, kids) hurtling themselves into fences until they knock them down.