Why Blog Safety Is Important - Perils of Blogging

In this article we will look upon the reasons why blog safety is important? My parents and teacher always told me to keep a personal journal, to be very frank I never kept a personal journal, not because having a personal journal is waste of time , in every sense it is very important for personal and childhood and development, but my procrastination never allowed me to have one. But our internet generation kids do have an online personal journal in the form of blogs. Believe it or not it’s been estimated that more than 50% blogs are created by children or teenagers.

Blogs is easiest mechanism to write the content on the internet and to maintain an online personal journal. Content can take any form such as text, pictures, videos etc... and kids normally and more alarmingly, post all sort of personal information on blogs. That's because most of the blogs requires no parental or elder supervision. Following are the popular internet blogs where anyone can freely write without any supervision:

• Blogger
• Diaryland
• Livejournal
• My Diary
• MSN MySpace
• Open Diary

If you have a time, please visit to one of the above mentioned blogs, you will be shocked to see the amount of personal information shared on those blogs. You can easily find pictures, of kids and their personal videos. You can realize how easy it easy for online predators to target kids. Blogs are the place where online predators synthesizes all the information about kids and then use chat rooms or some other chatting mechanism to talk to the targeted children in order to win their trust. Once the trust is established between online predator and targeted kid, then online predators arrange a face to face meeting with them. What's next? We can only imagine or may read a story in a newspaper. Newspapers are filled with horrible but true stories of children being targeted by online predators.

So what to do? Educating children on how to use blogs is essential and the first step, but remember do not rely on education only. Online Predators are persistent enough to gather information about the targeted child even if takes months to achieve that. Their main weapon is children's innocence. Let's say, we have provided all the safety education to our kids, but child being a child just post his/her school name, then after several posting unconsciously or innocently post which grade he/she is in. Online Predators closely looks for such clues and patterns that provides more information about the targeted child, and one by one they gathers all the information they want. For instances like that Parental Control Software really comes in handy for parents, because they help parents to supervise children's internet and blogging activity.

For information on how to protect kids from perils of blogging and how to implement blog safety measures, read Blogging Safety Solution

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