Safer Internet Day is organized each year in February to promote safer and more responsible use of the Internet, especially amongst children and young people. This year the event is organized for the ninth year, and is held in more than 70 countries worldwide.

This year the theme of the day is “Connect generations and discover the digital world together… safely!” The theme encourages people of all ages to work together to stay safe online.

Clearly, this is a topic very close to us at WOT. Here's some practical tips what you can do to guide kids around you to use the web safely (source):

• Talk about the internet and dedicate time to explore it together with the child. Ask the child to show them what he or she likes to do online, and try not to be shocked or overreact if they do not share the same interests.
• Stimulate the child's creativity. Point them in the direction of the best online content to explore for their development (or just for fun). The child can learn and discover new sites, play games, write blogs, create websites. Stretch his or her imagination.
• Set up rules or boundaries together. When\Where\Why and for how long can the child use their mobile phone or computer? If you listen to the child and establish fair rules, then he or she is more likely to stick to them.
• Protect personal data and help the child understand that information or photos they put online can remain visible to everybody forever. Help them set up the highest level of privacy settings on social networks.
• Think about using parental control tools to automatically filter certain topics (e.g. violence, porn) and limit the time the child will be able to navigate the web.
  (You can use WOT for this purpose: Use the Child Safety settings and the add-on will warn of sites that are rated poor in child safety.)
• Avoid having a computer in the child's bedroom. Put it in the living room instead. It will make it easier to follow the child's web-surfing habits on a daily basis.

What other tips do you have to help kids surf safe?

Read more about the Safer Internet Day and see the video below.

To make sure our users all around the world see the WOT traffic lights where they need them, we’ve recently added reputation icons to several search engines in different parts of the world.

The search engines are:

• UOL Busca in Brazil
• Goo in Japan
• Onet in Poland
• Daum in Korea
• Libero in Italy
• Pesquisa in Portugal

Safe surfing!

Here's an example:

Finland's largest online social networking site Suomi24 (“Finland24”), visited by 1,3 million Finns weekly, starts protecting its users with Web of Trust. Users of Suomi24 will see WOT’s intuitive traffic light icons after links on user discussions, showing which sites are trustworthy according to user ratings.

“Protecting the safety of our users with the best tools available is the number one priority to us. With WOT’s traffic lights guiding their clicking decisions, our users can also stay safe from online threats that automated technology solutions miss, such as phishing, scams, and unreliable content. We’re excited about our cooperation with WOT – we share similar goals and approaches to improving the Internet”, says director Jarno Alastalo from Suomi24.

“WOT’s traffic lights show at one sight which sites are trusted by our users and help Suomi24 users make informed decisions on what sites to use. WOT and Suomi24 both help web users to share knowledge and exchange information for the basis of their own opinions,” says Vesa Perälä, CEO of WOT.

About Suomi24

Suomi24 is the meeting place for all Finns. It is an online community where people debate and network, meet and fall in love, buy and sell, and keep in touch. With 3,2 million visitors monthly and 2,1 million registered users, Suomi24 is Finland's largest social networking site.

We welcome all Suomi24 users to join WOT’s community-powered protection!

Visit Suomi24 and see the WOT donuts here (in Finnish only).

Get your champagne or popcorn (or both, if you wish) ready, and find yourself a comfortable position in front of your screen. Open the front page of mywot.com, and wait: the counter’s soon about to hit 30 million downloads!

Be as cool as the snowman – get a WOT hat!

We at the WOT HQ are extremely excited about reaching this milestone. To make the moment a bit more special, we decided to give out WOT hats to our users who make the growth possible by sharing our story and recommending WOT.

If you want to be as cool as the snowman, send email to snowman@mywot.com, and include your postal address*. We'll raffle 20 hats** among participants on Thursday the 12th, 10 a.m. UCT+2.

Thanks for recommending WOT and helping the community to grow!

*We'll only use your information to send the hats to the winners, and obviously won't share the information with anyone.

**Colors vary.

It feels like just yesterday I was writing the yearly review for 2010, but believe it or not, another year has passed again. It’s time to recall what 2011 brought to WOT.

Key numbers & Service development

We started the year with 16 million downloads. 20 million downloads was reached in May, and now, right this moment, the exact number is 29,520,920 (which keeps growing fast, so check the counter on our front page for the exact number). Firefox still remains the most popular add-on among WOT users, but Google Chrome’s catching up fast and helped make the 3rd of November a day that will be remembered for the daily download record of all times - 80,000 downloads in just one day! (NB: We broke the record several days in a row and therefore the date and the number is different on the linked blog post.) We will break that soon again so let’s not get too exited… ;)

To serve our users the best possible way it’s important to make sure they see the WOT donuts where they need them. 2011 brought relief to those who like to network safely online: WOT reputation icons are now also visible on social networking sites Facebook, its Russian equivalent Vkontakte, on Twitter, and on several other popular sites. They are also shown for shortened URLs. The add-on’s now available in 15 languages, the newest being Korean – Thanks to our lovely intern Kaye who was with us for the first half of the year.

Business & Legal matters

Businesswise, 2011 was fruitful. In May, Facebook started using WOT to warn its users of potentially untrustworthy links. It was a great honor to us to be one of Facebook’s first security partners. In August, Russia’s leading free email service Mail.ru also started using WOT’s reputation database to protect its users. These reference cases give strong evidence that we’re going to the right direction.

Despite the promising numbers and achievements, the year wasn’t all sunshine and butterflies. In February, WOT was sued in Florida by ten Internet companies that demanded WOT to remove ratings and comments for their sites. As we expected, the claims were baseless and the judge dismissed the case with prejudice. The freedom of speech won.

What will 2012 bring?

Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

This is a good starting point for 2012, and we look forward to new challenges and opportunities it will bring. Big things are coming up, and we'll let you know more when the time comes. Thank you all for the great year 2011, and we hope you will stay with us for many years to come! Happy New Year 2012!