I have worries about my blog. I feel paranoid that one day, the wrong person is going to read it, interpret it wrong, and get me in trouble.
And usually I would listen to my common sense and switch this blog to private, but I can't. Because it would then be exactly like a diary, and then I would stop posting because I don't like diaries. I know, I'm a bit contradictory.
A long time ago, before I ever knew what blogger was, I was writing and sharing my thoughts on Xanga (oh the horror), and Myspace, and I found that I wasn't satisfied. I needed something that fit my needs even more. Something that's first priority was writing, or blogging. It's a wonder that I didn't stumble upon Livejournal first, but I'm glad I didn't.
Every time I've said something less than nice about people that didn't know I had a blog, I've used discretion, and in hindsight the choices I made back then weren't bad.
With the media attacking bloggers right now, and people also outing bloggers I feel even more paranoid than I was in the first place. But whatever. I've come to the conclusion that nothing in my blog can harm me.
I feel sorry for those who have been outed, and have been forced to go private, or stop blogging. The people who were malicious enough to do that have no life.
Why is the media attacking bloggers?
ReplyDeleteHmmm... I agree; I had to give up several of my blogs due to pressure from a certain organisation which I can't even reference to now *rolls eyes* But yeah, because of a few bad blogs, and things like Twitter (even though I <3 Twitter), 'real' bloggers and 'good' blogs are criticized too and it sucks... But hey, what can be done? And yeah, it's definitely safer to have nothing on your blog which can be linked back to you or anything in particular, but it's easy to do this and still remain public, but censorship sucks... Anyway, nice to comment on your blog again =)
ReplyDeleteSuperStizzle
Your concern is very valid (and it's only going to get worse as you go on to more 'serious' employments where you have to worry about colleagues and bosses).
ReplyDeleteIt's not contradictory at all: You want to share your thoughts with a select group of friends, and you're happy to share with the rest of the world, so long as they don't know you in real life. That leaves the small (but annoying) group of people you know in real life, but don't want to share with.
There are a couple of options. Neither of them is perfectly satisfactory.
1) Limit the amount of personal information. Don't use last names or anything that will appear on a Google search.
2) Cut off access to select people/groups. If you know the IP address of the person you wish to deny access to, and your web host allows this (blogger does not), then you can essentially cut off access.
This was a big issue for me. Basically, I tried implementing 1) until some idiot decided to link to my site by my last name (and then promptly disappeared). Afterwards, my site popped up first on any Google search on my name.
More recently, I got around this by denying access to anybody that comes from my school network. Basically, this denies access to any students or faculty (unless they are using an outside line, which is rare). It won't stop people who are really persistent, but it'll stop them from casually visiting the site.
Basically, it's not a perfect solution, but it has put me more at ease.