YouDiligence.com is the brain-child of Kevin Long. According to a blog post on ESPNB’s Jock-O-Sphere, the service works like this:

“…for a small fee — $1,250 a year for 50 athletes or less, or $5,000 a year for 500-750 athletes (described as pennies a day for each athlete) — schools are essentially given a broad-scale monitoring system for their athletes’ Twitter, MySpace and Facebook pages. Enter in the keywords you’d prefer not to show up in your student-athletes’ stream — these can range from curse words to alcohol and drug references to just about anything; it’s entirely customizable — and the instant any of these buzz words are posted to a student-athletes’ social media stream, administrators can be alerted via e-mail and a detailed account of the instance is added to a spreadsheet log … instead of online a few hours later on a blog or newspaper’s Web site, which could be potentially damaging to the program.”

This is a really interesting post (by Ryan Corazza, a freelance writer and Web designer based in Chicago), whether you’re in the world of college athletics or not. Would you (would I) be okay with your company monitoring what you post on social sites? Are you sure they are not? Would it make a difference in what you post?

Disclosure: At least one of the schools mentioned in the post is a “university partner” of the company I work for, Learfield.

For the record, I don’t see anything wrong with schools keeping an eye on what their student athelets are saying/writing. I mean, it’s out there. You should assume everyone is reading every word you post.

If you feel that your school is censoring your freedom of speech, then it’s decision time.