Tis true, under a new policy, the students of St. Hugo of the Hills Catholic School of Bloomington Hills, Michigan may no longer use MySpace at school, home or anywhere else; to stay enrolled they may not have any kind of "personal site" at all:

The policy states that students enrolled in the school can't have a MySpace.com account or any similar type of personal site, according to a news release.

At the beginning of each school year, students and parents will be required to sign an Internet policy.

Those students who have existing MySpace.com accounts must delete them if they wish to continue going to school there. Students who do not delete their accounts cannot attend the school, [principal] Van Velzen said.

Sr. Margaret Van Velzen implemented the rule under the Think First, Stay Safe program intended to protect the students from sexual predators on the internet. Supposedly, "99.9% of the parents support the rule" and some think the restriction should be imposed on students at all schools.

It's good to see that parents in the backyard of the once ruling capital of the automotive industry learn their lessons from the Japanese. Partitioning the kids from modern life and keep their minds focused on the Bible will help them regain their place in today's competitive, global economy.

The big news about the yanking of Hoooka from Tila Tequila's MySpace profile gave the impression that Hoooka was banned from ALL MySpace profiles. Representatives of Hoooka clarified the situation via communication to Kyle Monson of AppScout:

As Nate mentioned in his comment, hoooka and specifically, Tila's hoooka does not depend on MySpace to stay alive. Hoooka is an embedded code widget that can be placed on any website, not just MySpace. Tila's hoooka continues to live on at other social networks as well as on her indie911 page. Also, please note that MySpace only asked Tila to take down her hoooka--they did not ban the code from the entire site. My personal hoooka is still up and functioning. I believe that MySpace is currently examining hoooka on a case by case basis. They have not yet made any attempt to completely ban the code. [bold emphasis mine.]

This qualification is very important. The original article in the NYTimes gave the impression that the freedom of choice of all MySpace users is being curtailed when in fact only Tila Tequila was warned. MySpace's Terms of Service has no credibility if it is not enforced against the most flagrant violations. Tila's use of Hoooka is most flagrant because her's is the most popular profile on the site. Tila needs MySpace a whole lot more than MySpace needs Tila; MySpace could probably afford to also alienate the small group of less popular Hoooka embedding musicians, but diplomatically it has chosen not to.

MySpace management has voiced regrets in the past over allowing YouTube to gain critical mass on the back of their service; this prominent enforcement action is a clear case of not wanting to repeat that mistake again. Snocap is their annointed music store service. Take it or leave it. A Snocap widget is not evident on her profile yet.

The internet is a common medium for sexual crime between strangers. The problem is acute on massively popular social networking platforms like MySpace because profiles and messaging platforms make targeting and communication easy. The easy mingling of adults and minors also opens the door to age-related sexual crime. You could say MySpace is the new AOL of jailbait crime. It seems that every week brings another prosecution of an adult for sex with a minor. This week 21 year old Dustin Watson was charged in Chesapeake, VA for having sex with a 15 year old he met on MySpace.

IMSafer, the AOL, Yahoo or MSN Messenger chat monitoring service that alerts parents to inappropriate conversation on their computers, has now extended their safety technology to MySpace. The first release will alert parents to inappropriate comments left by others on their children's profiles. Later revisions will extend the protection umbrella to site mail, blogs, picture comments and bulletins. Parents can avail themselves of the service by subscribing to IMSafer Plus.

The service works by having the parent download and install a program on the computers at home. Presumably the program monitors traffic between the browser and the MySpace servers, filtering for the categories of inappropriate communication specified by the parent. Flagged material is logged and an alert is emailed to the parent.

Playa contains dozens of little tweaks so I'm gonna lift the whole block from their blog post. What's still absent is any integration with Yahoo Video. As I've complained about before, Yahoo is doing a lousy job of integrating their domain overlapping properties. The synergy in allowing Yahoo Video users to mix their clips with Jumpcut and seed Jumpcut editors with Yahoo Video source is too obvious. The first "integration" will come April when Jumpcut will integrate Yahoo IDs, as did Flickr. WooHoo!

Across the site…

* A completely new header with multi-word search built in
* Bigger, juicier thumbnails for movies, clips and photos
* Significant performance improvements
* The site is wider (960 vs. 760 pixels)

Uploading…

* Fixes to make upload much more reliable
* Significant enhancements to video quality
* You can now add your media to sets on upload

In The Editor…

* Created bigger clippers so it’s easier to trim your video (it’s no longer necessary to zoom in)
* Added a light grey indicator that shows you where you’ve placed titles and effects in the timeline
* Added the ability to edit titles and effects after you insert them into your movie
* Added an actions tab so you can easily take actions on multiple items (including applying styles, setting transitions, setting display duration for photos and sorting by date uploaded & file name)
* Created a Ken Burns effect for better slideshows
* Improved the stability of the Undo function

Playback…

* We made the player a lot smaller. The new dimensions for the embedded player are 408×324
* We fixed a number of issues that caused stuttering on playback
* If you’ve already loved a movie, the heart now says “Loved”
* We created a nicer “full” view. We think it’s a very elegant way to present your movies

Explore…

* A new main Explore section called “The Wall” that includes a Featured Movie, Recently Popular Movies and Active People
* An RSS feed for Recently Popular Movies
* New navigation for Exploring on the left side of the page

Groups…

* A new Groups page that displays Active groups and New Groups
* Views in the left-hand nav that let you see groups with the Most Movies and the Most Members
* Separate views for Events and Contests
* A new layout for the individual Group page
* The ability for moderators to specify a Featured Movie for their group
* New visibility and membership options for moderators
* RSS feeds for each group section

Your Personal Home…

* We greatly improved the recent activity section. It now shows a lot more relevant activity as well as the latest movie from your friends embedded right on the page. If you don’t have any friends yet, you see the most popular movie on the site
* Added a “More activity” page so you can see everything that’s happened in the last month
* Added a tag cloud that contains all of the tags on your media
* Added summary views of your Friends and Fans

Your Public Page (My Page)…

* Cleaned up the layout of the page
* Added a view to display all of your “Works in progress”
* Added a “View as slideshow” function to sets
* Added a date to sets so you can determine their sort order
* Added a link to your tag cloud