Dangerous Blogging
A Fresh Look at the Potential Problems of the Web Log
Weblogs, or simply blogs, can be informative, interesting or give a sense of kinship amongst others in the world. Many people find friendship and love in ways that otherwise wouldn’t be available to them. If you ask the bloggers, they’ll assuredly tell you blogs allow a sense of anonymity that you’re not otherwise afforded in the “real world”. As such, people can be free to be themselves and open up their lives to others to read for amusement.
Justin Thompson, a former member of blogger.com says “I blog as a way of remembering the past. A blog to me is a personal journal which can be littered with words, pictures, reminders of the past. The blog is never lost, destroyed in a fire, or stolen in a burglary. It is always there.”
The truth is, as with all things, bad comes with the good. The anonymity aforementioned must be taken with a grain of salt. “It would not be terribly difficult for someone to find you if they really wanted to. People often leave (sometimes unintentional) clues as to who they really are,” says Mark Allan, Freelance Software Engineer of Hamilton, ON.
“Blogging is like any other form of speech; it can be good or bad, right or wrong, fact or opinion. If you actually have something to say, you're likely to piss some people off, and make others happy, but I met an ex-girlfriend and several interesting people by blogging.” Martie Young says.
Perhaps the least of importance, but definitely a nuisance in the blogging community is the spam that circulates. Generally this type of spam does not wreck havoc on your machine, but if you have email notification turned on, it can be quite the pain. You’ll check your email only to find you have over 100 comments left to your blog today. However, when you look at what words or advice the readers have left you, instead you find obnoxious ads for everything from pornography to sports equipment websites.
These advertisements are the blog version of the unsolicited flyers in your mailbox and there is no tastefulness necessary. Of course, with some blog sites you have the option of turning on password protection, blocking anonymous users, and character verifications; but with each precaution the user gets more and more aggravated at how complicated it can become to post a simple message. Even then, the odd piece of spam slips through.
So is blogging just a flash in the pan? Justin seems to think so. “I made more posts in my blog in the last four months of 2005 when I first started the blog then I did in the entire year of 2006.“
Recently in the spotlight, there is a fear of being dooced as had Heather B. Armstrong of Utah who coined the phrase after misspelling “dude” on an instant messenger. However, Justin T. feels that for him, it’s not the real worry. “I've blogged about some of the upsetting parts of my childhood and had my mother find it. Now, I blog on a different web page than I used to, and the whole thing is password protected. The hardest part of blogging is deciding if you want it public or private. For me, the more public it was, the more exciting, but the more restricted I had to be.”
So, the question is, would anyone really want their private thoughts and feelings shared with the public? The answer seems to be, yes. Though you are exposed, it’s done in a relatively “safe” place where nobody knows your real name. The only trouble is, too often, people who know you can find you through searches of your hometown, your common nickname, or just surfing the web they could find a photo of you and link it back to the source or be searching for your company name and stumble upon you.
