Xanga and other teen 'hangouts'

About 13% of the students at San Jose's Evergreen High School have blogs on Xanga.com, and that's just one online journal site. One student told the San Jose Mercury News that he visits Xanga "like 50 times a day," either to post to his own blog or visit someone else's. Most of the blogs are innocuous, some cruel. "Evergreen's Xanga crowd operated largely under the radar of school officials until a parent called attention to an anonymous blog called Mc_Smack_Crew that mocks students with digitally altered photos and vicious messages," the Mercury News reports. "School officials alerted San Jose police, who opened a 'hate crime' investigation. The police decided last month not to press charges, calling it a 'case of name-calling, however foul'." The school blocked access to the site from school computers, which of course did nothing to help the site's young victims. But most of the Evergreen blogs are the typical teen diary fare (or the digital sort): true confessions, gossip, school news, flirtations, virtual relationships, and seeking validation through peers' posts/responses and links. "Most teens abide by an unwritten code of the blogosphere: What happens online stays online," e.g., test relationships - reading an interesting prospect's blog, learning all about him, flirting with him via IM and posts on his blog, deciding he's a little too weird, and ending it, without ever having had even a phone conversation.
 
Just for context, about every 5.8 seconds a new blog is created somewhere in the world, The Register reports. That translates to 8,000-17,000 new blogs every day.
 
Interesting note for parents: The secrets in today's teen diaries are open to the public but not to parents, who remain generally clueless about them. In fact, some parents feel they're invading their child's privacy if they do what everybody else does, go to the blog, and read it (see an example in "Daughter's blog, mom's dilemma"). Would you agree? Is it wrong to read your kid's Web site? Please email us your answers!