Raising Children gets more Govt funds

$4.4 million for parenting website
11/05/2009

The Raising Children website will be expanded to include parenting information on pre-teen and teenage years with the help of a $4.4 million Australian Government grant.

Funding will also enhance the site to target people with low literacy and numeracy levels and the Indigenous community, through the addition of new and innovative visual based and interactive information resources.

Celebrating Families Week, the Minister for Families Jenny Macklin said this funding will enable the expanded Raising Children website to be a valuable tool to help parents with the day-to-day raising of their children from birth through to their teens.

The Raising Children website already offers up-to-date, research-based material on more than 800 topics spanning child development, behaviour, health, nutrition and fitness, play and learning and sleep.

The site, which currently caters to parents of newborns to eight years, is a valuable resource for Australian mothers, fathers, grandparents and anyone else who cares for a child.

Parents have found the website to be informative, interesting, well-researched and user-friendly. The site also helps connect people through discussion forums.

A recent survey confirmed the benefits of Raising Children, with 97 per cent of users agreeing the website was useful, clear, comprehensive, credible and easily navigated.

Ninety-one per cent felt the website could make them more confident as a parent and 95 per cent would recommend the website to parents or carers.

The Raising Children website has received more than 9.5 million visits since it was launched in May 2006.

The Raising Children Network is a consortium made up of three early childhood organisations Smart Population Foundation, the Parenting Research Centre and the Centre for Community Child Health at the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne.

Raising Children website: www.raisingchildren.net.au <http://www.raisingchildren.net.au>

I stumbled across Kidglue whilst reading some news on the co-founders of Tsavo Media (who is funded by Amercian Captial)…it’s a fresh resource site offering tips for parents on things like how to settle a baby, folding t-shirts in 2 seconds and what to do with Time-outs for a child having a tantrum…it’s also product orientated, so I can also find out what games are appropriate for my son’s leapster device that are educational…

Check out Kidglue it’s has great content for the mum dealing with many issues with running the household and family.

Minti has released a Case Study on the results of a recent Sponsored Virtual Gift campaign an advertiser ran on Minti.  

Some details include…

1. A tike virtual gift was sent every 20 seconds from a member to another member.
2. 21k+ tike virtual gifts sent from member to member [figure is as of 26th Nov 2008]
3. 350+ tike blog reactions in the Minti community.

Over on the MintiBlog I announced that MothersClick (ParentsClick Network) had recently been acquired (August 2008).

Here is a quick summary…

1. Acquired by Lifetime Entertainment Networks.
2. “Lifetime” is owned 50/50 by Disney and Hearst.
3. Price? Rumoured to be USD$10M
4. Here is the official press release on the acquisition.
5. Here is PaidContent’s blog post on the acqusition.
6. Here is MothersClicks blog post on the acquisition.
7. Interesting that the press release mentions that “MomBlogNetwork.com” (a website run/owned by MothersClick) has 2,500 registered “blogs”. I am assuming that they are referring to “blog posts”, not “blogs” as their blog directory only displays about 400 blogs in total. When you consider that Minti has over 200,000 blog posts from many thousands of blogs this number seems quite small.
8. Interesting side story is the MothersClick/TechCrunch mess (see here, here, and here) way back in 2006.
9. It looks like Lifetime will be leveraging the “robust technology platform that ParentsClick Network has built across our existing properties and new properties to come”.
10. Lifetime also now owns the 200 parenting domains that MothersClick had built up.

Minti launched in Mar 2006 as the world’s first true Web 2.0 “social network for parents”, and close on it’s heels Maya’s Mom launched in Apr 2006. Since that time a raft of other parenting focused sites have joined the race, however Minti and Maya’s Mom continue to lead the pack with their innovation.

What many people may not be aware of, is the fact that Maya’s Mom was acquired by BabyCenter (a Johnson & Johnson company) in Aug 2007 for a reported $7 million. Here is a blog post by Ann the Founder of Maya’s Mom announcing the acquisition. The acquisition was a great decision on BabyCenter’s part, as they could see the value of the platform that they would be able to roll out across their large network of parenting sites worldwide.

BabyCenter and Maya’s Mom got to work integrating the technology platform, and in July 2008 announced that they had just launched a “BabyCenter community“. It is my understanding that Maya’s Mom will continue to run as a stand alone community, and Baby Center will continue to integrate the technology into it’s other parenting websites worldwide.

Congratulations to Maya’s Mom and also Baby Center, we will watch your progress with much interest.

Contributor: Clay Cook

So grab your surfboard and come for the ride….although I can’t help but let him only be a ‘contributor’ for now, otherwise I’ll check back and the theme would have changed to something black – lol

Minti has a new fresh look to it’s homepage. We want to let parents know they now can earn Minti cash for referring friends, writing good articles and contributing to the Minti Community.

Check it out here: Minti.com

You can now send compliments to your Minti friends and other members, telling them for example they are a super dad or mom.

Member homepage’s have had a little face lift and another viral feature is that you have the ability to upload various address books and earn Minti Moolah cash for referring friends who contribute to Minti!!!!!

Take a look log into Minti.com and experience this growing community of parents.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: minti, rachelcook, virtualgifts, currency, socialnetworking, parenting

Take care and keep continuing to enjoy Web 2.0!

Gurgle.com is targeted for mothers-to-be through to toddlerdom.

Yummyfriends or The Yummy Mummy Club is a social network for busy mothers.

Real Live Moms, Microsoft’s niche Live Spaces website for Mothers.