GwB Presents: The Great Doko Giveaway

Remember Pogs?

Yeah, me neither. Thankfully I was well into being a taxpayer by the time that little phenomenon gripped kids and the pocketbooks of parents everywhere. They were harmless little disks that kids would collect and trade, little different than baseball cards in that respect, but there was a game that went along with the pogs that went well beyond my understanding. It was no doubt one of those signs that I was getting older. Now here we are, still taxpayers, but with broods of our own to try and rid us of what happens to be in our pocketbooks, and there's a new contender on the block vying for our kid's attention.

Doko is a global trading game. By collecting little metal coins (each with a colorful design, web URL, and unique serial number) children can go to a website online and register their Doko. By registering these coins, collectors of this global game, accumulate points and as the coin is traded or passed along to friends, it's progress can be tracked via a Google Maps like map on the Doko website. In theory the disks can make it all the way to the other side of the planet, allowing your child to make friends all over the world.

And therein lies one fo the better aspects of Doko's online component, it's anonimity. At no point during the registration process does you child give any personal information. The only thing that Doko asks is things like their favorite color, animal, and birthdate and from that it assigns a username. Password is set by the child and the only e-mail address required throughout the entire process belongs to their parent. Despite the anonymous nature of the website, it is as always best to exercise caution with your children online as there is a chat and e-mail like abilities within the website. Doko is also excellent for introducing your wee ones to the scurge that is social networking website as at it's heart, this is what dokodrop.com is.

Mac certainly likes this little disks. Outside of the online games, she enjoys the possibility of making friends online from around the world. If there is a downside to the whole process according to her, it's that these are truly meant to be traded and given away, she'd rather keep them. As any parent can attest to, most children within this target demographic ('tweens really) would like to keep something they rather enjoy, but Doko provides the reward of getting to connect with new people and once all the points possible for each disk has been collected, the person with it at that point keeps the coin. So in order to really appreciate these disks, you'll need a large network of friends to trade with.

Hopefully as the popularity of these disks increase, so will demand for what has the potential to be as big as those cardboard disks of old. To help foster this, I've got Doko to give away to two lucky parents of 'tweens. To participate, simply drop a line here and subscribe to the RSS feed. That's it. we're going to give this one a few days, so you have until Sunday, July 20th, 2008 to enter. As Doko is global in nature, so is this contest and the only restriction is that contestants must be the parent or grandparent of a 'tween aged child (6-13 years old).

For those wanting to give their kids an opportunity at getting hooked on Doko now, Doko disks are available in store or online at Toys-R-Us.