Andrew LaVallee

“I wanted not a single tooth mark on the dog,” says Ms. Turbeville, 54. Her solution: a paste of cayenne pepper and Cholula Hot Sauce, which she painted on its tail. The cats still sniff the Aibo’s backside. “They just can’t help it. But they never, ever bite him anymore.”

Many owners have found robotic pets attacked by their “bio-pets” when they aren’t home, she says. People on some online forums suggest getting rid of the flesh-and-blood pets with territorial issues. “Obviously, they’re feeling threatened,” Ms. Turbeville says. “They retaliate. They retaliate hard.”

On Page One: When Dogs and Robots Collide, Somebody Needs a Talking To (Thanks, Gizmodo, BoingBoing, Jezebel and Wonkette!)

(This story also ran in the Arizona Republic, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Charleston [W.V.] Gazette, Houston Chronicle, Seattle Times, St. Paul [Minn.] Pioneer Press and the Virginian-Pilot/Ledger-Star.)

When a group of college students launched the document-sharing Web site Scribd.com, they envisioned it as a place where they and others could publish term papers online.

Scribd, which allows anyone to upload documents much like YouTube lets users post videos online, has grown quickly since its September 2006 debut. Users have added more than 350,000 documents in various languages, ranging from instructions for solving a Rubik’s Cube to the sheet music from Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Ave Maria.” Groups dedicated to sharing everything from Federal Communications Commission reports to Japanese comic books have sprung up.

But rivaling Scribd’s growing collection of schoolwork, public documents and other miscellanea is a significant amount of adult content, which the start-up has taken pains to downplay while it decides whether the explicit material will stay or go. As other Internet destinations that rely on user-generated content have learned — from photo-sharing sites like Flickr to video sites like YouTube and Veoh — keeping the site “clean” while not alienating users is a central challenge.

Read Document-Sharing Web Site Finds Racy Content Piling Up

Episode No. 4 of “The Midwest Teen Sex Show,” a new video podcast, opens with a shot of a young woman holding a crying baby. Nearby, two young boys are noisily scuffling and trading noogies. Looking into the camera, the obviously stressed-out mother of three says nothing, but her expression says: How did I get into this mess?

Seconds later, the episode’s title, “Birth Control,” flashes on the screen.

That sort of wry, pointed presentation has helped the show lure thousands of viewers since its debut this past summer. Some may have been attracted by the provocative title, but this isn’t pornography. Instead, it aims to teach teenagers about sex using risqué sketches, explicit language and anecdotes that draw on the teenage experiences of its two 28-year-old creators — host Nikol Hasler, the aforementioned woman, and Guy Clark, an aspiring filmmaker.

The two felt that existing sexual-education efforts were far too prim — and boring — to be useful to teens. Their podcast focuses less on birds-and-bees basics and more on real-life scenarios teens are likely to face.

In “The Older Boyfriend,” which warns teenage girls against taking up with a guy in his 20s or 30s, Ms. Hasler says, “You may think you’re pretty cool for having an older boyfriend, but what you have to remember is he’s not cool for dating you. He’s a loser. And you can find plenty of losers to date at school.”

More than 50,000 people subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. The “Midwest Teen Sex Show” is listed under iTunes’ “Health” category, where it regularly is in the top 10. Yesterday, it was No. 7, compared with Discovery Health Channel at No. 20.

Along with growth has come controversy, particularly among sex-education teachers and therapists. While some praise it for tapping a hard-to-reach audience, others worry it’s too racy for younger teens, and still others say the podcast focuses too much on humor and not enough on the facts kids need.

Read Sex-Ed Podcast Is Frank, Funny and Controversial

Read The Juggle: More Talk About Sex

Young Cineastes Find Lego a Congenial Medium for the Age of YouTube

In the three-minute film “Cognizance,” a hit man on his way to his next target wordlessly reflects on his life. He walks past shoppers browsing in stores, children on a merry-go-round, a young couple embracing. Finally, he spots his intended victim across a busy street, and, as the soundtrack music by Coldplay swells, he reconsiders and drops his gun in an alley.

As the killer turns and begins to walk home, he finds himself facing the barrel of another man’s gun. A subtle smile crosses his placid, yellow face as the screen fades to black.

One reviewer said he was “overwhelmed with emotion” by the film. Another called it “a gleaming gem,” adding that it was “required viewing for anyone interested in our little plastic world.”

“Cognizance” is one of hundreds of movies known as “brickfilms” that are getting attention on YouTube and other video-sharing sites. Amateur filmmakers use Lego pieces to create characters and scenes, sometimes spending months painstakingly arranging and rearranging the blocks before the camera. Re-creations of famous moments in “Star Wars” and “Titanic,” faithfully rendered in the primary colors of Lego pieces and stitched together from thousands of stop-motion frames, have drawn hundreds of thousands of viewings. Many of the productions are original films with elaborate plotlines, soundtracks and voice-overs.

The growing genre is driven by a lively online community of would-be Spielbergs who swap tips on message boards about tackling the unique challenges of the medium.

Read In This Film Industry It Really Helps To Be a Blockhead

As recent graduates, several of Hung Truong’s classmates will be headed for typical next steps in their technology careers: working as programmers or pursuing master’s degrees in computer science.

But the 23-year-old, who received his undergraduate degree from the University of New Mexico, instead plans to study the growth of social-networking sites like Facebook and why unpaid volunteers spend time fixing incorrect Wikipedia entries. He enrolls this fall in a new graduate program in social computing at the University of Michigan.

Michigan’s program clinched his decision to attend that school. Social computing “has more of a focus on real-life applications, whereas [computer science] is very broad and more ambiguous,” he said. “I do think there’s a growing interest from students, myself included, and the universities seem to be responding to that.”

After years of worrying about how much time freshmen spend on Facebook, schools are incorporating the study of social networking, online communities and user-contributed content into new curricula on social computing. The moves, like other academic expansions into fields like videogame design, are part of an effort to keep technology studies relevant to students’ lives - and to tap subjects with entrepreneurial momentum. Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are among the tech companies that have invested in schools’ social computing programs.

The programs tend to draw as much from the sociology, psychology and communications departments as they do from more traditional computer science classes.

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Hundreds Enter, but Some Complain Winners Are Often Pros Seeking Exposure, Not Loyal Listeners

Time was, interacting with a favorite band didn’t go much beyond joining a fan club and singing along, lighter or cellphone outstretched, at a concert. Now, artists are asking listeners to shoot their next music video.

Several popular acts, including established artists like Björk and the Red Hot Chili Peppers as well as indie bands like the Decemberists, are holding video-making contests to coincide with the release of their latest albums. Even Ozzy Osbourne will invite fans to create the video for his single “I Don’t Wanna Stop” later this month. Prizes range from cash and computers to having your creation distributed as the band’s “official” video.

Record labels hail the competitions as a way to tap into the growing interest in user-generated content, and connect with their most passionate fans. While music videos are no longer a central part of the programming on MTV and VH1, they’ve enjoyed a resurgence in popularity thanks to sites like YouTube and MySpace. But the contests are alienating some listeners, who gripe that winners tend to be highly skilled video producers looking to gain attention, and aren’t always die-hard fans.

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The Internet has been a boon to deaf computer users, giving them easy access to a wide variety of information and breaking down communication barriers. But many of those users feel left behind by one of the Internet’s fastest-growing segments: online video.

Though television networks and movie studios are rapidly expanding into Internet distribution, few online videos offer the closed captioning that companies are required by law to offer to TV viewers. The major networks provide full-length episodes of some of their most popular shows on the Web, including hits like “Lost” and “Survivor,” but none of them include captions. Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes store sells downloads of more than 200 TV shows, but doesn’t offer versions with captions, and the company’s popular iPod player doesn’t support them.

The absence of online captions has emerged as a hot topic in the deaf community. The media providers say they are held back by technological hurdles, and point out that online distribution of TV content is still in its infancy. But advocates for the deaf and hard of hearing say the lack of captions is a slight, since most programs have already been transcribed to comply with Federal Communications Commission rules. They are pushing to update government regulations to cover the Internet.

“It’s like history repeating itself from TV to Internet,” said Jim House, a spokesman for Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Inc., a Silver Spring, Md., deaf advocacy group. Groups lobbied networks to caption shows starting in the 1980s, he said. Regulations put in place in the 1990s by the FCC and Congress required TV manufacturers to make sets compatible with closed-captioning signals, and set a timetable for networks to include captions with their broadcasts. While captions are now common on U.S. broadcasts, it wasn’t until January of this year that they became mandatory for all English-language programs produced since 1998.

“I’m hoping we do not have to wait another 25 years” to bring captioning to Internet video, Mr. House said.

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A forthcoming exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art will feature work selected by unlikely curators: visitors to the YouTube video-sharing site.

MoMA solicited videos to be included in a retrospective of the Residents, an avant-garde multimedia group, that will open next week. The museum has posted the clips of 11 finalists on YouTube and invited the public to weigh in. The votes and comments those works receive on the site will help determine which are screened at the museum.

It is among the latest moves by museums to capitalize on the popularity of online communities and remain relevant to the new generation of art fans. London’s Saatchi Gallery is sponsoring what it calls “the first reader-curated contemporary art show” later this month, in which online voters picked the participants. In New York, the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum has this year expanded the prestigious awards it bestows on artists, adding a “people’s design award” based on votes from visitors to the museum’s Web site.

Meanwhile, the New York’s Pace/MacGill Gallery staged a summer show based on the photo-sharing site Flickr. Pace/MacGill’s project, called “Self-Portraitr,” included nearly 130,000 user-submitted photos, and drew a younger-than-usual audience — one of the goals of the exhibit, a gallery spokeswoman said.

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Video-sharing Web site Veoh.com has been around less than a year and is dwarfed by rival YouTube.com Inc. But Veoh has drawn outsized attention from bloggers and other Internet users for its willingness to host racy videos that other sites prohibit.

But that changed late last week, when closely held Veoh Networks Inc. quietly removed the “adult” category from its site and deleted thousands of risque videos. The San Diego company also said it was cracking down on copyrighted material.

Veoh, like YouTube and Google Inc.’s video site, attracts visitors with its user-contributed collection of video clips. The site, which was launched in September, has lined up prominent backers, including Time Warner Inc. and former Walt Disney Co. chief Michael Eisner, who sits on its board.

Veoh has been popular with bloggers because, unlike YouTube and Google, it allowed bloggers to upload and link to videos containing nudity.

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