Some random pieces of information that made it into my brain yesterday....do they all kind of tie together somehow?

I saw a video clip that led me to the blog of a mom of 6, very funny, just telling stories of the adventures in their household. She gets more than 40,000 hits a day, has some ads on her blog, so she makes around $4000 a month on the blog, just from people clicking, and has a book coming out, and is in talks for a movie. Crazy. How did it all start? She is the mom who put her kids Pokemon cards on ebay. Have you heard or read about that? When asked if people in her town know who she is, or if they know she has this huge following, she says she doesn't think they have any idea. The secretary at the kids' school, for example, doesn't know folks have read about this mom's encounter with her.

We watched Frontline last night on PBS, it was about teenagers and the internet....MySpace, Facebook, etc. Things that stuck with me: They show a 13 year old kid upstairs in his room on his myspace page, "talking" with his "friends" and then show the 7 year-old little brother downstairs, "getting a primer" in on-line social interaction on the Penguin Club website..... There was a story about some girls that started a fight on-line, but took it to the cafeteria at school, and ended up getting suspended. The one said she regrets it, thinks it may make it impossible for her to get into the college she wants, all just from some stupid MySpace comments..... And there was a story about a 13 year-old kid who committed suicide as a result of "cyber-bullying." His parents had no idea it was even happening. The mom talked about how it used to be that if you were having problems with another kid at school, you could at least have a safe haven at home. But this bullying was coming into their home, all hours of the day.

We hear about everything Britney Spears does or doesn't do, with pictures.....The actor Heath Ledger was found dead at 3:30pm yesterday in New York, and Scott heard about it on his ride home from work at 5:00pm. (6pm New York time, but still, I read this morning they removed his body from the apartment around 6:30pm....yet it was already all over the news.)

I've been thinking through the permanence of words in print. I talked with Lars about it when he opened his MySpace thing, and reminded him again when he got a cell phone with a texting package. I think of it everyday when I sit down to write for this blog (this isn't all that much different from having a myspace page), and when I send emails and the (very) occasional letter.

We can communicate so quickly, the technology is amazing. But we need to take time to recognize that once it's out there, it's out. I guess this is true about spoken words, too. We never know what flip thing we said is being held onto by someone else....
Thoughts?