lalalondon.net

When I go to bed at night, it usually takes a few minutes for me to relax and settle down and I usually have what seems like a thousand thoughts all running through my brain, trying to keep me from sleeping. Lately, they’ve mostly been about work but occasionally they might be about something I’d like to write about in this blog. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to think to myself, “well I’ll just write that up in Word tomorrow at lunchtime” and then by the time morning comes, the thought and the prompt to post has just disappeared into the ether.

Sometimes, when I’m at work, I’ll be on a cigarette break and I’ll think of something and I’ll try to write a note in my phone to prompt me for when I get home. Usually I forget about the note and then weeks later, I’ll find a bunch of notes that seem cryptically impossible to understand.

So – the point of this? I have a bad memory and I’m a bad, bad blogger!

Anyway, I did actually have a really good thought this morning and I remembered to write it down. In fact, I even had five minutes spare to think about what I wanted to say and draft a post – it’s all about Privacy and the blogging world.

When I started blogging, many years ago on Livejournal, I used to write about my life, warts and all. I used to update every two or three days and I had a wonderful little community of friends there – many of them who still blog either at LJ or on their own site to this day. Because Livejournal has some wonderful security features, I felt like I could share a lot more than what I do here at LLN.net, for instance, I used to call G by his full name and I even gave out my mobile number to my friends there – it was all so easy when I had full control over who could and couldn’t see my entries.

But now I’m in the public domain.

I’ve already broken my original rules of blogging in public: no identifying photos of either my husband or I and no mentioning my full name.

I know a lot of bloggers out there are now turning back the clock on revealing their personal details – one blogger who originally had a public Facebook profile is now setting hers to private and setting up a Facebook profile for her website, another is getting rid of her domain all together and re-doing it – basically creating a new online identity, but can these people undo everything they’ve made public in the past? I’ve contemplated changing everything around here to remove my name and my personal photos, but it all seems like a bit of hard work if I pledge not to blog so personally anymore.

Is any personal information sacred anymore? Are you worried about the wrong hands getting a hold of your personal information that you put out there on the internet? If you’re a parent, do you worry about posting photos of your kids online for anyone to see? If you’re not a parent, what do you think about photos that clearly identify you?