Okay, this one looks cool and is very densely packed with special effects.

Here’s the trailer for “I Am Number Four,” about a hunted kid with superpowers, a film with an even more super pedigree. Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg are producing the movie for DreamWorks Animation SKG.

It’s based on a teen science-fiction book written by Jobie Hughes and James Frey.

Enjoy:

Last week, Common Sense Media released a poll it conducted that showed parents fretting about the growing power of social networks.

Now, TRUSTe, a Web privacy trustmark firm, has released another, titled “The Kids Are Alright,” which shows a little-nicer picture, especially for Facebook.

In fact, according to the survey–based on responses from 2,000 parents and teens, ages 13 to 17–parents and teens feel in control of social networking sites, including their privacy.

Wrote TRUSTe of the poll:

“It reflects in many ways parents and teens doing the right things on social networks. For example, parents are monitoring and engaging with their teens online; and, teens are using available privacy controls.”

The possible snafus: Teens oversharing, overfriending and, of course, overhiding from parents.

Yes, all that.

Here is the official press release, a short and long version of the study and some tips for teens, as well as a guide for parents:

TRUSTe Social Networking Survey Results Release_Draft 7_101310_KB

SNS_shortdeck

TRUSTe Parent and Teen Social Networking Study _Full_

SNS_TeenGuide

SNS_ParentGuide

Here’s the new trailer for the upcoming movie “The Dilemma,” minus a joke that used the word “gay” in a negative manner.

Universal Pictures replaced the original teaser trailer after there were protests about it. In it, actor Vince Vaughn said: “Ladies and gentlemen, electric cars…are gay.”

With the recent spate of bullyings of gay teens that have ended in tragedy, such a move is probably wise and not too surprising.

More surprising was the video below it, in which gossip blogger Perez Hilton vowed to stop being so mean on his popular Web site.

Since a lot of his repertoire consists of nasty drawings and comments scrawled over photos, along with cruel nicknames for celebrities, it will be interesting to see how this change impacts his dubious success.

Here are the videos:

A national poll released today by Common Sense Media asking how well social networks protect kids online produced an answer that should come as a shock to exactly no one:

Not very well, at least according to parents.

A full 75 percent of them gave social networking sites such as Facebook a negative rating for the task.

About 2,000 parents were polled by the nonprofit media organization, as well as 400 teens, who also gave thumbs down to social networks’ ability to police themselves.

There will be a big roundtable discussion on the topic in Washington, D.C., this morning, which will include Common Sense Media head Jim Steyer, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz and Deputy Secretary of Education Anthony Miller.

Along with the poll results, San Francisco-based Common Sense Media said it will also announce the launch of the “Protect Our Privacy–Protect Our Kids” campaign to help parents protect kids’ reputations and personal information online.

I love the smell of impending privacy legislation in the morning!

Already from Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts: “As the House author of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, I remain intently interested in ensuring that children are not targeted online and their privacy is strictly protected. Twelve years after the bill was signed into law, entire new technologies and industries have emerged that could put children’s safety at risk, making a legislative update necessary. I look forward to introducing such legislation to bring COPPA into the 21st century.”

Thus, here is more for pols to chew on: The bulk of those surveyed are more concerned with online privacy than they were five year ago (another obvious one); parents do not believe Web sites, including search engines such as Google (GOOG), should share the location of kids (count me in on that one too!); and teens think their friends overshare (you think?).

But instead of me telling you, just read it all here in top-line results for adults and teens, as well as in the official press release:

Final CSM adults topline

Final CSM teen topline

Privacy Poll Results and Campaign Launch

Almost from the minute former AOL head Randy Falco handed over a giant bag of cash to Joanna Shields, the awfully clever chief money charmer of once darling social networking site Bebo, it was clear it was not going to end well.

Essentially, AOL (AOL)–then a unit of Time Warner (TWX)–had forked over $850 million to corner the market on teen girls in the United Kingdom.

Of course, all those girls are now using Facebook.

It was, sorry to say, the peak of the social networking lunacy of early Web 2.0, which is now being bookended by another series of wackadoodle fundings for start-ups by venture capitalists insecurely prompted not to miss the next big thing.

Not much changes. As I wrote about the Bebo deal two years ago in a post titled, “Bebo: By the (Not So Big) Numbers”:

What’s AOL getting for its $850 million in cash to purchase social-networking site, Bebo?

A very attractive social-networking service and a very experienced exec who has been running it.

But, perhaps more importantly for those who focus on pesky numbers, not a whole lot of revenue and negligible profits, judging financial information I got a gander at, courtesy of sources at several companies that looked at funding or buying Bebo.

And the rest of the overall outlook for Bebo? A small but growing business, with nice user engagement with strong page views and minutes spent per session, but little traction beyond Britain and Ireland, and too small a presence in the critical U.S. market.

That was the best AOL got from the deal, as it turned out, as the asset declined and Shields was shuffled out of AOL by new CEO Tim Armstrong (ironically, she’s now running a big chunk of international sales for winner-took-all Facebook).

Now comes the final shoe dropping, with AOL admitting in a filing the glaringly obvious–that it was evaluating strategic alternatives with respect to Bebo, which could include a sale or shutdown of Bebo in 2010.

In a message shared with employees today, the company noted:

The strategy we set in May 2009 leverages our core strengths and scale in quality content, premium advertising and consumer applications, positioning us for the next phase of growth of the Internet. As we evaluate our portfolio of brands against our strategy, it is clear that social networking is a space with heavy competition, and where scale defines success. Bebo, unfortunately, is a business that has been declining and, as a result, would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social networking space. AOL is not in a position at this time to further fund and support Bebo in pursuing a turnaround in social networking.

AOL is committed to working quickly to determine if there are any interested parties for Bebo and the company’s current expectation is to complete our strategic evaluation by the end of May 2010.

Quicker translation: Bebo is a dog and it bites.

But the experience is one that will soon be forgotten with the next careless gorging of VC funding.

Not be lost on anyone should be the sudden departure of Jay Adelson as CEO of Digg this past week from the social news site, yet another example of hot going cold in the eyes of Silicon Valley.

At one time Digg and Bebo could do no wrong. Now, no right.

In actuality, neither characterization is correct, but it matters little. In the warped tech perception game, Bebo is apparently dead and it’s time to bury the corpse and move on.

Consider these metrics:

Of the teens Piper Jaffray surveyed,

• 15 percent own iPhones (up from eight percent six months ago)
• 22 percent plan to buy an iPhone in the next six months
• 87 percent own iPods (up from 86 percent six months ago)
• 93 percent of the 40 percent who legally purchase music online use iTunes

Music to Apple’s (AAPL) ears, right? “Apple’s dominance in the CE and online music markets is going seemingly unchecked, capped by market saturation for iPod and iTunes usage,” Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster writes in his analysis.

“Also, interest in the iPhone remains high…We believe the $99 iPhone 3G has been a meaningful part of share gains in the last six months. Previously, teens were indicating that the plan pricing and handset pricing were too high for them (and their parents) to buy iPhones. The lower pricing appears to have been a catalyst for share gains. Also, the popularity of the App Store and the quality of games available for the iPhone have likely led to the gains among the teen demographic in recent months.”

Munster’s conclusion: “Apple is taking its leading position in music and mobile markets.”

Since it was tacked onto the slasher movie, “Sorority Row,” which opened this weekend, many have been posting the brand new trailer for “New Moon.”

The second installment of the “Twilight” vampire series debuts Nov. 20, natch!

And, actually, while the first film left me in a mild stupor–BoomTown is so not the demographic for the film–this one looks pretty good because it seems chock full of the Olympic broodiness of Kristen Stewart (who is also filming a biopic about Joan Jett, which completely redeems her in my book).

Here’s one of the many video trailers, one of which already had 2,732 comments on Google (GOOG) video site YouTube since it was posted just yesterday, most of which are text versions of teen girls screaming:

And here are the first two trailers, released earlier this summer:

To my mind, this is more a parenting issue than a technology one. The easiest method would be to join Facebook yourself and become one of your teens’ ”friends” on each account they have. That might not sit well with your kids, but if you’re willing to be tough, you could make that a condition of their being on Facebook. You could also insist they use the network’s extensive privacy controls to guard their detailed information and activities from strangers.

There is a paid service called YouDiligence that claims it will notify you if certain words appear on a child’s Facebook page. But it requires that you be one of your child’s Facebook friends, so it is mainly a time-saver. Also, because it focuses on words, it doesn’t flag photos or other Facebook activity.

Another paid service, called imView, automatically takes pictures of the screen of the PC your child uses, at intervals you select, and allows you to view these screen shots at your leisure, from any Internet-connected PC. Its maker touts this as a way to monitor Facebook activity. I haven’t tested either of these two services.

I want to transfer my Mini DV taped videos from my video camera to my Mac. But my new MacBook has no Firewire port, which is the only port my camera includes — only USB ports. Am I stuck?

Maybe not. One option would be to see if you can borrow a Mac or Windows PC that does have a Firewire port, convert the videos to digital files on that borrowed machine, and then transfer the resulting files to your new Mac using an external hard disk or flash drive. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to have to do this often.

Another option: A company called Pixela (pixela-1.com) claims to have a Firewire-to-USB cable meant for exactly your situation. It is for Windows only, but might well work if you installed and ran Windows on your Mac. However, a glance at the company’s Web site shows it is out of the version of the cable that works with the North American, as opposed to European, video standard. If you are in North America, you might check with the company to see if and when the correct version will be available. One important caution: I haven’t tested it, so don’t know how well it works.

My computer crashed last fall, and I lost thousands of iTunes songs. I would like to copy all the songs to my new computer from my iPod, which still contains them. However, iTunes allows only purchased songs to be returned. Is there software that would help me?

Yes. There are several utility programs designed to copy the contents of an iPod back to a Windows or Mac computer. The one I usually recommend, because I have found it works well, is called Music Rescue. It costs 10 British pounds, or about $15 at current exchange rates. It can be purchased at kennettnet.co.uk.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online free of charge at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

As BoomTown expected, the popularity of the chaste-yet-lustful vampire movie for screaming teen girls everywhere, “Twilight,” has inspired more online video spoofs than you can shake a braided rope of garlic at.

Rabid fans of Stephenie Meyer’s book series flew into theaters all weekend, adding up to a $70.5 million U.S. box office tally so far.

Thus, we are in for more online videos in praise and in mockery of Edward and Bella than perhaps even Alaska Governor Sarah Palin engendered.

Here’s one of the oh-so-serious “Twilight” trailers, followed by one of the better spoofs–by Evil Iguana Productions–below it:

Of course, a lot of the attention last week was aimed at MySpace, which had only a very peripheral role in the appalling story of a gang of teen harpies from Florida who viciously laid into another and videotaped it.

The unfortunate girl–whom the female wolf pack (to be fair, wolves are a lot more intelligent) was heard accusing incoherently in the video–had apparently posted something on MySpace–owned by News Corp. (NWS), which owns this site–that apparently ignited their rage. Thus, the genius leader of the half-dozen girls planned on posting a video of the beat-down to MySpace and also YouTube (GOOG).

The parents of the beaten girl, who was severely injured in the incident, urged the sites to prevent users from uploading the viral video, even though it was never uploaded by the teens and has been regularly taken off the services when it has been.

(I could not find the video on either service last night, except in snippets as part of news coverage. It is available on Salon here, and can also be embedded, which I decided not to do here.)

Still, the injured girl’s father was quoted in a local newspaper: “As far as I am concerned, MySpace is the anti-Christ for children.”

Actually, the gang of girls get that particular moniker in my estimation. In any case, justice will be meted out, I am sure, and it started with the judge’s order that the defendants not use any social network.

And while it got a lot less attention, don’t miss New York magazine’s riveting story of a Facebook scandal at New York’s tony Horace Mann private school.

In the piece, titled “Testing Horace Mann” by Gabriel Sherman, Facebook is used as a vehicle for disgruntled kids to create obnoxious groups attacking teachers they don’t like in verbally appalling ways and without any apparent recriminations.

Laid out in exquisite detail are how petty school politics, overindulged kids and parents who need their heads examined collided to create the digital equivalent of “Lord of the Flies.”

Here’s the money quote:

These Facebook pages, however, were something different. Kids have always ragged on an unpopular teacher or ridiculed an unfortunate classmate. But sites like Facebook and RateMyTeachers.com are changing the power dynamics of the community in an unpredictable way. It is as if students were standing outside the classroom window, taunting the teacher to her face. Should they be punished? There were, as yet, no rules or codes for how a school should address such issues.”

While it is pretty obvious that it is easy to blame the technology in both these cases, there are bigger societal issues at stake here that nothing MySpace or Facebook can fix with a simple tweak.