• The New York Times, Wednesday, January 3, 2007 10:15 AM

YouTube, MySpace and all the other Web 2.0 sites being bought up by major media corporations may be clamping down on the sex and violence depicted on their sites, but that doesn't mean minors can't easily find it elsewhere.

Web sites like Stickam.com are able to build businesses by going precisely where others fear to tread: unfiltered live broadcasts from Web cameras. Stickam combines MySpace-like elements with features that allow Web camera conversations to be broadcast to large groups of people. Dailymotion, a French startup, is more like a young, uncensored YouTube, though the company's executives maintain they take down copyrighted and racy content.

Web sites and technology providers like these pervade the Web; Stickam and Dailymotion certainly aren't the only ones. Skype, for example, eBay's VoIP provider, offers high-resolution video chat that enables conference room video chat to users of any age, all for free.

Sites like MySpace and YouTube are becoming safer, which is good for parents, teenagers and advertisers. Don't expect sites like Stickam to attract significant usage, ad revenue or funding for allowing minors to broadcast themselves. If it does, the Department of Justice will sort things out. As ever, the moral of the story is the Internet is a dangerous place for curious teenagers, and parents need to be proactive about monitoring their Web use.

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