Dear Blogger users,

I’m increasingly reading blogs through an aggregator. This is a software tool that grabs text from lots of different web pages and puts it in one place for me. It saves me time, and allows me to read more blogs in less time. More people are using them all the time.

To enable this, many blogs have site feeds, using technologies such as RSS and Atom, and provide a link somewhere that people can plug into their aggregator to read it that way. But most Blogger sites don’t have this turned on by default. If you use Blogger and haven’t already done it, make the time to switch it on — the instructions are here — it should only take a couple of minutes, and (if it’s what you want) it’ll make it easier for people to stay up to date with your blog.

I can see trouble brewing. They’re not saying so in the adverts yet, but Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith has gained an M rating from the Office of Film and Literature Classification.

Unlike MA, this is not a legal restriction on kids under 15 seeing it, just a recommendation. But it may cause ripples in my house, where we have a well-established rule that G and PG-rated are okay, but anything higher is out. The kids understand and respect that, that they’ll have to wait until they’re older to see those programmes and films.

But this is Star Wars, dammit, the final chapter. I know Lucas said a while back that it was darker, but kids everywhere will be wanting to see it. Isaac in fact got invited to a screening with a bunch of friends, two days after the premiere. He’ll be 10 by then. Obviously I haven’t seen it yet, but knowing where the bar is for M-rated violence, I’m not sure I want him to see it. Some thought and discussion needs to go into this.

(By comparison, in the USA it’s got a PG-13 rating. The UK rating is 12A.)

What do other parents think about it?