Talking About Blogging

Talking to our children about blogging can be difficult especially if we don’t feel comfortable with a computer. Blogging can be a great creative writing exercise for your child.  Just make sure they understand how to stay safe.

The basics:

• A blog (short for Web Log) is a web site of your own, where you enter information ordered by date. It's an online diary or online journal that is shared with others online. 
• Blogs should not contain identifying information that someone could use to locate the blogger or anyone he or she writes about.
• The practice of blogging, short for keeping a "Web log" or online personal journal, has spread like wildfire—especially among teenagers, who sometimes maintain blogs without the knowledge of their parents or guardians.
• Recent studies show that teenagers write roughly half of all blogs today, with two out of three providing their age, three out of five revealing their location and contact information, and one in five revealing their full name. It should go without saying that there are potential risks in sharing this type of detailed personal information.

Family blogging rules:

• Establish rules for online use with your kids and be diligent.
• Screen what your kids plan to post before they post it. Seemingly innocuous information, such as a school mascot and town photo, could be put together to reveal where the author goes to school.
• Ask yourself (and instruct your kids to do the same) if you are you comfortable showing any of the content to a stranger. If in doubt, have them take it out.
• Evaluate the blogging service and find out if it offers private, password-protected blogs.
• Save the Web address of your child's blog and review it on a regular basis.
• Check out other blogs to find positive examples for your kids to emulate.

Basic guidelines for bloggers:

The following tips are a good place to start for kids interested in blogging, although by no means comprehensive. It's a good idea for parents to add more guidelines to suit their family's particular needs.
Start by telling kids that they should:

• Never offer any personal information including your last name, contact information, home address, phone numbers, school's name, e-mail address, last names of friends or relatives, instant messaging names, age, or birth date.
• Never post provocative pictures of yourself or anyone else, and be sure any images you provide do not reveal any of the previously mentioned information.  Always remember to look at the background of a picture too.
• Assume what you publish on the Web is permanent. Anyone on the Internet can easily print out a blog or save it to a computer.
• Use blogging provider sites with clearly stated terms of use, and make sure they can protect the actual blogs, not just the user accounts, with password protection. (Even so, it's better to assume anyone can see it.)
• Avoid trying to "outdo" or compete with other bloggers.
• Keep blogs positive and don't use them for slander or to attack others.

The benefits of blogging:

After establishing guidelines, blogs can create an opportunity for kids and their parents to communicate and share with each other: kids can teach their parents about new technology, and parents can teach their kids "street smarts."
• Other benefits include learning the responsibility and discipline of keeping a journal, having a creative outlet, increased communication with friends and relatives, learning new Internet and computer technologies, and improved typing, spelling, writing, and editing skills.