MD 23 Things: Week 9, Thing 20

[your neighborhood librarian]

YouTube is Thing 20. Here are videos from my family on YouTube.

My husband has approximately a hundred gamillion sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, and cousins, so we have been using YouTube for a while to keep in touch with them.

A couple things I have learned the icky way:

• Don't post video of your children in their jammies - you get A LOT of hits, and that skeeves me out.
• Listen carefully to the verbal content of your videos - make sure the people in them aren't calling each other by name. I've got one up there now that conveys a little too much information, but I'm hoping it's garbled enough that we're safe.

All this sharing is marvelous and all, but it's important to remember that there are a lot of creeps out there, and many of them can figure out a lot of information about you if you give them just a little. Our rules are:

• No first names for kids (we use blogonyms)
• No last names for anyone
• Don't post pictures or video that clearly show the school name or the street name
• I am not even comfortable mentioning my neighborhood online, but sometimes it's inevitable

And here's Mr. Four swordfighting with a pretzel.