Blogging can, indeed, bring you business. I’ve taken on two major projects this year as a direct result of my blog. Having seen how much traffic a blog generates when I ran this site at greynotebook.com back in 2000-2003, I returned to blogging for my company site with renewed momentum earlier this year.
Having witnessed the benefits of blogging, however, I’ve also seen some of the down sides too. It’s not all good. This week, for example, a school I’ve done some consulting work for had a student blog shut down. The blogger in question was basically using the site to lambast fellow students, illustrating her posts with pictures taken from sites like Facebook and MySpace, and being rather malicious.
In turn, the matter was reported to the police and the hosting company happily shut the blog down.
The school then asked me to further research how students were using blogs and it didn’t take long to find a variety of sites where students were openly bitching about each other, teachers and life at the school.
I don’t have a problem with students blogging. In fact, if channelled properly it would be a great way of sharing class notes, course discussions, etc. However, these kids evidently didn’t have a clue what was appropriate to put on the Net. A couple of relatively innocent posts had, in this case, upset students and suddenly the whole thing was a police matter.
What I’d like to see is schools taking blogging even more seriously. Students need to be made aware of the kind of trouble they can get into directly and indirectly by the things they write on the Net.
Having done a bit of teaching this year myself, I made my students aware, for example, of what happened to the Norwegian journalist who “borrowed” too much content from a British newspaper.
What else can we do to raise awareness about blogging responsibly?
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