http://radio.weblogs.com/0114726/2003/02/12.html

Blogging is a truly expressive method to communicate your thoughts and opinions on pretty much anything. The recent and anticipated growth of this phenomenom is undeniable.

Of course, with any truly expressive form of communication, there are risks and consequences to blurting things out. For sure you have seen disclaimers here and there from blog owners detaching their remarks and opinions from those of their employers. But sometimes, that’s not enough, and a little bit of personal censorship is required..

CentralMX, a site dedicated to Macromedia Central, points to an article in the Salt Lake Tribune that talks aboutt the perils of blogging from an employees point of view:

Last October, he published in his blog a photo of a pallet of Apple Macintosh computers being delivered to Microsoft headquarters. The following week Hanscom was fired for allegedly violating a confidentiality agreement he had signed when Microsoft hired him.

On his blog, Hanscom admitted that he may have gone over the line by publishing the location where Microsoft receives shipments of high-value merchandise.

“The picture itself might have been permissible,” he wrote, “but because I also mentioned that I worked at the MSCopy print shop, and which building it was in, it pushed me over the line.”

Source: The Salt Lake Tribune

So, the moral of the story: Watch Your Back, Check Over Your Shoulder, and Cover Your Ass.. We’re Watching ™

Was visiting Gothamist and saw this entry floating right up top, covering a NY Post article. I figured, since I’ve already talked about teens blogging, I may as well mention this other part of the spectrum.

They tell of an interesting new blog titled “Belle de Jour: Diary of a London Call Girl“. Yup, Belle is a prostitue. There are no actual pictures, nor will she reveal her identity, but it makes for some different reading.

Growing up is always a trying and difficult time, I think, regardless of your particulars of your situation. Social circles, peer pressure, and parental expectations are just some of the sources of stress the youth of today are fighting. Surely, it’s not to say that we didn’t all suffer through these issues on our own, but certainly there’s been a change, perhaps evolution, of the forms in which it manifests. Just two weeks ago, I pointed out an article that talked about the potential use of the Internet and its variants for bullying others at school.

The New York Times Magazine has a quite lengthy piece on the blogging trend and how it is infiltrating the teenage social experience. The girth of it takes us through the lives and experiences of many different teens and how they are drawn to the online world for release. As noted in the article:

Writing in his online journal was cathartic for him, he said, but it was hardly stress-free. A week earlier, he left a post about an unrequited crush, and an anonymous someone appended negative comments, remarks J. wouldn’t detail (he deleted them), but which he described with distress as ‘’disgusting language, vulgarities.'’ J. panicked, worried that the girl he liked might learn about the vulgar comments and, by extension, his attraction to her. It was a somewhat mysterious concern. Couldn’t the girl have read his original post, I asked? And anyway, didn’t he secretly want her to read his journal? ‘’Of course,'’ he moaned, leaning against the banister. ‘’For all I know she does. For all I know, she doesn’t.'’

J.’s sense of private and public was filled with these kinds of contradictions: he wanted his posts to be read, and feared that people would read them, and hoped that people would read them, and didn’t care if people read them. He wanted to be included while priding himself on his outsider status. And while he sometimes wrote messages that were explicitly public — announcing a band practice, for instance — he also had his own stringent notions of etiquette. His crush had an online journal, but J. had never read it; that would be too intrusive, he explained.

…

Silences like this can create paranoia. It may be that friends just didn’t read the post. Or it may mean they thought the post was stupid. There’s a temptation to take silence — in real life or online — as a snub. ‘’If I get a really mean comment and I go back and I look at it again, and again, it starts to bother me,'’ M. told me. ‘’But then I think, If I delete it, everyone will know this bothers me. But if I respond, it’ll mean I need to fight back. So it turns into a conflict, but it’s fun. It’s like a soap opera, kind of.'’

Source: NY Times Magazine

The most interesting aspect of this article is the level of involvement teens have with the Internet today. I guess it’s only been in the last two weeks that I realized, and appreciated, how large and interesting this group is.

I have a very large extended family, spanning 49 first cousins alone (of which I am the second youngest, only to my own younger brother). Within the confines of my own first cousins, there are probably more than 100 children (again my younger brother and I the only non-contributing nodes). In our culture, this makes me an “uncle” to all of them, despite the fact that some of them are older than me!

I was first brought into this circle about a year ago when one of my nieces obtained my AIM screen name from someone. I got a short little instant message and was surprised to find out that it was her. It seems there was some apprehension on that end as they were scared I would be “mean” or not “cool”. Apparently, I was funny enough. A day later her younger brother shot me an IM. Within a week, I had messages from another 4 of them.. apparently there was this whole network of my nieces and nephews that I didn’t know about. Strangely enough, I think I’m also one of the few from my level in the family to ever participate.

Damn, I’m getting old.