News for the Week of July 17, 2005

You could call it teen-blogging theme week (again), because the subject kept popping up in kid-tech news. Here are the top stories:

"Teen blogging's good": A rare positive comment on blogging's impact on teens came from writer and single mom Laura Matthews in the Christian Science Monitor: "To keep a blog going, you have to have the discipline to write daily. This puts today's young bloggers on the fast track to future Pulitzers. To keep your friends coming back, you have to be interesting, funny, intelligent, relevant. These kids are all that and more. Once I got past the immature spelling and punctuation (along with the usual teen slang and vulgarity), I was treated to some of the best poetry I've ever read. All of their blogs together are a veritable anthropological study of high school life. One senior I know has, in four years, transformed from what seemed like functional illiteracy - incomplete sentences, poor spelling - into a blossoming philosopher headed for a major university." Would that all parents were such avid readers of teen blogs! Also check out the Matthews family's online-safety rules at the bottom of Laura's article.

Then there are the risks. High school and college yearbooks would be cherished and/or laughed over for a few weeks or months, then be revisited occasionally years later, but mainly just gathered dust in some basement or attic. They allowed us all to move on and mature. Blogs and Web sites where similarly personal thoughts are entered and expanded on, on the other hand, might be archived and available to anyone googling our names for years to come. On the Web, personal thoughts take on a life of their own that, usually, we can no longer control. These publicized personal thoughts can affect children's academic and professional careers, not to mention their parents'. Take for example Maya Marcel-Keyes, daughter of conservative politician Alan Keyes, who at 19 "discovered the trickiness of providing personal details online when her discussions on her blog about being a lesbian became an issue during her father's recent run for a US Senate seat in Illinois (he made anti-gay statements during the campaign)," the Associated Press reports. Nearly a fifth of teens with Net access have their own blogs; "38% of teens say they read other people's blogs"; and "79% of teens agreed that people their age aren't careful enough when giving out information about themselves online," the AP cites Pew Internet & American Life research as showing.

Privacy features. Probably, more and more teens will use features like LiveJournal.com's "friends lock" and MSN Spaces' and AOL's RED Blogs' levels of privacy control so the public at large can't get to their innermost thoughts! But meanwhile, until their inner "risk analyst" chimes in (with post-teen frontal-lobe development), their parents can promote those privacy features (the AP article above cites one uncle who heard his niece, a college student, was looking for a job. After googling her and finding her blog, "The Drunken Musings of...," he wrote her to suggest she take it down).

16-year-old's blog fuels social debate. The story of Zach in Memphis led the New York Times's "Fashion & Styles" section Sunday. The 16-year-old wrote a few entries in his MySpace.com blog about being sent by his parents to "Refuge," the youth version of "Love in Action" - according to the Times, "one of 120 programs nationwide listed by Exodus International, which bills itself as the largest information and referral network for what is known among fundamentalist Christians as the 'ex-gay' movement." Zach's parents, he said in his blog, believed there was "something psychologically wrong with me" and they'd "raised him wrong." But what's pertinent, here, is the impact of these few entries in a teenager's blog. Moving beyond his peers (his blog links to 213 friends' blogs), they "grabbed the attention of both gay activists and fundamentalist Christians around the world," the Times reports. They've been "forwarded on the Internet over and over, inspiring online debates, news articles, sidewalk protests and an investigation into Love in Action by the Tennessee Department of Children's Services in response to a child abuse allegation [later dropped because the allegation proved unfounded]." Not to mention 1,700 responses in Zach's blog to his last post before entering the program, the Times adds.

MySpace.com's new parent. One of teenagers' favorite blogging services - or rather its parent, Intermix - is being acquired by News Corp. for $580 million, MarketWatch reports. News Corp. is undoubtedly interested in all that ad revenue and catching the next wave in media: user-driven content. MySpace, the most prominent of Intermix's 30-odd Web sites, says it gets about 2 million registered users a month, and it targets the attractive audience of 16-to-34-year-olds. What this may eventually mean to online families is better privacy protection for the underage segment of that target market - MySpace may join services like MSN Spaces, AOL's RED Blogs, or Yahoo 360 in offering levels of privacy for bloggers (for more on this, see "Do young bloggers care about privacy?"). Here, too, is a recent thoughtful article in the York [Penn.] Daily Record on teen blogs.