I went to a blog meetup last night. Met Gwen Harlow, an accomplished web and print graphic artist, blogger, and code maven. Why am I not gonna point to her blogs? Gwen wants to keep her personal life apart from her professional contacts.

As a freelance artist, Gwen is always looking for work. Her portfolio site shows a great track record designing web sites, print, web banners, and logos. Gwen's résumé is first thing on her main navbar. I don't know Gwen's mother and didn't ask, but would Gwen want her family to know about her risque print ads for a lingerie store?

I picked the most exotic thing from her portfolio, out of context. Her whole collection shows a wide variety of clients, treatments, and media. Her portfolio design makes it easy to see the context.

Weblogs are bad at this. When was the last time you read six months's of anyone's postings? This depends on why you're at the weblog and how it helps you.

• If you're there to hire someone, you look at a few recent posts (2-5 screenfuls), for interesting or relevant categories, a résumé/portfolio, and the overall site structure. From this you hope to get an impression of how this person fits your team, project, org.
   
• If you're a clergyman checking in on members of your parish, you're listening for the blogger's tone, for what is on their mind, for how you might help them and how they might help the parish.  
   
• If you're a family member, you're non-invasively checking in on your loved ones.

Weblogs can be confessional, a daily diary, an unfettered spew of consciousness. Lives and blogs are freely filled with sex, drugs, politics, food, religion, race, health, rumor, kvetching: everything you're told to leave out of the office (in professional America, anyway). When they are, it messes with the whole idea of communicating on purpose.

That means ignoring your varied audiences and stakeholder when you choose:

• a writing style,
• make editorial and information architecture,
• choose a look and feel, and
• self-censor.

Whether you do it formally or not, you craft personas for your family, children, church, romantic connections, the strangers of blogspace, connections outside your firm, subordinates, peers, and superiors within the firm. Very few posts are appropriate for all audiences. How do you keep them straight without going nuts?

I've met bloggers who post pseudonymously to keep their worlds apart.

You have several choices:

1. Shut up.

Self-censorship. Don't say what might come back to harm you.

Rory Perry on Candor and Blogging:

Howard Bashman disagrees with Hugh Hewitt's statement that "candor is the first requirement of successful blogging."  I'm stuck in the middle on this.  As a consitutional officer and appointed Clerk of the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, my ability to opine on legal issues is more restricted than, say, Howard's, or Ernie's or Denise's.  Obviously, it may be problematic for me, in my role as a public servant, to use blogspace to engage in a "web duel [that] makes light sabers look tame," as Hugh Hewitt puts it. 

So candor, for a public information blogger, is of a different stripe than a private blogger.  Before I launched this blog in March of this year, I decided that candor in the public context relates to the free and public delivery of legal information, because law is free.  So I have refrained from weighing in on issues like the election of judges, choosing instead to report facts and perspectives related to law, technology and the courts, all of which falls within the scope of my public duties.  Might not help my traffic, but you won't read any savage commentary here.

This is a delicate balance at times, and perhaps exlains the dearth of bloggers in the public judicial sphere. 

According to Andrew Bayer, lawyers aren't the only ones with these problems.

The second thing that jumped out at me was a section at the end, talking about a high schooler who had started a blog, got his 25 or so readers, and was happy - until his mother found his blog, and read about the illicit activities (drinking, drugs, partying) that he documented in his blog. Said high schooler is now worried that he's going to have to self-censor in his blog.

This is something that causes problems for me, too ... not so much in terms of personal dirt that could come back at me (while there are a few things I've done in my life that I don't want certain people to be able to find about, I have absolutely no desire to share those things with, well, anybody, so I'm safe. heh) but more in terms of bitching about work. I work for a Major Tech Corporation, as you can tell from a mention here or there in the blog, and by the email address whenever I post a comment. (I really need to start using alternate email addresses rather than my work one - someday I *am* going to leave and getting all my mail forwarded around will be hell. anyway...) I've got some problems with the way this corporation operates - not in an Enron/WorldCom sense, but I don't like our CEO very much and I don't like how upper management treats us employees. I'd like to blog about it - it's something that's really bothering me that I need to get off my chest, and it's information that I think should be out in the public eye, though not so critical that mainstream media would care.

I don't blog about it because I'm afraid of it ending up getting me in trouble ... there've been a few bloggers who've lost their jobs because of blogging ... I have no desire to be one. Blogging, unlike much of the rest of the Internet, isn't about anonymity, and that can make things more complicated.

2. Narrowcast.

Try to avoid leakage between your worlds. Create channels of content in separate web spaces. Each space makes it convenient for a reader to stay with the kind of content you intend for them. Channeling microcontent means your barbershop chorus friends don't find your political rants one click away from your writeup of the last SPEBSQSA convention. You make it harder for folks in one world to wander into your other worlds.

3. Wear masks.

Assume a name, a style, and a persona for each of your publics. Pseudonymity on top of narrowcasting. This may work for some things but not for all. Curious or dedicated prying eyes often see through these.

4. Live with it.

If you have little or nothing to lose, you can say:

• "If they can't take a joke, they can leave."
• "If they object to my posts, they can always fire me."
• "If they fired me, I shouldn't have been working there anyway."
• "I don't care if my insurance company knows I have disease X"
• "I want my friends and colleagues to know all about me, good or bad."

This is the simplest, easiest, riskiest approach.  

We want more options. Secure, controlled access may give us a few more or strengthen one or two these. But blogging in public is a public act. It takes new awareness and skills to raise these blurry fences. 

Thanks, Gwen, for reminding me.

 [aka Bloggers for Hire]