Xanga (www.xanga.com) is the most popular teen website for blogging, short for web logging. Blogs are part diary, part scrapbook, part meeting place. Teens flock to blogs as an extension of the school day. They come to see and be seen, to chat, to gossip. They talk about love and the pain of lost love. They talk about who they like and who they don’t like. They talk about how much they love school or how much they hate it. They talk about parties they’ve been to or parties they plan to host. They talk about their pets, their family, their teachers, their churches.

It comes down to this: If it’s something a teen has ever thought or ever said, it’s on Xanga.

People sign up for free accounts on Xanga – or other blogging sites, such as LiveJournal or Blogger, as a place to host their personal online diary. Unlike diaries, which traditionally have been kept hidden and locked (and woe to the sibling who finds and reads one), blogging sites make a diary readable by the entire world.

For the most part, blogs are probably read by people in the same blogring. Blogrings are areas of a blogging site devoted to people who have a common interest or connection. It’s a smaller community inside the larger community. For instance, Xanga lists a bit more than 8,500 users in the Oklahoma City metro area, and those users sign themselves into various blogrings. A Putnam City High School blogring has 229 members. A Putnam City North blogring has 225 members. Putnam City West has more than 200 students in blogrings. Some schools have separate blogrings for school bands, swim teams, graduates from past years, and more, and at least two middle schools have blogrings. All told, there are probably 700 to 800 district students who use Xanga.

What’s Good About Blogging

The first thing to know about blogging is that it’s inevitable. Teens like to talk with other teens. Developmentally, they should be talking with other teens. Because teens know their way around computers and the Internet, they will do some of their talking online. Now, with the emergence of blogs, they have an additional realm in which that talking can take place.

If we think of blogs as simply a diary, the positives are clear. Journaling helps us peer into our own hearts. Through reflective writing, over time we begin to understand issues in our lives. We see and question patterns in our behavior and thought. Feelings are poured out and inspected in the pouring. Journaling helps us examine our values and decide by what moral code we should live. Diaries are personal, intimate and introspective. They are who we are.

As a place simply to be social, blogs serve teens well. Images of teens talking on the phone for hours at a time or going to the mall to meet with friends are fading. The new reality is that a lot of teens spend a lot of time in front of the computer screen. They cruise through the Xanga sites of friends, reading entries and typing in responses. They add to their own Xanga page and check to see who left a response for them. Because teens tend to be superb multi-taskers, they may at the same time be instant messaging with a dozen or more friends and constantly checking their e-mail.

Parents who know say teens are spending more and more time blogging. The advantage that blogs have over e-mail is that it’s faster and more efficient. You don’t have to open e-mail message after e-mail message and send a response to each person. It simply doesn’t take as much time to browse through the blogs of your 40 closest friends. And compared to instant messaging, blogs are more in-depth. The "Hey, whatcha doin?" and "LOL" of instant messaging is replaced with drama and exposition, photos and music.

Dangers of Blogging

If there is a concern about blogging, it’s that in some cases teens reveal too much personal information. It’s not uncommon for teens to list their name, address, phone number, cell phone number, e-mail address and instant messaging screen name, and include their photo. Many bloggers describe themselves as "hot" or "sexy." Add to that the fact that teen angst is common in blogs as teens describe troubles with parents, fights with boyfriends, clashes with friends.

For child sex predators, this is a goldmine of information. Cyber predators meet potential victims wherever they can online (often in chat rooms), then progress to instant messaging, e-mail, telephone and ultimately a personal meeting. In the process of grooming victims, cyber predators build trust by pretending to understand their target’s problems and concerns. They try to establish connections by taking about the same music, pop stars and television shows.

And yes, there are cyber predators out there. These are the facts:

• 1 in 5 children under age 17 have received unwanted sexual solicitation on the Internet.
• 1 in 33 children have received an aggressive solicitation to meet somewhere in person.
• 49 percent of children who received online solicitations do not mention them to parents.

What Parents Should Do

Blogging sites are blocked in district schools, so most blogging goes on in student’s homes. That means parents have a lead role in appropriate use of blogging sites.

In the January 2005 issue of Community Spirit, writer Tara Lynn Thompson says teens prefer that parents focus on their own child and whether they are mature enough to be part of Xanga. Thompson goes on to suggest, though, that parents monitor Xanga by joining up and knowing their child’s Xanga screen name. Because teens may consider this an invasion of privacy, Thompson says, parents should be careful how they use information they come across.

This school year, district officials are presenting i-SAFE education programs at every school in order to teach Internet safety. By year’s end, every student in the district will receive i-SAFE education, and meetings will have been held at every school for parents to attend.

i-SAFE materials suggest that parents should discuss the dangers of the Internet so that their children can make wise decisions online. They suggest parents should develop rules of the road for their child’s Internet use and make sure those rules are clearly understood. The computer should be in a public area of the house, not a child’s bedroom, i-SAFE recommends. And children should be encouraged to report disturbing online encounters with parents, who may decide if the encounter should be reported to police or www.cybertipline.com

Terri Boswell, Putnam City’s i-SAFE coordinator, says such education and awareness make a difference. According to Boswell, blogs for students at one district middle school where i-SAFE training just took place have noticeably less personal information than other blogs.

Boswell narrows her advice to just five words.

"Be social, but be safe," she says.