This Is This

Hey. Back now, and every time I am it makes me think of the relationship I have with my blog. Things happen, and I think: “Should I write about this?” Actually two major things happened that I can’t write about because I have friends (what?) who read this and it wouldn’t be right to break the news to them here. If you know me, next time we speak, all you have to do is say: “What are the two pieces of news?” and I will tell you personally. And if you’re the ninth caller, you go into the prize draw for a holiday to Cancun (OOooooooh!) No seriously, ask me.

Last week I mentioned AOL, the company I work for. That night I spoke to my dad and the first thing is asked me is why I decided to go public with my employer after four years of blogging. “Go public” sounds a bit pompous, because I wasn’t really hiding it, I just chose not to say where I worked, for a few reasons:

It’s an internet company
And a media company. A huge one. I was worried that if this blog got really popular, then critics could argue it’s because of who I work for. That changed of course when I realised this blog isn’t really popular. Also, lots of people who work in the media have blogs and their sites aren’t known as Throwing Musings by Pete Stevens from The Daily Sentinel, or Blog Cabin by Sarah Zucchini from TFR Online News. No. Sarah Zucchini has her own site and does her thing at work separately. Also, there are lots of sites written by people who don’t work in the media which are far more popular than mine. Which is a good thing, because can you imagine how boring that would be?

Lots of people have blogs
Far more people blog now than they did four years ago, so working for a company like AOL does not give me an edge. I have made some great friendships at AOL and I link to blogs run by my friends, who mention the company and other colleagues, so if you’ve been reading this over a while you’d know who I work for because they have left the company and they write about it themselves.

Social networking
If you’re on My Space or Linked In or Face Book (I refuse to do those stupid CappedUp shitness they put in your titles. It’s Play Station, OK? ShitHeads.) then you can easily trace me, this blog, my Flickr page, my friends networks of work alumni, etc and find out a bunch of things. It makes me careful not to put personal details anywhere, but it’s stupid hiding the big things, because you’d find out if you wanted to.

Work/Life balance
I have a healthy one, I think and I keep the two separate, as I do with personal stuff. No one wants to be burdened with my problems. My policy has always been to mark out the two. “This is my site, this is my shite.” Where I can, that is. fs something has happened that’s going to affect my writing, then it’s fair to share that. If I’m cracking jokes all week and then announce some tragedy from earlier on, then that would seem a little odd. As for work, I wouldn’t link to my site from the pages I edit every day at work and I never write about the company or strategy on this site, because that would get in trouble and understandably so.

More later, here as usual. I re-discovered saunas at the weekend. Good god I’m relaxed.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 8:24 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.