Basic Guidelines for Bloggers

The following tips are a good place to start for kids interested in blogging, although by no means comprehensive. It's a good idea for parents to add more guidelines to suit their family's particular needs. Start by telling kids that they should:

(1.) Never offer any personal information including your last name, contact information, home address, phone numbers, school's name, e-mail address, last names of friends or relatives, instant messaging names, age, or birth date.

(2.) Never post provocative pictures of yourself or anyone else, and be sure any images you provide do not reveal any of the previously mentioned information. Always remember to look at the background of a picture too.

(3.) Assume what you publish on the Web is permanent. Anyone on the Internet can easily print out a blog or save it to a computer.

(4.) Use blogging provider sites with clearly stated terms of use, and make sure they can protect the actual blogs, not just the user accounts, with password protection. (Even so, it's better to assume anyone can see it.)

(5.) Avoid trying to "outdo" or compete with other bloggers.

(6.) Keep blogs positive and don't use them for slander or to attack others.