Family and Child Online Safety Blog - SafetyClicks

It's hard to believe that the past 10 years have flown by so quickly.

When looking at the Internet's road from 2000 to 2010, it is amazing how much has changed. In 2000...

• -- Google existed (it started in 1996), but was hardly a verb in the American lexicon.
• -- If you wanted to share your home videos, YouTube wasn't an option until 2005.
• -- Social Networking was happening via profiles, online chat rooms and message boards, but "Social Networking" didn't happen until the middle of the decade. Now people have multiple social networking sites.
• -- In 2000, media was defined as the newspapers, broadcast news and other forms of "news" we always knew. During this decade there was a new media created, Blogs. There are several blogs that are considered equals to the traditional media. There is even a woman named 26th most influential woman in media, who got there by blogging. That's it. Blogging. According to Wikipedia, as of 2007 there were 112,000,000 blogs.
• -- Speaking of Wikipedia - it didn't exist until 2001. It is a free encyclopedia that is created by anyone who wants to contribute to it. Because anyone can contribute or edit any article, it is hard to use it as a soul source of information - but it is generally a good place to start. In my circle of friends it is considered enough of a source to settle an argument.

With the good comes the bad. Before 2000, there was never a report of cyberbullying nor sexting. These are relatively new terms that brought online worlds crashing into our "offline" lives. We, as parents, have learned that our children don't see the distinct difference between online and offline like we do. This has changed the focus of parents slightly. Luckily the basics of parenting are still true.

Everything Internet related changed so quickly in this decade that I wonder what the world will be like in another 10 years. Do you have any predictions?