There is just too much on there that they don't need to see, and we found out that some of the supposedly "for kids" videos they were watching had some inappropriate language. I know they will eventually be exposed to that stuff, but we can do our best to at least make sure it isn't in our home. To their credit, Cuddlebug and Bearhug told us that some of the videos they found had bad language in them.
They were pretty bummed about not being able to watch some of their favorites. We tried looking for their favorite videos on some family-friendly sites like GodTube, but they tend to like some fairly obscure videos and we couldn't find them there. I came up with the idea of making them a blog site that links to videos that are ok to watch. We sat down together to go through their favorite videos and added them to their website. Cuddlebug came up with the name, Epic Randomness Videos.
Lots of Pokemon and Kirby stuff there, including some old video game commercials (they are really into old-school video games). I've been adding new ones here and there. The other thing I like about this site is that it makes it where they can watch the videos without being exposed to the comments (even good videos can have some wildly inappropriate-for-kids comments).
The one loophole I noticed was that when a video stopped playing, it brought up "related videos" which left it open for them to watch not-screened videos, but I have since figured out how to turn that off. Hehe ;) (Update: there was much despair over the loss of this feature as it's convenient for them to watch several videos from one window. Since it usually brings up videos by the same user, and generally the users I've posted seem ok, I've agreed to turn it back on for now, but with the warning that I will turn it off again if it becomes an issue).
If you have children with similar interests, you may want to check it out.
If you're interested in setting up something similar that is tailored to your child's interests, here's where I found the template (for Blogger):
http://www.zoomtemplate.com/2010/08/bloggertube-v3.html
Be sure to check out the setup instructions here.
Hope this is helpful!
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Thought I'd also share one of my favorite videos from the site, Bearhug and Cuddlebug found this one and liked it because it has Kirby in it (Bitty loves it too, being the Kirby fan that he is). They have no idea who Weird Al is or that this was actually a spoof of the classic Michael Jackson song but it brought back memories for me... at the risk of "dating" myself, I remember when this song (and "Beat it") first came out!
