NYTimes on candid blogging

In Dating a Blogger, Reading All About It, Warren St. John writes about how many bloggers write very candidly about their lives, sometimes with unexpected consequences:

When her bosses were alerted that Ms. Armstrong was writing about her office life, they fired her, she said. She is now much more careful about what she publishes in her blog, and she had a word of caution for bloggers who write furtively about others. “If you’re publishing under your own name, they’ll find out,” she said. “I was extremely naïve.”

Everyone is comfortable with different levels of publicity for their lives. The key is to realize that anything you publish online is out there for people to read, so you shouldn’t put something out there if you don’t want it to be read. One of the people cited in the NY Times article is relying on “security by obscurity”, figuring that her mother doesn’t know how to find her blog… hmm. Wonder if her mother would be interested in looking at her blog now that she’s been in the NY Times?