The problem with blogs as they are today is that people tend to not think that "hey, anyone in the world with an Internet connection can read my posts". Case in point, a girl from Texas who's in Japan on the JET program has a blog, where she made some not so cool comments that some of the accidental readers objected to. She was linked in a featured section for whatever reason, but then all of a sudden her blog "for family and friends" became a lot more public. While I understand her reasoning for keeping the blog public, one has to realize that putting something on the Net makes it public in the fullest sense of the word. Even if one uses security methods, those can be compromised, or people who have access can make their credentials known.

Another article I just read on cnet mentions some chick working for Friendster who got canned for making work-related comments on her blog. In the article there was a reference about a contractor working for Microsoft who was terminated after posting to his blog pictures of Apple G5s being unloaded at the Microsoft campus. Clearly people aren't being careful enough with the information they're disseminating. Why do they put these things on display for people they don't know to see?

The answer is ego. That's not meant in a disparaging manner, because ego is important to have (you go Ayn Rand!). However, in dropping a little something -- a bit of info here, a tidbit there -- so people will think you're cool or important, you can expose a risk to others. In the case of the former employees of Friendster and Microsoft, they exposed sensitive information; from the company's perspective, they presented a future security risk and therefore were terminated. The JET girl's sarcastic commentary simply left herself open to critique through posting her commentary publicly, so she has little right to complain.

As for me, I could certainly get myself in trouble if I were to post confidential information from work on here, even accidentally. Should I want to impress people in that I work on cutting edge HDDs, I have to provide proof, right? People want to know what's coming, to know something most people don't know -- but so do competitors. Everyone wants to be respected, but abandoning one's professionalism is not the way to do it. And publishing information about oneself or one's opinions in a public forum certainly opens one up to criticism. Don't want to be criticized? Keep your opinions to yourself!

Eventually I'll write my own information management software that allows me to customize access for finer publishing control. For example, I might want to write a piece using "colorful metaphors" for my friends' entertainment, but not want to have it read by my immediate family. (It helps to at least put forth the illusion that I don't have my worse moments.) After all, it's the network structure that really matters: with the glut of information out there, partitioning it becomes the most important thing. Access, flow, connections. The science is still young.