This is the third blog I’ve tried to start over the years. It’s like joining a gym. Every few years someone talks me into joining them at their gym. I end up walking out repeating, “Now, I remember why I didn’t join a gym the last time I went to one.” Going to the gym and blogging are great things to do. Please stop telling me I need to do either.
I use (or at least cyber-squat on) RobHalligan as my ID for about 100 web services. (Although on Digg and YahooOpen ID, I couldn’t get RobHalligan. I should make a deal with the Rob Halligan in England that he can be Rob.Halligan if I can be RobHalligan.) So, it’s not too hard to find out a lot about me by searching the web. But, to me, blogging is too much like talking about yourself.
Maybe, just maybe, FriendFeed will be the solution. It can pull disparate posting from many web services onto one page. Here’s my FriendFeed. So far mine combines Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Pandora, Last.fm, Twitter, and LinkedIn. I fear the far-flung blog comments I make will never make it into my FriendFeed. And the 21 Yahoo Groups I contribute to will likely continue to silo-in their content forever, as well.
And then there is the private vs. public conundrum…I can set these blog posts to be viewable only by some…same with most of the content fed to FriendFeed. Are my family members going to get mad if I make their (dorky) adolescent photos public? An associate of mine sends around these lobbying pleas, and writes in huge letters, “Do not post this to the internet.” I dated a woman that had a tell-all blog where 10,000 people (she claimed) read how our dates went. That site came down when she started a job hunt.
We need to think about how much of an open book we should be. It’s not easy to curate all your web identities and mentions. Maintaining comments made on other people’s blogs is nearly impossible, but that content can be a significant body of work. In my mind, the issue isn’t close to being resolved.