social web, without the kids

I listened to an interesting question at SuperNova that was put to Clay Shirky around the SPAM issues around Web 2.0.

He answer was based around reactive solutions managed by the crowd. That is YOU don't manage the comments etc but rather the members of that community do this for you. Which works great in the adult world (most of the time).

I DO have issues around this - more and more i am beginning NOT to trust the crowd. No necessarily the people i know, but rather the way that companies tend to promote media created by the crowd.

YouTube for example will show many videos that just should NOT be seen by kids (and some of them by adults!) by default until someone flags this. A recent experience taught me this. So, someone - or likely a number of people - need to flag a video before it is removed ... which is just too late when all you wanted to do was show your kid a "Puff the Magic Dragon" video.

How could this work better? Well, for a start ONLY show videos recommened by specific friends - all others are not seen by default. Links from videos work in a similar manner. Same with comments.

This stuff isn't hard and with OpenSocial i'd expect youtube to be making this higher priority than allowing MORE comments on videos.

It concerns me that the younger generation are being ignored in the social web and i'd like to see a hell of a lot more effort put into it than PICS which the social web seems to completely ignore.