Can Your Blog Be Used Against You?

Blogging is all the rage these days; it seems as if everybody who's anybody has one or several. A blog, or Web log, functions as a high-tech version of a long-time tradition, the personal journal. It's a chronological record of one's thoughts, comments, opinions, or whatever else you want to write about that day. Many services provide free blogging space to anyone who wants to sign up. Some blogs are information-oriented, such as the many tech blogs posted by IT professionals to share tips and how-to's about computer topics. Some are more editorial in nature, such as the many blogs that exist to promote the authors' political opinions and commentary. Others have more of a "dear diary" tone, relating intimate details of the authors' lives and feelings. Some blogs are highly publicized. Millions of "regular old people" have blogs. Estimates of the number of blogs online range from 10 million to 60 million or more world-wide. However, millions of blogs are started and then abandoned within weeks or months. The number of currently active blogs those to which the author is posting regularly is much lower. If you want to attract strangers to read your blog, you can publish it to a blog directory such as Technorati www.technorati.com or Blogpulse www.blogpulse.com. High traffic volume is a big plus if you want to make money off your blog by selling advertising space on your blog page. If your blog is more personal, you may choose not to publicize it, or even to put it on a password-protected Web site. Who reads blogs? Last May, a Pew research survey found that about 25% of Internet users said they read blogs. That translates into over 30 million American adults. Of course, it's not just adults who author and read blogs. Blogging is also very popular with teenagers as a way to share their activities, thoughts and fantasies with their friends. But some of them have discovered, to their chagrin, that their friends aren't the only ones reading. Parents are finding that reading their kids' blogs is one way to find out what's going on in an uncommunicative teen's life. And unlike reading the child's diary, it's easier to justify. After all, the blog is out there on a public forum for anyone to see. Articles such as this one encourage parents to read teen blogs to better understand today's adolescents. School authorities are getting into the act, too. Last month, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about teens being suspended for inappropriate comments in their blogs. But wayward or sometimes merely imaginative minors aren't the only ones whose blog posts can get them in trouble. Adult bloggers who rant about their marital problems, their neighbors or their jobs or who confess to less-than-legal doings may find themselves in hot water with their spouses, the folks next door, their bosses or even the police. As a blogger, in effect you are a publisher. Although you have free speech protections under the Constitution if you're in the U.S. and some other countries, you can still be sued if you libel someone (publish untrue defamatory statements) or if you publish material in your blog that's copyrighted by someone else, without the owner's permission. You could also be fired and sued by your employer for disclosing trade secrets. You can try to get around this by blogging anonymously, but subpoenas can be issued to your provider to compel them to reveal your identity or identifying information such as your IP address. Of course, anonymity may take some of the fun out of blogging. After all, the reason you blog about personal matters in the first place is to share yourself with others. If those others have no idea who you are, that sharing may lose a lot of its appeal, on both sides. Thus even if you use a pseudonym and take steps to technically mask the origins of your blog posts, you may find yourself subconsciously dropping clues that can be used to determine who you are. Remember, blogs are forever - or at least, they can hang around for a very long time. Public blog entries get indexed in search engines and those indexes remain even if you delete the post. Copies may be cached or archived on servers. Readers may make digital copies or print them out. Posts that seem fun and harmless at the time, especially relevations about your love life or drunken rants about your pet peeves, can come back to haunt you years later when a new love interest or a potential employer Googles your name and unearths your journal musings.

from www.wxpnews.com