get your kids blogging (safely)

By alice | January 11, 2008

I made both my kids blogs on my Blogger account, and they are really enjoying posting stuff even though comments are disabled and nobody is reading while I ponder what to do about keeping them secure etc.

Any thoughts? I don’t read or know of any kid bloggers, but presumably there are some out there. Tips appreciated.

They can give their urls to friends and family, but they shouldn’t appear on search engines or on the Blogger list. Comments are members only and moderated by me. I guess that all seems about appropriate unless I have missed any holes/ opportunities.

Watching them get into it, a couple of things were immediately obvious: first, it’s all about the love of expressing your thoughts and ideas. Doing this somewhere they can be shared makes it feel both worthwhile and exciting. But it’s not at all “for” the audience.

A lot of people found blogging very difficult to understand, when it first got big. Now that’s irrelevant, of course. But then, they couldn’t understand why anyone would voluntarily devote time and energy to unpaid writing, except for reasons of vanity. What a cynical world this used to be… watching my kids shows me just how instinctive and real is the desire to express and share ideas and impressions of the world, and how much it contributes to the learning of that world, because of the communication part. The very opposite of imbibing stuff at school for the sake of tests and points, while sitting at the back of the classroom in grumpy silence, as I used to do. Sharing and learning are the same process. They start conversations even if nobody is listening or seems likely or able to continue them.

In fact, it’s almost hardwired in their brains. My son, who has been surfing the net since he was two, starting with just a mouse and Cartoon Network games (before I could instruct him on where to click, the mouse was moving faster than my voice), automatically started posting in an appropriate audience-directed voice. “Look at this, you will love it,” and so on. He even invited youtube video requests. This is a little guy in search of a big audience… I guess I’ll just keep thinking about it all.

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2 Comments »

2 Responses to “get your kids blogging (safely)”

Dave Says:
January 13th, 2008 at 12:48 pm

I got a domain name and installed Wordpress on the webhosting server. This was quite easy.
I changed the theme and incorporated a meta tag in the top of every page that says: no index, no follow to search engine crawlers. This was a little bit more technical. But my blog doesn’t show up in search engines. You would have to know the URL to get it or find it. It’s for friends only anyway.
Wordpress allows you to set the comment security to approved commentators if you wish, based on their e-mail address. And finally you can be the administrator and your kids can be users with less rights of course.

alice Says:
January 15th, 2008 at 11:52 am

I love wordpress- I use it on this blog. The reason I started them on Blogger was just that it’s simpler for them to use, especially for uploading and posting photos. I have to size everything here on photoshop before posting it. Or maybe I am just missing some app for that (?)

But Wordpress offers a lot possibilities which I think they will appreciate sooner than I expect, so thanks for the tip about the search engines. I’ll definitely do that as and when.