(* Source: Mark Hendrickson *)

KidZui is an ambitious project, launching tonight, intended not only to make the internet safe for kids (aged 3-12), but to provide a browsing experience that caters to their cognitive powers and surfaces the best juvenile content as well.

The concern for children’s safety on the net has been around for years and has usually been addressed with software that attempts to blacklist all the worst parts of the web (and pornographic websites in particular). The fundamental problem with this type of software is that no blacklist can be complete given the rate at which the web grows each day, so holes through which children can access the inappropriate content they’re supposedly protected from are bound to appear.

KidZui takes the opposite approach to these traditional solutions. Instead of blacklisting all the “bad” sites, it whitelists only the “good” ones. The application, which is essentially a custom browser built on top of Internet Explorer and Safari technology (depending on the platform), has been in development for three years. During that time, the company has hired around 200 teachers and parents from across the United States to scour the net for appropriate sites and content. So far they’ve whitelisted about 500,000 websites, as well as many videos found on YouTube. Spiders have helped to gather this content, but ultimately all of it was reviewed manually by humans.

As a result, KidZui has effectively cordoned off a safe area where parents can let their children roam free. This safe area will grow for KidZui as a whole. Each time a kid clicks on a link to an unapproved site, it will go into a moderation system and either approved or denied within an hour. The area can also grow or shrink for each KidZui user. Parents can decide to whitelist certain sites, such as Facebook, not ordinarily allowed for KidZui users. Or they can blacklist a site, such as Club Penguin, that their kids spend way too much time on it.

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