MySpace to get safer

That's what its parent, News Corp., is promising, the Wall Street Journal reports. "News Corp. plans to appoint a 'safety czar' to oversee the site, launch an education campaign that may include letters to schools and public-service announcements to encourage children not to reveal their contact information." The site aims to be the industry leader in safety, the Journals adds. Other measures the company's considering: blocking links from MySpace to explicit photos stored on other sites (a popular work-around to bypass deletion by MySpace); restricting access to groups like "swingers" to people 18+ (though there's currently no technology preventing people from lying about their age); blocking search terms predators might use to locate users; and somehow encouraging users 14-16 to restrict access to their profiles to people they know. It could be that the best blog-safety tip is to encourage kids to use social-networking sites owned by large companies accountable to public opinion. But there's little stopping determined kids from moving on, or keeping a MySpace account to keep Mom or Dad happy and establishing free accounts on a bunch of other blogging sites. Many kids do have multiple accounts (see "18-year-old blogger Amanda on blogging" and Wikipedia's partial list of social-networking sites). Feel free to post about this in our new forum).