Chapter Nine. Step 6: Reduce Your Vulnerability When Blogging


Caroline's family had just moved to a new town, and she missed her friends in Brisbane. She decided that a great way to keep in touch would be to start a blog. All the kids at her new school were getting into blogging, so it would be a good way to make new friends, too.

Caroline found the sign-up process for her site easy to work through. Eager to get started, she accepted all the default settings and typed in her city and state in Australia. She thought that a racy nickname might make the kids at her new school think she was cool, so she chose "NaughtyCaroline." She entered her contact information and customized her Web address using her last name and the year she was born so she could remember it easily.

Caroline tried to make the background of her site look impressive (like many 14-year-old girls, she loves hearts and hot pink) and added a bunch of photos of herself and her friends with labels identifying them and the scenery in the photos. She also created a list of her favorite songs and posted it to the site.

Her new friend Amy came over to look at the site one Saturday morning and said it still looked kind of empty. Together the girls downloaded and filled out a few quizzes, challenging each other to come up with more and more outrageous answers. One survey asked how many beers she drinks in a week, and Amy taunted Caroline to say a dozen. In fact, Caroline doesn't drink at all, but she wants Amy to think she's sophisticated, so she entered 12 for her answer.

Over the next week, Caroline made lots of journal entries, finding that it was liberating to write about herself. In one entry, she mentioned her most recent fight with her mother, and admitted to being kind of lonely since she and Nigel broke up. She added that she's hoping to meet a "hot guy" when her family goes on vacation in Perth next week. Now that her blog isn't looking so empty, Caroline sends an instant message to her old and new friends telling them to check out her site.

She doesn't know that several online predators have already seen her site and are already getting to know herreally well.



Look Both Ways. Help Protect Your Family on the Internet
Look Both Ways: Help Protect Your Family on the Internet
ISBN: 0735623473
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 157
Authors: Linda Criddle

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