I met @3djamie at the #twee8 Hackney tweetup last Wednesday and met up with him again yesterday to have a chat, seeing as we both work in eLearning. I’ve found tweet ups to be great for networking with people in my field who have useful ideas and contacts, as well as being an excellent way to break the tedium of working from home.
I knew Jamie had looked at my blog before he got in touch with me, and, rather nervously, I asked his opinion about it. As I was doing so I realised that this was the first time I’d asked anyone for feedback on my online persona, which is crazy if you think about it; I pretty much live online these days, and while a lot of my clients don’t know about or aren’t interested in my online persona, increasingly I’m aware that the boundary between my social and business presence on the web is blurring.
Hitherto, I’ve been very nervous of these two worlds colliding. I tend to blog about how I’m feeling, and worry that this is just tmi for potential business partners. Jamie disagreed. He thought my blog was interesting, but was frustrated that it was difficult to find out from it what my work actually involved.
I get a lot of unsolicited feedback on my blog, in the comments, on Twitter, and in person, and I’ve been surprised at how positive it generally is. I’m beginning to think I’ve been a bit cowardly for assuming that I’ll never work again if potential employers find out I’m an actual human being, so I’ve decided to conduct an experiment. As of today, I’ve brought together pretty much my entire online persona into one space. On my blog I’ve linked to my business website, linkedin profile, Facebook, Twitter and last.fm profiles on my About page and in the right hand sidebar. On my Google profile I’ve added my full name and linked again to all these sites.
It remains to be seen how this will affect my blogging. Perhaps my inner censor will filter out overly personal content, but I’ll try and suppress the urge. In any case, I’ve never blogged about very private matters, and I’d certainly never identify or openly criticise a client or an employer online.
I’m curious, though, about how other people are managing to negotiate this increasingly interconnected world we live in. Do you keep your private life for meatspace only? Or are you baring your soul online?
Digital identity
I yam what I yam
Yeeees, but in your line of work it pays to be considered ‘open’, I guess. It’s good that you have that freedom.
Oh, I have two blogs because I think my boss reads the main one and it gives me a chance to talk specifics about what annoys me at work.
Sometimes I go on a link-spree and put everything in one place and then someone creepy says something creepy and then I take it all apart again.
I’ve actually gone the opposite direction recently. I stopped blogging under my full name and started a new blog just using my first name, because I had begun to feel a bit too self-censorious. But if you’re comfortable with your level of privacy/exposure, I can see the benefit of blogging openly — for one thing, you don’t have to keep track of your fragmented identities/self-imposed privacy settings, you just write…it’s all you.
I have a bit of trouble with this myself. It’s pretty blurred, because my name is all over “the googles,” so I don’t really have any privacy. But I do have a blog that is mostly read by people I’ve never met, and I prefer it that way. It won’t hold up over time.
I censor myself pretty heavily online — in specific ways — anyway. I am all too aware that your age-17 ramblings about virginity can stick around on the Web until you’re, say, 44. So if I had anything negative to say about any person, job, relationship or situation EXCEPT myself and the situations I create for myself, I wouldn’t say it online. Then again, I probably talk about myself a little tooooo much.