News for the Week of April 23, 2006

A key issue on the teen online social scene is slowly gathering momentum in kid-tech news: how to help teens be their own "spin doctors" as they blog and social-network - though the concept that comes to parents' minds a lot is how to get them to protect their reputations and future prospects. Here's more:

Concerns are valid

There are two reasons why concerns are valid on this increasingly user-driven, highly mobile Web: 1) It's tough to take it back - people's photos and comments can, almost instantly, be passed along and/or archived on the Web virtually forever, beyond the original uploader's control; 2) reports are multiplying that school administrators, law-enforcement people, and other authorities are checking out teens' blogs and profiles; and 3) somebody needs to be thinking about online teens' futures, because - though this is changing as public awareness grows - teens themselves say they don't think about this much as they do their blogging and social networking.

"Parents are well advised," said Mary Leary, deputy director of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's Office of Legal Counsel, "to realize that whenever images of a child exist, no matter the context in which they were created, that child is at risk of exploitation as long as cellphone cameras, the Internet, email, etc. exist, and children should avoid such images ever existing. They are images over which these children will never have control."

Two basic ways content lives on

Peers pass stuff along. Well, peers and strangers, but more likely someone a teenager knows. Teens can lose control of their words and media in way too many ways, e.g., a comment, photo, or video emailed, uploaded, IM'd, or shared on P2P file-sharing networks or in old Internet technologies like newsgroups. Once something's in a Web site, shared via P2P, or sent to a friend by cellphone, IM, or email, anyone can grab it, copy 'n' paste it, pass it along, or upload it to a myriad sites and services.

The Internet Archive. Even after personal Web pages, blogs, and social-networking profiles are deleted, they can live on at Archive.org. Founded in 1996, the nonprofit Internet Archive "was founded to build an 'Internet library' . offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format" - not to preserve teen socializers' content, of course. But if a page has a URL (its own Web address) and it was on the Web anytime after 1996, it's very probably in the Archive (which contains more than 55 billion Web pages, continuously "crawled" by the Archive's search-engine-like spider bots).

The good news is, college admissions people, prospective employers, or future political opponents can't search for your son or daughter's name in this online library. The Archive's Wayback Machine - a special search engine that shows how a page changed over time - only searches by URL (a page's Web address). Also, only public pages are crawled and archived. If a blogger uses privacy features restricting public access, his/her content won't be captured by the Archive's Web crawlers, an Archive spokesperson told me.

People can ask the Archive to remove their pages, providing they have those pages' URLs. If you've found your page (type the URL into the search box on the home page) and want it deleted, you can email the Internet Archive with the URL and your request (info at archive dot org). Allow for "about a two-day turnaround," Archive folk say.