Once said can not be unsaid

There are many places where people can publish text and multimedia content on the internet. There are many places where this can be done for free. Examples of this include blogger, myspace, youtube, flickr, zoomr and wikispaces. The list of places like this is extensive and growing rapidly.

This means that young people can say and publish things very easily, on impulse and without due consideration to the consequences. Sometimes things can be said that are regretted later. It is a simple thing to go to the website and remove the material which is now causing embarrassment but the problem is that evidence still remains in the databases of search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Some time after content is placed on a web site Google and Yahoo robots check the material out and put key words into their database along with key phrases. These words and phrases continue to appear when using search engines long after the offensive material has been removed from the actual website. So even after the material has been removed, the words remain for quite some time.

What are some things we as parents might do to help our children with this?