Kids & Blogs

What Parents Need to Know

Blogs are new to a lot of parents, but they're nothing new to kids. Fifty-two percent of all blogs belong to 13-to-19-year-olds, according to a recent study at Georgetown University, the number of blogs has been put at anywhere between 10 million and 32 million, and a new blog is created about every 5.8 seconds. That's why we'll keep coming back to this moving target of a subject, and we recommend that you check the News often, because we report on teen blogs a lot. But here are some basics for parents:

What's a Blog?

"Blog" is short for "Web log," an online journal or diary with - depending on the blogging service - varying degrees of privacy. Having one is a lot like having your own Web site, only much easier to create and maintain (no techie know-how required), and in most cases it's free. If you can do word-processing or email, you can have a blog. Anyone, regardless of age, can start one just about anywhere there's a computer and an Internet connection (e.g., at home, a friend's house, cybercafes, libraries, etc.).

Blogging's pretty new, but so far there are basically three kinds of blogs: professionals' blogs (where journalists, techies, researchers, etc. talk about what they're working on), amateur blogs about interests and hobbies (film, music, parenting, sports, pets, etc.), and social blogs. Kids' blogs certainly involve their interests too, but usually in the context of their social scene - a lot like instant messaging. A blog is just another "place" for kids to hang out with their friends.

Sometimes the better part of a high school will be blogging on one of the services popular among teens like MySpace.com and Xanga.com, so - as with instant messaging - teenagers tend to use the service their friends use. Which one they use is not really negotiable (if your friends aren't there, there's no point in being there, the thought goes).

Because it's so social, blogging usually isn't meant to be private like a diary, even though many teens publish very personal information in their blogs. They post (or type into the blog) their thoughts and feelings - about themselves, friends, music, parties, what's going on at school, etc. - and friends post their replies. Like instant-messaging, blogs also include a personal profile - a place where friends and strangers can click to find out the blogger's description of herself, her favorite tunes, celebrities, Web sites, etc. Many blogs expect you to post a picture of yourself to go with the profile. Some allow you to post other pictures and audio clips and links to music playlists. Some people just use blogs to share photos. The pictures part has been a shock to some parents who've read teen blogs, but we'll come back to that.

Young bloggers' privacy

So far, privacy clearly has not been an issue for teen bloggers themselves - except, of course, when their parents read their blogs. A young blogger could be posting the most intimate details of his life for anyone in the world to find in a search engine, but when a parent sees the post, very often a teen's privacy-invasion flag goes up. Complete strangers are less of an issue. This will probably change, as public (and parent) awareness grows and adults get more engaged in kids' blogging experiences.

Until then, it would be good for parents and kids to have a conversation about basic privacy protection while blogging (click here to read how one father and 12-year-old blogger worked through the issues). All the basic online-safety rules should apply in the blogging space as much as with any other online activity (see the rules at SafeTeens.com and SafeKids.com).

Basic blogging smarts

It's always a good idea to ask your child if he or she has a blog. If the answer is no, search for his or her full name in a Web search engine just to be sure (parents should have no qualms about ensuring that a child isn't putting any information online that identifies him or her personally - this is basic child protection). If the answer is yes, good for your child for being up front about it! Only two basic questions need to follow:

1. You're not publishing any personally identifiable information in your blog, right? (Examples: full name, school name, street address, phone no., etc.) The most important policy by far is never to use your full name online.
2. Are there privacy protections at your blogging service, and do you use them? The safest policy is: Keep it among friends - don't let strangers read your posts, comment/reply to them, or add themselves to your group or Friends list. Also, don't make your email address or IM screenname public unless it's a "throw-away" account you can delete if someone starts harassing you.

That second question is really the start of a discussion, since teenagers and parents usually have different definitions of privacy and its importance. Also, different blogging services have different levels and types of privacy protection - keep reading.

Beware the three "P's"

That would be Posts (blog entries), Profiles (bloggers' and instant messagers' descriptions of themselves), and Pictures. These are all wonderful means of self-expression and getting to know people, but they're also the areas where young bloggers' privacy, and possibly safety, is most vulnerable. We all know kids are risk-takers and often use the anonymous online environment to experiment with identity. So most online kids know that what you see isn't always what you get online (people fudge their ages and sometimes post pictures of "themselves" that aren't recent or even real), but kids don't always think about what other people can do with the information they post in blogs, whether friends, former friends, or strangers. If a friend somehow switches loyalties or gets mean, someone posting very personal information or pictures can really get hurt. Help your kids think about the implications of forgoing privacy and revealing their innermost thoughts.

Blogging sites' privacy options (the 4th "P")

Though your child may not be using one of the more protective services (and, to her, switching may be "social death"), most do have some pretty good privacy features. In most cases, the protections are obvious right when you sign up (you might start a test blog to see what it's all about). Your child can also show you how he or she configured them, which might be a good thing to run through together. Here are some examples of privacy options in most blogging services:

• At sign up (or reconfiguring account set-up), opting for friends-only or me-only (like a diary) instead of public blogging
• When posting, making each entry private or friends-only
• Not allowing her blog to be in the service's searchable directory
• Allowing only friends to post replies in his blog
• Not allowing people they don't know to add them to their Friends or Buddy list.

Depending on maturity level, if your child is a tween or young teen, it might be a good idea to go through the blogging service's privacy options right alongside him or her. Then go to the blog together and click around. Make sure the profile doesn't reveal anything someone with bad intentions could use to contact him or her; check out his or her photos (or have her sub in a favorite pop artist, pet, flower, or animation); click to friends' blogs; and talk, as you go, about how much your child really feels comfortable about revealing to friends who can be fickle. Again depending on trust and maturity levels, it's also a good idea for parents to know their child's username and password. Kids won't like it, but they need to know that it's not to embarrass but to protect them.

A few specifics on the services

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but the blogging services teens tend to prefer are sites like MySpace.com, Xanga.com, LiveJournal.com, and Blurty.com. All provide pretty decent privacy, but have limited staff to act upon abuse reports - users are pretty much on their own. Then there are the big-company services like MSN Spaces, Yahoo 360 (still in beta), Google's Blogger.com, and AOL's RED Blogs for teens (the most protective, but only for AOL members). MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360 both provide at least two levels of privacy, Blogger is all-public, all the time (except you can choose not to have your blog listed on its home page or available to search engines). MySpace, which says it's only for bloggers aged 16+ (but it's easy for tech-savvy kids under 16 to start a blog there anyway) is the only service that makes its privacy options a little harder to find (go to "Account Settings," then "Privacy Settings"), and there is no privacy for individual entries (that you click on before posting). For example, some services allow the blogger to make sure only friends read a particular post, or to go back later and change its privacy level. MySpace may eventually become more overt about user privacy, because its parent company, Intermix, was just acquired by a large media company News Corp., which makes it about as "mainstream" as Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo.