Finally I have come across something to write about that truly talks to my site motto “where technology and fatherhood collide.” It is not very often that I can write about a new service or piece of software that can help a family. Computers are now as common as TVs and now kids have computers in their rooms, at schools, at friends houses, at libraries, etc. I’m sure that someone will say, the best protection for your kids on surfing the Internet is direct supervision, and I wholeheartedly agree. However, this is a difficult task to consistently do, so sometimes we need to rely on other methods to reduce the risk. I, personally, wouldn’t want to have to watch over my children’s shoulders as they go though NickJr.com or PBSkids.org for hours upon hours. However, I WOULD want to monitor them if they had unfettered access to ANY site on the web. Thus, there is a need for tools to regulate what can be accessed.
I did a couple of things to resolve this issue in the past. On one of my girl’s computers, I installed ZoneAlarm with some Parental Blocking of certain sites. It really slowed the computer to a crawl (of course the computer was really old as well so I’m not sure what the culprit was). Sites are categorized at ZoneLabs and then each request to visit a site is checked against their lists, I believe. It pretty much did its job, but slowly.
On another daughter’s computer (a Mac), I set up the Parental Controls on Safari. This basically sets up a “white list” (allowed list) of sites. Any other site is blocked. The big problem with this was adding a new site to the white list. You have to type in the url, enter the administrator’s password, and then add that site to the bookmark bar (you can’t really add it to any favorites folders…at least not easily). This too, was not the best solution, in fact it was a real pain in the ass.
Well today I came across a much better solution…an offering called Glubble. In my opinion, Glubble is the perfect melding of Web2.0 technologies out there. It has plenty of AJAX, real-time communication, social networking, and other things that I am sure that I will come up with later. But that is the “tech” side of me talking…the “dad” side is impressed with the service as a whole. But now, where to begin?
Installation
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