lessons learned the hard way

one day my daughter asked me if she could have a blog. she loves to write and i figured that, with comments disabled, it was a pretty safe place for her. avid blogger that i am, how could i say no without sounding like a hypocrite. it's not like she was asking me if she could drink a bottle of beer.

i always stay close when she is at her blog (and she very rarely is at her blog). in fact, she asks me to type while she dictates the words to me. i don't allow her to surf, and we only look (carefully) at the silly animal videos on you tube. she doesn't even have her own email address.

today tashi begged me to let her show her blog to a friend. i wasn't so sure. tashi and her friend go to waldorf school after all, where electronic media in the lives of children is frowned upon. but with nothing but cats and dolphins on her blog, i figured it was ok to share it.

so we were scrolling through the little pink innocent blog when suddenly tashi asked, "why does it say you bandwidth stealing fuck?"

i almost fell over. she's never said the f-word.

i asked her what she was talking about and she said again, "it says you bandwidth stealing fuck!" oh my, she has now said the f word twice, with a friend present no less. and then i saw it. what was previously her profile photo, had become the words: you bandwidth stealing fuck.

the picture in my daughter's profile had been of a happy leaping dolphin. she loves dolphins. we pointed to the url of a photo we found online, through a google image search. this is common practice, or at least, i thought it was.

oh so tech innocent me. at least the dolphin photo wasn't replaced with a really creepy porno shot.

still, i felt like a total creep was staring out at us from where once a dolphin swam. tashi felt invaded, and confused as to how and why someone would do this. and tashi's friend will probably associate blogs with this forever. and i have to explain it to her parents tomorrow when they pick her up from her overnight. yea, i was letting your kid online without your prior approval. blech.

so the lesson here is, if your child has a blog, be careful what they link to. because a very unfriendly, insensitive, immature person on the other side might change the image to something that makes everyone feel a little bad.