I received a (potentially) heart-stopping e-mail from my boss this morning:
Subject: Blogs
Body: Do you participate in any? how? why?
It’s not that any of the blogs I run are particularly salicious salacious, defamatory or overly personal. I don’t use co-worker’s names, I don’t trash the company, and my venting is particularly mild. It’s just that I don’t want her to read any of them. It’s the same looming fear I have of my mother using a search engine to find all the crap I’ve littered along the cyber-highway. Both are smart women and will eventually overcome their technical limitations and see my Internet stash. I know this, but…some part of me doesn’t want it to happen. I don’t want my mom to ask me why I use a screen name instead of my real name. I don’t want my boss to scrutinize the time stamps on my posts. I don’t either to know what I’ve been up to. They’re not my audience. I don’t want to be found. Sigh.
So what to do? I answered my boss’s question at a very high level (no domain names were disclosed), and then offered to help her set one up for herself. A-ha! Distraction!! I went heavy on the name dropping (Blogger, Bloglines, Blogroll). More distraction! Maybe it’ll be enough to put off the inevitable question…So, where’s your blog?
But I kinda doubt it. I want to keep a personal blog but not engage in self censorship. What’s the balance? How do other people handle this?
