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.
Self censorship
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.
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