How Babies Interact Online

Brooke Holt's family set up their first computer when she was in middle school in the early 1990s. She registered her own Yahoo e-mail address while in high school, and later, she began blogging about her daily life. By the time her daughter, Beau, was born in 2009, it felt only natural that the baby should have her own blog too, and now Holt updates the Little Wakka blog for Beau a few times a week.

For many moms, it's no longer enough to post their baby's pics on their Facebook page. Before their kids have learned to type their name, parents are now scooping up online real estate for them in every way; babies have Twitter feeds, blogs, and their own domain names. More than 150,000 specific domain names were registered around the top ten boys and girls' names for 2010, as parents scrambled to secure their kids' place in the virtual world as soon as they entered the real one.

Loren Splawn bought his son's URL the day he was born and eventually turned the site into a blog. "At first, I just wanted to make sure that no one else could register it -- someone with the same name or someone trying sell it for a profit," he says.

People now view a domain name as an essential piece of online identity, says Warren Adelman, president and chief operating officer of the domain-registration and Web-hosting provider GoDaddy.com. They often sync it up with their Twitter handle, Facebook URL, and other social-media sites. "Parents know the Internet is increasingly important," says Adelman, "and they want to get that domain name so their baby has it for the rest of his life."

Social-media consultant Jason Falls's 6-year-old is learning what a blog is, while his 3-year-old stars in a series of videos posted as messages on Facebook. "We're raising these kids in a sharing society," he explains. The trend doesn't seem to be slowing anytime soon -- and that means we'll be seeing an online baby boom for years to come.

Baby Bloggers: Read on to meet a few tiny tots who are making a big splash in the blogosphere...

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