A dad on kids & blogs

Dan in southern California emailed me recently about his 12-year-old's blogging. "I was shocked to see a picture of her, a profile, a Yahoo email address I did not know about, and profiles of all her friends that are hooked up on this site," Dan wrote. "A simple click on their pictures and you have public email correspondence for all to read." He and his wife weren't sure yet what to do about this - they didn't want to overreact - so for starters he wanted to learn a little about these sites (MySpace, LiveJournal, DeadJournal, Xanga, Blurty, etc.). I told him he'd stumbled upon a pretty big phenomenon of teen life these days....

52% of the blogs out there are being developed and maintained by teens 13-19, reports a just-released study of "Gender, Identity, and Language Use in Teenage Blogs" at Georgetown University.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project puts the overall number of US-based blogs at about 8 million late last year.

A new blog is created somewhere in the world about every 5.8 seconds, The Register reported last summer.

Dan said there were a lot of pieces to this that concerned him. He spelled them out. Then, a few weeks later, he kindly told me how he and Jamie (not her real name) worked through the issues and checked out her circle of friends' blogs from both caring and ill-intentioned adults' perspectives. Click here to read his account in this week's newsletter.