Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com - Lycos opens safe haven Web site for children

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Thursday, September 30, 1999

Lycos opens safe haven Web site for children
Lycoszone.com is a virtual playground with a protected environment to put parents at ease
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - One of the Internet's most popular Web sites opened a new virtual playground Wednesday, one of a growing number of child-friendly destinations aimed at reassuring parents anxious about their children roaming the Internet's seedier neighborhoods.
   Lycos Inc. of Waltham, Mass., said it created www.lycoszone.com as a protected environment for children online. Except for its advertisements, the site's links lead to other Web pages within the site.
   "You can log in, spend all your online experience as a child in Lycos Zone, and as a parent you can feel pretty good," said Chief Executive Officer Robert J. Davis, who acknowledged that the Internet was "a medium I'm not comfortable having my children do without guidance."
   Davis noted that other industries also offer ostensibly protected realms for children, such as the Nickelodeon cable television station or "Sports Illustrated for Kids," the spinoff of the popular sports magazine.
   "You can predict with a pretty good degree of accuracy what you'll see there," Davis said. "We're trying to do the same thing for kids online." Lycos, with $135.5 million in sales last year, is one of the Web's popular "portal" sites offering collections of news, entertainment, stock quotes and more. It was the fifth-most popular site on the Internet with more than 2.4 million visitors daily, according to figures this month from Media Metrix Inc., an online ratings service.
   Other kid-friendly sites include Yahoo!'s "Yahooligans," The Walt Disney Co.'s "Fun for Families," Netscape's "KidZone" and Headbone Interactive's "Headbone Zone."
   More Web sites with content geared toward children are listed on a site that the online industry organized earlier this year, www.getnetwise.org.
   "This is a solution that's good for certain types of families and educators, and it can help parents understand how to let their kids use the Net in a safer way," said Ari Schwartz, a spokesman for the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology. The group helped organize the "Get Net Wise" site.

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