A note on blog/child safety

Since the subject recently came up, I thought I'd mention here that I do my best to follow internet safety rules. I am comfortable posting videos of my children here because I do take precautions. My children are not bothered by me taking video of them, or posting it here. Leanna has requested that certain videos not be posted, so they weren't. I don't post pictures that show our address (or if they do I blur it out). I don't mention our city name. I don't ever post our last name, and I've rarely/never mentioned middle names, particularly the uniquely identifying ones. I generally post about events after the fact, not before. When I have posted pictures of other people's children I requested permission from their parents first.
While internet predators do exist, I think they mostly lurk on places that teens/children hang out on, not on Mom blogs. Just identifying our first names isn't a huge danger-people all over town hear us saying our names in public. I do occasionally mention place names that technically someone could look up, that is true. But someone would have to be really determined to search through all my blog entries to find things to identify us and search out our exact location. My blog is relatively safe, and I take responsibility for it.

Actually I'm more worried about people googling the kids' names and finding posts about things that might embarrass them in the future, than I am about someone useing my blog to search for us. It's increasingly common for friends and bosses to look people up and I don't want anything I post to come back to haunt them. I can not control what information other people put out there. (So I would like to mention that is not ok for people to post my children's last and/or middle names. An easy way to check this is to use the "search blog" feature in the upper left corner on your blog).

A few tips for bloggers:

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:
•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.
•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.
•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.
•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.)
•Avoid trying to "outdo" or compete with other bloggers.
•Keep blogs positive and don't use them for slander or to attack others.