Russell Beattie has an interesting entry about subject matter for his weblog. What to post and what not to post is a tough decision, I think. You’ll find that I never mention my employer here, the reason for that is I never want to run into a problem where I’ve said something about my employer or their products that they don’t particulary like and have to answer for it to my manager (or his boss). I also try to avoid mentioning competing products as well, but I fail on that front occasionally, much to my chagrin. Other than that, subject matter is pretty much no holds barred, with the exception that I know my immediate family members read this stuff at least some of the time, and I try to avoid saying things that they would find too jarring. The fact that my mother could be reading this at any time leads me to think a bit about the language I use.

The other means I have for keeping things compartmentalized is that I’m not “Rafe the guy with the blog” in the non-virtual world. I don’t really talk about the site at work, nor do I discuss it offline with friends and family, unless asked about it specifically. In fact, when I meet people in the physical world and they mention that they know me from this site, it kind of freaks me out. And the really weird thing is that I almost never write about personal stuff here, I can’t imagine disclosing the intimate details of my personal life online and having to meet people for real who had read them. Needless to say, I’ll probably never write a memoir. I guess for me intimacy is more a two way street. I have great sympathy for people who are famous and who have to deal with complete strangers every day who’ve read sordid detail of their lives on the gossip pages.