In developing this blog, I have spent a lot of time researching online and reading up on other people's blogs. One thing I found was that what I was most interested in was reading their bios and trying to find a picture of them. For some reason I was fascinated by learning about these people.
Now most people go to blogs to read the posts and discuss the ideas held therein. I love to do that too, but I am also immensely interested in these writers as a face and a personality. Personal anecdotes make what they're writing about so much more real to me.
When I first started blogging, I held nothing back - it was my personal journal for all to see. Then I decided to privatize my posts so that only friends could read it. With that veil, I could continue to write about the people in my life without concealing their identities, since they mostly knew each other anyway.
However, as I was getting back into the blogging scene in the early days of 2009, I wanted a public blog that anyone could stumble upon. I thought long and hard and decided I should create aliases for the people I would be talking about (and even kept myself behind a pen name) for privacy purposes.
With social networking, blogs, photo and video sharing sites becoming evermore popular, transparency has emerged as a concern for us all to consider. It is much easier to find the true identities of people via these sites now, so it makes me wonder how transparent I should be on my blog. Should I use people's real first names? Should I post pictures or videos of them up?
To some extent I am worried about the safety of this - am I endangering those around me by overexposing them on the internet? Or, should I just go with the flow of it (which, apparently, is towards complete transparency)? Though I believe in being honest and open, should I be so open? It doesn't change the quality of my writing if I refer to someone by their real name or their pet name.
A blog I was reading recently dealt with the decision to be more transparent and it made me think about my own choice to use pseudonyms. Only recently did I even decide to reveal my own name in the "About" section. It's a first step towards my personal transparency. However, for now, I still don't feel right about revealing more about the people in my lives.
It's a hard balance between sharing enough and sharing too much!
2 Comments
2/11/2009 08:15:01 am
Hey, I just thought I'd recommend http://www.chrisbrogan.com/
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Yes, it is a hard balance between sharing enough & sharing too much.
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laelene My philosophy is simple: things change. Therefore, we are all on a lifelong journey of discovery. We should be flexible, questioning, learning, adapting, and growing. Always. Archives
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