Do you ever wonder what’s going on with your kids? Do you feel like you might be left out of a part of their lives? Do you really know all of their friends?

Parents with middle and high school kids may want to check out a Web site that has kids across the country running to their keyboards every night to check in with their new Internet friends.

Parents of students at John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor received a letter home last week cautioning them of the hugely popular Web site that police think could be a virtual playground for stalkers and pedophiles.

The site is called www.myspace.com, and parents were urged in the letter written by Officer Dan Frazell of the Bangor Police Department to visit the site and search for their children’s names.

The letter, combined with a story out of Normal, Ill., where a 21-year-old woman who had a myspace blog, or Web log, went missing and was later found dead in Mississippi, prompted me to take a peek.

I searched the site for local kids between the ages of 16 and 18. There are 402 Bangor High School students of that age who have profiles on the site, by the way.

It’s free and simple, just the way kids like it.

With an e-mail address and a made-up password, you’re in. You can now browse through 35 million “profiles” and create one of your own.

Kids post pictures of themselves on their sites and then decorate their “space” with various colors. They can even pick a song that will begin to play when a browser clicks into their space.

You can fill out a survey so that browsers can learn your likes and dislikes. Do you smoke, drink or do drugs? The site will list your birthday and the town you live in, your high school and where you hang out.

Frazell found some local kids who had not only pictures of themselves in skimpy outfits and sexual poses, but also pictures of their homes with comments.

“This is a picture of my house in Hampden Maine,” for example.

Any of the site’s 35 million members can do a search, click on pictures they like and become “friends” with that person. Pictures of those friends are then posted on the user’s site, and you can access those profiles by simply clicking on the pictures.

Users also post blogs or journals in which they discuss their day, their family life and likes and dislikes.

Many sites are seemingly harmless, with cute pictures of the kids and their friends and filled with fairly mindless chatter about what’s going on in their lives.

Many would probably be shocking to most of you. One 16-year-old local gal has a photo of herself bent over wearing a thong; “this would be muh bit butt” she notes beneath it. Another photo of her in a bustier indicates she was “trying to be a French whore.”

Even if your child’s site isn’t full of talk of sex and drugs and partying, click on the pictures of the “friends” that are chatting with them. Clicking on those pictures will take you to their “spaces.”

You may think it’s all harmless teenage stuff, but Sgt. Glenn Lang, the supervisor of Maine’s Computer Crime Task Force doesn’t think so.

Lang has fielded a rash of complaints and concerns about the Web site from concerned parents.

“These kids are giving out sensitive information about themselves as well as posting pictures, and they are putting it out there for millions of people to see,” he said this week. “We are constantly cautioning kids not to give out personal information about themselves, and that’s exactly what this Web site is all about. It’s very personal.”

“This is great info for a stalker or a pedophile, and we do have these in our area,” Frazell noted.

One of the complaints to the computer task force concerned a young girl whose picture was lifted off the myspace Web site and transferred to another “less pleasant” Web site, with various derogatory remarks attached to it.

“Her parents were very upset, but there’s nothing we can do about it. Once that information or photograph is out there, you’ve lost control of it,” said Lang.

And the threat is there even if you don’t sign up.

There also are pictures and profiles of Bangor teachers and administrators, which I’m certain these folks didn’t set up.

Kids have taken legitimate photographs of teachers and principals, posted them on myspace and created profiles for them. They tell where they work, what they teach and where they live. Then they fill in the blanks with a variety of crude and sexually explicit information, and it appears it was written by the person profiled.

Police aren’t sure whether the abduction and murder of that young woman from Illinois was connected to her myspace blog, but they are certainly looking into the possibility. She was described as a serious science student with lots of friends. A beautiful picture of her is posted on her site. She talked about her work at Ruby Tuesday’s and invited any readers to come to the restaurant so she could serve them. She also notes that she likes to have a good time and has plenty of guilty pleasures.

This week I did a search on about a dozen teens I know from various places. They were all there. Every one of them. Some of it may look harmless, but keep looking.

Search for your kid’s name. They may not be talking to you so much these days, but they may be doing a lot of chatting with plenty of others.