The Right to Blog: The Law for Students and Staff -- and Cops

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has several good web sites explaining the right of students to express themselves on blogs:

http://w2.eff.org/bloggers/lg/faq-students.php

and for state college faculty and staff:

http://w2.eff.org/bloggers/lg/faq-labor.php

Since one out of five students blog, and a great many faculty and staff blog as well, these are useful primers on First Amendment Rights.

EFF also discusses your right to an anonymous blog: the contentious issue challenged by police groups and others who do not like sites such as ratemycop.com or ratemyprofessors.com

For more on the efforts of police to shut down cop-rating blogs, see this article.

Perhaps your campus newspaper could do a story on student and staff blogs? Do they educate? Go over the line? What role do they play in college student and faculty life? The new "virtual diary" of the 21st century? Or will all your "status updates" go up in smoke when you shut down your Facebook account?