Sunday, March 26, 2006

Blogging is fun: No more!

After looking at them disdainfully initially - I now kind of like them. The little, occasionally interesting web clips appearing just above my google mailbox. And clicking on one of those, I came across this rather disturbing article - which basically says people in positions who can influence your career might be reading your blog and judging you by that.

This is not entirely surprising - only last week I was reading about how kids are being warned not too put anything non-conforming in their facebook profiles by schools. We all love to see abundance of information online. Sometime googling a persons name turns out more information (s)he can imagine or may even like to have available. However it definitely assumes another dimension when these information can be against them. It can be as simple as an online stalker finding your mail address or phone number or as they mention in that article - your current employer seeing you whining about your job. And this second aspect actually worries me. A while back one of my friends here wrote something in his blog about the unfair pay structure in our department and he was kind of reprimanded for doing that. Since he hosted his blog on departmental webspace - so that was kind of a grey area and can not really fault the department for being unhappy. But most of us use third party sites like blogspot or livejournal - and would love to believe we can get away with anything as long it "solely expresses the opinion of the author". Apparently not so and if the personal opinions end up messing up our personal life - that certainly does not sound like fun. Should that be happening? I would say no. But is there is not much we can do - I would want to express my politically incorrect opinions here - that's what a blog is for - and keep my fingers crossed!

P.S - Birthday wishes for Soumita (24th March), Rajarshi ( 25th March).

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