Blogging is Very, Very DANGEROUS

Well, who knew! What happens in the blogosphere doesn't stay in the blogoshpere.

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Blogs are everywhere -- increasingly, the place where young people go to bare their souls, to vent, to gossip. And often they do so with unabashed fervor and little self-editing, posting their innermost thoughts for any number of Web surfers to see.

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Some also speculate that more scandalous blog entries -- especially those about partying and dating exploits -- will have ramifications down the road.

"I would bet that in the 2016 election, somebody's Facebook entry will come back to bite them," Steve Jones, head of the communications department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says, referring to thefacebook.com, a networking site for college students and alumni that is something of a cross between a yearbook and a blog.

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Amanda Lenhart, a researcher at Pew who tracks young people's Internet habits, says she's increasingly hearing stories about the perils of posting the equivalent of a diary online.

She heard from one man whose niece was a college student looking for a job. Out of curiosity, he typed his niece's name into a search engine and quickly found her blog, with a title that began "The Drunken Musings of ...."

"He wrote to her and said, 'You may want to think about taking this down,"' said Lenhart, chuckling.

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Meanwhile, Joseph Milliron, a 23-year-old college student in California, says he's become more cautious about posting photos online because people sometimes "borrow" them for their own sites.

It's just one trend that's made Milliron rethink what he includes in his blog.

"I know this very conspiracy theorist -- but I wouldn't put it past a clever criminal to warehouse different databases and wait 20 years when all the Internet youth's indiscretions can be used for surreptitious purposes," says the senior at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, who's been blogging for about three years.

All this may be a good reason to blog anonymously even if it brings its own challenges.