Blogging's 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 finding. Probably, more and more will use blogging services' privacy features like LiveJournal.com's "friends lock" 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 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).