Mommy Blog Lines: Tal(k)ing Care

When my daughter Googled her name… I turned out to be her biggest online privacy problem -           Lorraine Akemann                 While browsing through the BlogHer archives I found a really interesting blog posted back in January by Lorraine Akemann , “3 Lessons I Learned About Online Privacy When My Teen Googled Her Name” . Akemann, a mom blogger, explains her surprise upon discovering that the photos of her daughter that she had uploaded onto her blog were popping up in a Google search of her daughter’s real name despite being labeled “anonymously” (which up to this point she believed was an adequate measure for protecting their privacy), meaning her daughter’s online identity was now linked to her blog unintentionally. You can read through her post for some tips on how she’s dealt with this issue and the changes she’s making in her blogging practice since.                 Many mom bloggers do upload identifiable images of their children to their blogs while ot

             According to some of the blogging advice we’ve been looking into these past couple of weeks, sharing personal information on blogs is advocated for as a key way to engage viewers who want to “get to know “ the person behind the blog. It’s one way to potentially create a sense of identification between reader and writer. What better way to do this than to actually show the person behind the blog…which brings us to vlogging (video blogs). Mommy vlogging is increasingly popular on platforms like YouTube and although many of the practices are quite similar to text based blogging, there are some differences and some unique privacy concerns when uploading videos for public consumption.                 It almost goes without saying but vlogging is nearly entirely image based with the occasional use of text in a supplementary manner (captions, titles, comments, etc) making it a much more voyeuristic activity. Showing video clips and visuals of children and their activities