Personal Blogging - How Personal?

Many blogs deal with the day-to-day activities of the writer, something they did, saw, or perhaps a joke they heard. But how personal should the writer get with their blog?

Let's take Joe for example. Joe works his Monday through Friday 8am to 5pm job in your typical office environment. Joe has a friendly relationship with his supervisor and co-workers, occasionally going out for drinks with them after a hard day's work. They discuss life, politics, things of interest, and so on.

One evening at the local pub they start to discuss the internet and the blog phenomenon. Joe and a couple of his co-workers have blogs and explain to the others how it is a great way to meet people, share interests, rant and rave, etc. The others appear interested, and ask how they can create their own blog. Joe gives them the web site address of the blogging service he uses, along with the address to his own blog.

A few weeks later, Joe's supervisor receives a phone call just as he sits down to begin another day at work. It was Joe on the other line, and a sickly sounding Joe at that. "Morning boss," Joe says, "I'm not going to be able to make it in today, feeling a bit sick". Joe's supervisor excuses him, and returns to what he was doing.

Lunch time rolls around, and instead of running down to the local sandwich shop, Joe's supervisor decides to work on his blog, and do some browsing on the internet. After writing articles about "good work ethic", and "the responsibilities of today's supervisor", Joe's supervisor decides to spend the remainder of his lunch hour browsing other people's blogs.

As usual, Joe's supervisor decides to first browse the blogs in his bookmarked list. After reading a couple of good articles, he pulls up Joe's blog, not having visited it in a few days.

"Oh, wow!", Joe's supervisor exclaims. "I didn't know Joe went turkey hunting this weekend, he didn't mention anything about it yesterday". While looking at photos of Joe's prize, he noticed something odd... the date on the blog was this morning!

Although Joe's desk remained pink slip free when he returned, he did have some explaining to do, and had learned a valuable lesson from the incident:

Be careful what you put on the internet, it can be accessed by anyone!

Category Posted: Blogging