There are a number of coming-of-age moments that have meaning for people, and if you ask what those milestones are, you’ll likely get a lot of different answers. I’d have to say a fairly universal one is the realization that most of the “offenses” committed by eight-and-nine-year-old kids are not of cosmic import.

I was one of those control-freak kids, and wasn’t really a threat to get into a lot of trouble anyway. But I may have been the last kid in my class to be actually intimidated with a standard educational threat:

“Young man, do you want something like that on your permanent record?”

Okay, so maybe I did worry a little too much about what would be on my mythical “permanent record.”

Having been out of public schools for a couple of decades, I’m not sure how prevalent or effective such a tactic might be. Based on the explosive growth of MySpace and other sites that promote sharing of personal information, I’m not sure kids are receptive to those ideas anyway. Steven Silvers had an excellent take on what he calls the Transparent Generation.

I turns out that many adults who grew out of the fear of the “permanent record” ought to revisit the notion. Most people have never taken the time to Google themselves to see what is out there. The search engines will find just about anything you’ve ever attached your name to publicly. More importantly, they’ll find things you never knew were written about you:

“In meat space this would be like me putting up a negative billboard right next to your location and you not noticing it for months.”

You can’t control what other people write. But you can control the things you write — and one day might regret.

My caution goes out to those occasional writers (and bloggers) who have a stake in maintaining credibility. It’s so easy to let your biases be exposed, especially in a politically partisan climate. If you’ve got a message that deserves heeding, off-handed comments can cut your audience in half instantly. Surfers have the option of tuning you out in an instant, and reduce your effectiveness and reach forever.

I’ve got a fellow blogger that I correspond with from time to time, and I occasionally have to remind this individual that bias creeps in. It’s not a political blog, yet politically-charged opinions can leak through. This person is making a concerted effort to weed out the statements that threaten to overshadow the intended message. In most cases, these are sentences or adjectives that weren’t even necessary to the primary point.

Maybe I take for granted my training as a journalist, and my ability to self-screen and maintain an editorial objectivity. But in an age of Google cache and the Wayback Machine, you now have a permanent record, kiddo. Act like it.