TrueCare if you truly care

Do you want to protect your children from cyber bullying and online predators? Are you not sure what the latest slang or abbreviations are? TrueCare.com can help you!
For $9.99 a month your family gets:

-An easy, automatic 24/7 monitoring system
-Activity reports
-The ability to identify true friends from unknown adults
-Resources to online sites that help you with internet safety: http://www.truecare.com/yd/Internet-Safety.htm and their blog: http://blog.truecare.com
-Child ID Kits
-Slangspotter E-newsletter: stay up to date on current slang
-Online guide for popular abbreviations
-Cashback on internet filtering software
-Knowledge if predators live in your neighborhood
-Resources for help with cyber bullying

I tested TrueCare out on my son's facebook account. You can also monitor: Twitter, MySpace, Bebo, and YouTube accounts. If you are a busy parent and your child has multiple accounts, TrueCare can be a timesaver. In addition to preset terms to look out for, you can add your own terms. You can look at photos/videos and flag them. You can also investigate their friends. However, when I looked up myself, I literally got thousands of people with the same name on the program they refer you to, which is pipl.com. On another friend, not enough came up. You can add search terms, but if you don't know who this friend is, I'm not sure how helpful this feature will be and it will probably take extra effort to try to find the right one.

When I set up my son's account, I thought I had set it up successfully but didn't realize until much later, that I wasn't getting reports because I had not. Once I did set it up, it took less than 24 hours to get e-mail reports on friends that had no mutual friends (me, grandpa; we are not friends yet) and an adult friend (grandpa; my year of birth is not listed in my profile). This may or may not be of true concern for your child, but the good thing is that you are alerted, so that you can investigate. I have had a hard time getting an alert to a photo caption in which I purposefully put a term that I wanted to be alerted on; after several tries, I'm still waiting. You can also search for other things like URLs. I also found the site to be slow, compared to other sites that I frequent.

However, if your child has multiple accounts, and you find that you can't monitor his/her plethora of activity, then this site can be helpful. So far, I haven't found it to be completely helpful, but maybe I am doing something wrong in trying to get it to recognize my term?

If you would like to try TrueCare, sign up for 2 free months at: truecare.com/bzzagent
After the free trial period is over, it costs $9.99 a month.

Disclaimer: I received a free 3 month trial since I am a bzzagent.

Trend Micro SafeSync is OK but has some flaws

I wrote a disclaimer below, but I wanted to let you know that I am a BzzAgent. That means, I get to try new products every once in a while, often for free. After I try them, I write a review or I talk to people about the product or both. In this case, I wanted to write a review about a product that I am trying for free, a program that uploads documents and other items to a virtual cloud that you can access from your computer or other mobile device.  It is supposed to keep them safe, in case something happens to your computer or hard drives. They use the same type of security a bank uses and you can send a link to others so that they can view your files as well. Here is my review:

 Trend Micro SafeSync has some great features if you are looking to keep some documents safe and accessible outside of your home. For me, I am looking for a program that could keep all my photos and documents safe in case something happened to my computer or multiple hard drives. It took a few hours for SafeSync to upload 5.1 GB of content from my computer. After that, however, it almost instantaneously updated my online account when I moved an item into another folder.  When I couldn't remember my password, it took at least 5 minutes before I saw the link in my email. But getting through to customer service was very fast, and I got someone who spoke English well, not a foreigner.  There are several issues however. One is that as a Mac user, I have to use Safari instead of Firefox to optimally use SafeSync since there are a few known issues like the inability to do drag and drop with Firefox. I almost always use Firefox and think Safari is not as secure. Second, I could not see my raw photo files at all in thumbnail view or through the online editor, and some  jpg files that I should have been able to see in my thumbnail view also did not show until I saw it in the online viewer.. Overall, the viewer was slow. Third, in the promo video, it states that I should be able to use their online photo editor, but I could not figure out how to do this. The video also states that I could edit and then send it to facebook, but I saw no link to send a photo to FB. Fourth, I have several hundred GB worth of photos and videos and the price to store 100GB is prohibitive (about $90 without a promo code!) compared to that of Flickr pro which costs much less to store and I get unlimited storage. And if I want to store documents, I can store at least 2 GB through Yahoo mail for free. Of course, these 2 options don't sync for you. Overall, I think if you have a lot of non-photo/video documents, this might be a good way to store them safely. But if you are like me and have tons of photos/video to keep archived, this is not the ideal solution. 

I read some other reviews and other possible issues are the slowing down of your computer. For now, I may use this as a backup while I have the year subscription, but I will be continuing to use my Flickr pro account and my hard drives.

Disclaimer: I am a BzzAgent. I received a free subscription for a year for a 10GB account from BzzAgent.com.
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Introduction

I wanted to publish a blog with just reviews, as opposed to my personal blog. I call myself a scrunchy mama--not quite crunchy, but adhering to some practices that would qualify me (i.e. attachment parenting, organic foods, reusable bags, etc.)