Blogs are Forever – Almost

King David of Bible fame said, "Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord." The words were appropriate then and mean even more now that blogging is here.

For those still in technology training, a blog is like a public diary on the internet. It is read by friends. It can also be read from Sian, China or Nairobi, Kenya. MySpace alone has 70 million bloggers in 2006, 15 million of them between 14 and 18 years of age.

Blogs are not private. They can be easily accessed by parents, police and job recruiters. Radio financial guru Clark Howard says that all corporate recruiters Google for job applicant’s history on the Internet. A job applicant may have a fine resume, but their blog may show an unsavory side not in the resume. If a bad side is seen, there will be no job offer. A few poorly chosen words while we’re teens may keep us working in minimum wage jobs for years.

Being 15 or 18 is not a phase we pass through on the way to real life. It IS real life and we need to live it carefully and correctly now.

This blog stuff is permanent. Today it’s MySpace and Facebook. Other social networking sites will become popular soon.

And just changing the blog does not do away with what was written last week. There are web sites that specialize in keeping copies of the present. One is the Way Back Machine at http://www.archive.org/index.php

More than ten years ago I wrote on different discussion groups and sometimes those comments still come up during a search. The comments were ok, but it is alarming to realize that the internet comments are so permanent.

So the bottom line is this: The Lord forgives us when we ask, but the Internet cannot forget. Say it carefully the first time.