Savvy research

I read an interesting article on MSNBC today titled When Murder Hits the Blogosphere. You may recall November headlines from Pennsylvania about the 18-year-old boyfriend who allegedly killed the parents of his 14-year-old girlfriend while she stood next to him. The article centers around the following:

...as the story of the double murder and the two missing teens hit the news, hundreds of curious, savvy Web surfers found Kara and David's MySpace profiles and Xanga blogs. It didn't take long for reporters to begin doing the same thing. A photo used by numerous news Web sites was also from the MySpace profile of Kara's best friend. MSNBC was first to report the teens' interests found listed online.

This fascinated me because I would never think to research the teenagers beyond the news story. I would wonder what provoked the alleged murders but I probably wouldn’t start hitting all the MySpace type sites. However, in all fairness, I do have a tendency to google any new guy I date just to make sure things check out properly; sometimes information pops up, sometimes it doesn’t.

The point is, it’s not uncommon to have a blog or MySpace profile. It’s an easy way to stay connected and share our thoughts or expertise on various subjects with anyone. And like most things, there are risks involved. In the case of the teenagers involved in this incident, some of their friends linked to their MySpace pages were subjected to high volumes of comments and messages from people who knew nothing about them or the situation:

Some MySpace users even traveled to the pages of Kara and David's friends, glutting their comment space with hate-filled invective. One friend of Kara's cancelled her account.

When one chooses to have a site, even if it’s a MySpace account intended for friends, it’s considered public. Discretion is advised. And a good rule of thumb: don't do, say or write anything that you don't want to read on front page news.