Schools' blog struggles

The school scene is a huge part of teen blogging – not just because a lot of teen members' posts and profiles revolve around school but also because users are searchable by school. That's certainly true at MySpace (where anyone can type a local high school into the search box and find hundreds of students there, searchable by age and distance – e.g., within a 5-mile radius). The hugely popular Facebook.com, now at more than 2,600 colleges and universities, is now available to many high school students. Xanga.com isn't overtly school-oriented, but it can be searched geographically, and large portions of student bodies will use it just because their peers do. So, like parents, schools are scrambling to catch up with this looming presence in their environments. "Many outlaw use of the sites on school computers," the Christian Science Monitor reports, "though kids find ways to get past the filters [see "The real story on filtering"]. Schools have a harder time controlling what gets posted at home, even if it has a tangible effect within school walls." Schools in the UK are struggling with online-safety and cyberbullying issues too, a new UK government study found.