It's hard to know what is appropriate to talk about here.
While it's is technically a public forum, where anyone could happen along to this site (especially now with the link from the high traffic site "Kristin In Berlin"), it is mostly people that I already know fairly well who make up most of the traffic (or at least all of the comments). If I were sitting in a room with only the people that I suspect are reading, I would have few qualms about saying something inappropriate (as I likely have done many times in the past). But would I want to write down those thoughts where anyone could come along (perhaps even months later) and read them? It seems to me that might undergo slightly different filtering.
It is not only a matter of who is reading, but the fact that this is a much more permanent medium than speaking. With spoken indescretions, one can hope that they will fade away and be forgotten. With published indescretions, things that you have written could always come back to haunt you, even if you've editted the page to remove the indescretions... with all the web-crawling out there, you never know what version of your page Google is caching, or which split-second view of the page some other history-of-the-web site out there is saving for posterity.
Then there are things that I'm never quite sure if I can talk about or not regarding my workplace. It's always hard to keep track of what is public knowledge (i.e. there has been some sort of press release and it's posted on our website), what is still under wraps (i.e. things that are revealed in sentences starting with "Remember to keep this 'in the company family'"), and all the things in between (i.e. things that are not necessarily secret, but that haven't been announced on our company webiste). I think it is best if I just avoid talking about my company at all on the blog!
Almost all of my readers are bloggers themselves... what do you guys think? Do you often find yourself not posting things you might want to post?
-KDH
p.s. Don't worry... the change in page width that you've noticed was on purpose... I'm playing with the relative widths of the columns... and I'll likely play around with it until I find what seems best.
5 comments:
i definitely avoid writing about work (see dooced.)
also, i start a lot of posts discussing something that has been bothering me or that i've been thinking a lot about but then realize that i really don't want it out in the public domain.
whatever you're comfortable with i guess.
I definitely filter. In fact, I feel more inhibited while blogger than in just about any other situation that I regularly find myself.
oops. blogging, not blogger.
Filtering is absolutely critical.
You pretty much have to assume that the world is reading your Blog. Complete strangers will find it from random Googling, people you went to Elementary school with will find it because they suddenly wonder what their old classmates are up to. I've had both experiences, and stranger.
As you said, the permanence of the medium is the biggest cause for caution. The odds, for example, that random co-workers will stumble across your Blog this week are pretty small, but the odds that one of them will do so in the next year or so are significant.
I'm careful about what I blog too. You never know who's reading and who you'll offend. I also try to keep with parenting stuff just because most of the people reading our blog are more interested in pictures of our kids than anything else (I think).
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