Over at Information Wants To Be Free Meredith has an interesting post up about The Boundaries of Disclosure. It stems from another blog post that gets a little personal. I’ve been thinking about what I will say and won’t say on this blog an…

I think Penelope could have discussed her experiences and shown her readers that she’s dealing with the same issues they are, without the TMI approach, simply by mentioning the issues, instead of scripting out the personal drama. But – on the other hand – I do believe, firmly, that it’s (A) her blog and (B) her right to write whatever she wants on it, and (C) there *is* something admirable about the bare-all approach. It’s very courageous. As others have said – this is a highly personal thing, that “TMI” line and where it lies, and this is mine, period. So – definitely – YMMV.

So far, my decision has been to just blog about personal stuff for friends, and just subscribe to a lot of professional blogs I admire. But one day, I’d like to write the blog I’d like to read, and be able to put my name on it and take reasonable and purposeful risks in writing.

I blog under my full name now in my personal professional blog – thanks greatly to the insight and encouragement of Penelope Trunk. That was a big leap for me, and the questions about disclosure and transparency and authenticity and integrity still plague me every day.

I have to tell you, I also wrote a post in response to Penelope’s post yesterday. I had a similar “stopped in tracks” moment when I read her post too. I thought to myself, wow, that is a lot of disclosure for such a public person. Maybe I react to this so much because of my journalism background or because in college, on my first blog, I had a roommate move out of my house because of a whiny post I wrote about her Christmas decorations. I don’t know, but I do realize the profound implications of blogging about your real life.

But when I read her post yesterday, I didn’t think merely: “I don’t want that to happen to me” or, “Man, no one should write that much about their personal life online to strangers.” Nope. I just felt like I knew her so much better, I understood her writing and perspective even more, and I realized that as hard as we all try, crappy things can happen to anyone. They could happen to me.

It made me reflect on my own life and how I need to experience it, what I can change, what I can learn from her and others like her. And to me, that’s what the best writing in the world does – it makes you think about your life. So I’d personally thank her for her post and for having the courage to write it. It may be too much for some, but that’s okay. There are meant to be some people in the world who will put it all out there and others who don’t. It’s up to each of us how much we will share, and with whom. And that’s perfectly okay.

I love people and often strike up friendships with people that most others shun, for one reason or another, and sometimes it’s good – others not so much. Besides being outgoing, I try to just be myself, which often involves sharing my personal experiences as they relate to those of the people in my life. Not a “one-up” kind of sharing, but honestly trying to relate as an authentic person. I am who I am.

When I started blogging back in 2004 I did so in response to the presidental election and I pulled no punches in how I expressed myself. Later, when I wanted to start writing about my professional life, I found that those old blog posts came up with a name search and I regretted expressing myself so vehemently and “colorfully”. I didn’t want my personal views to affect my peers perceptions of me as a professional, so I erased the political blog and it only rarely shows up in caches now.

You are so right in that our blogs, if intended for a professional audience, should use the rules of thumb expressed so well above. Additionally, your point that the expression of our personality in our blog is often what makes it interesting reading, and more fun than just reading a journal article is dead on in my opinion. Blogging is often like an Op-Ed piece, in spite of the fact that many of us are experts on something or other. As an example, in my mind, “Jane”, at “A Wandering Eyre”, does a great job of writing on professional topics with a very personal flair.

For me it is that personal expression that I find missing in my blogging life, since I try to keep most personal disclosures off of my blog. So, I try to use my My Space blog for personal stuff and limit it only to friends that I trust and who I am confident won’t judge me too harshly. Not that I am afraid of judgement, because there is still a huge part of me that still doesn’t give a bleep (for lack of a more accurate expression).

Right after I started blogging at InfoSciPhi, I wrote about something that happened at our library and mentioned a generic faculty reaction to it. My boss, who had read it unbeknownst to me, called me into her office and lectured me on the dangers of relating specific professional experiences in this medium. I had thought it innocous, but took down the post anyway just to keep it from being an issue.

What I started out commenting on here is that this is a prevalent issue in our online lives since the very nature of social networking is to share about ourselves and learn more about others. I find I am much less likely to add someone as a “friend” in a network if I can’t find out anything personal about them.

I have enjoyed the Twitter experience for this very reason. While I can read my peer’s professional blogs, and check out their Facebook profiles, I have found that Twitter posts have helped me learn much more about their personalities and personal lives.

Sometimes I wonder if I share overmuch on there, but it is a sign of my growing trust and comfort level with all of you that I let myself be more “me” in that forum. I wonder at times how I am perceived since we lack the physical and verbal cues that we rely on so much face-to-face.

Since many of our professional relationships start out as just that, it is a judgement call regarding how much of the “true” us that we express to our colleagues and the world through the intertubes. We deal with the same issues in our face-to-face work environment where we might share more personal stories with one co-worker than another.

In the past, in my personal profiles, I express the evolution and convolution of my personal philosophical framework and belief system since it is such a huge part of who I am and how I came to be me. However, I eventually thought that it might detract from my credence as a professional if people knew that much about me, so I again pulled those expressions of myself back behind My Space privacy settings.

I think we are all (well most of us anyway) socialized early on in childhood and adolescence about how best to present ourselves to others. The online environment bends all of these rules with easily achievable anonymity in one forum, and open personal sharing in others. Moving back and forth between the various networks and places we share info online has forced us to rethink TMI (along with the spiders who index everything we write).

In the end it is a personal choice and our readers will consume as much as they feel comfortable with or leave. I am willing to accept that, but I want to be considerate as well. Personally, I read more blogs because I am interested in the writer, who they are, & how that affects their professional opinions more than the technical aspects of their message. Personalities make the reading more interesting for me…

Thanks for discussing this. It needs to be talked about to help us all figure out where we stand in regard to this – not that there is a right and wrong position, but to help develop our personal preferences.

The idea of publishing personal journals online is just such a fascinating one, and is fraught with many related issues. The fact that many people can read our thoughts and then interact with us in real life is both frightening and powerful. It can change the course of our lives, in ways we can’t really imagine.