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New York City's Department of Health launched its Mindspace program last week, an attempt to reach at-risk teens by creating MySpace pages for kids battling common mental health issues.
Though many teens experience mental health issues, they are often reluctant to acknowledge them and seek help. When asked who they are most likely to talk with when they feel sad, more than 20% of teens NYC Teen said they talk to no one, one-third said they would talk to a friend only (31%), and just one-third said they would talk to an adult (32%). The Mindspace page responds to these issues with interactive features that raise awareness and combat stigma by helping teens identify with peers and prompting them to seek help.

The Health Department today announced a new online campaign to engage teenagers grappling with depression, drugs, and violence, and to encourage them to seek help. NYC Teen Mindspace, posted on MySpace, is the agency's first effort to promote health through Web-based social networking - a medium with great potential because of its popularity with young people

Research from Northwestern University finds that college students' choice of social networking sites -- including Facebook, MySpace and Xanga -- is related to their race, ethnicity and parents' education.

This three-part article includes a discussion of classroom connections to social networking sites and the school's role in intervening when information that affects the classroom is publicly posted on MySpace or Facebook. The authors also provide five key social networking tips:
1. Establish a policy for dealing with incidents in which students break school rules and their inappropriate behavior is showcased publicly on social-networking sites.
2. Outline clear guidelines for administrators that spell out how schools should discipline students based on information garnered from social-networking sites, and let parents and students know about those rules.
3. Educate students about online-safety issues and how to use sites such as Facebook and MySpace responsibly.
4. Have a policy in place for dealing with cyber bullying.
5. If teachers are using social-networking sites for educational purposes, they should establish clear guidelines for how they intend to communicate with students via those sites.

Pictures allegedly were uploaded to her MySpace profile, and then apparently leaked by the type of friends who make it unnecessary to have enemies. They've since made the rounds to all the typical tabloid style blogs out there, and of course all the folks posting them have made the appropriate amount of dismay and analysis on how this is going to ruin her career.

Four suspects pleaded guilty to raping a Seattle-area girl who later identified two of her attackers on her MySpace page.

Burt Lo from CTAP6 attended the CTAP4 School Administrator workshop, MySpace, Your Campus and You(Tube). In this blog, he captures some of the take-aways from the workshop.

A new study finds that 54 percent of teens talk about behaviors such as sex, alcohol use, and violence on the social networking giant MySpace -- presenting potential risks even if all they're doing is talking, researchers said Monday.

A conversation with Chris DeWolfe And Tom Anderson, founders of Myspace.com

The folks at Dateline created this mock MYSPACE page to illustrate how information can become too much information. Roll your mouse over each part of the profile, to see why the information is potentially dangerous. This model could be used to open a great dialogue with students on cybersafety and privacy practices.

Larry Rosen, professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, has long studied "the Net Generation," the first to have grown up with the Internet, not to mention cellphones. In Me, MySpace and I: Parenting the Net Generation (Palgrave Macmillan), he helps parents understand social networks. His advice: Talk to your kids, learn the technology and don't panic. USA TODAY's Janet Kornblum spoke with the author. The complete interview can be found here.

MySpace is public enemy number one in many school districts. But that doesn't mean social networking tools should be banned outright.

"But there is growing consensus among lawyers and legislators that the child pornography laws are too blunt an instrument to deal with an adolescent cyberculture in which all kinds of sexual pictures circulate on sites like MySpace and Facebook. " But there is growing consensus among lawyers and legislators that the child pornography laws are too blunt an instrument to deal with an adolescent cyberculture in which all kinds of sexual pictures circulate on sites like MySpace and Facebook.

A comparison of MySpace and FaceBook Safety Features

The official White House Blog calls it "WhiteHouse 2.0." The administration is unveiling its membership in a trio of the social-networking leaders today: Facebook, MySpace and Twitter

The explosion in social networking may be even greater than imagined. The time that people in the U.S. spend on social network sites is up 83 percent from a year ago, according to a report from market researcher Nielsen Online.

MYHOPE: Hysterical song about MySpace being shown at NECC09. Payback is a wonderful thing! Some key points made here about digital footprints.

Lori Drew, the "cyberbully" mom who has been accused of indirectly causing the suicide of a MySpace teen member may have acted heinously, but not illegally, according to a group of Internet legal advocacy groups who filed a legal brief yesterday in the U.S. District Court in California.

Anne Collier recounts the saga of the Windsor High School teen who was recently singled out at a school assembly meant to warn students about the dangers of providing too much personal profile information on MySpace. She asks us for input on whether we think this is effective cybersafety training - or a form of public humiliation.

Over the last five years, scholars say, the meteoric rise of social media sites, including MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, has sparked a public explosion in self-documentation, making the "me" in multimedia more prominent than ever.