Blogging

How young people are using blogs

Many of your students will blog without even realising it, but will almost certainly not adhere to the rules of responsible blogging. Even if they know the rules, teens can be found at Bebo, MySpace and MSN Spaces, maintaining contact with their friends (and some strangers) through their attractive, busy 'home pages'. They often update regularly and chat in real time with their friends – this is the blog part of these services. 

The pages are 'self-policed' by their users but content remains concerning as students place personal information and photographs to an unknown audience as well as to their friends. Blogging in the classroom provides an opportunity to educate safer blog use. The following is an overview of these tools, which are worth knowing about, even if you may not use them with your students.

Bebo

Bebo is a social networking tool. When you create an account, you give your name and e-mail address but once you have your own page, you can put on it whatever you want. It is self-policing in that users flag up inappropriate content which is then reviewed and, if deemed necessary by the service owners, is deleted.

How safe is it?

There have been only four cases of online bullying that needed intervention from the site owners, out of a total of millions of Bebo pages. Bebo is in fact very intelligent. It can tell where you are logging on from and present a home page full of user profiles, covering people in a geographical area near you. This encourages the building of contacts beyond your familiar group of friends, inviting them to your page. In most cases, we can only guess, this is harmless fun. However, it is not watertight safe surfing and no adult has control over the creation and maintenance of such sites. 

Better to educate how to blog and network online in a responsible fashion, though, than ignore the existence of such a huge teen phenomenon.