Don't drink and blog

It is difficult to avoid causing trouble in a personal blog when you write about your friends and things that they say. I have recently gotten into some trouble by writing some items that a few months later were deemed to be private and personal once they had been pointed out to the person who they were from. So I received messages from them saying that people were very hurt that I revealed secrets and that I betrayed their trust. This was never my intent and I immediately edited content that was brought to my attention as problematic.

While I think I pay attention to keeping secrets secret I am not a good enough judge. What I need to always think about when publishing an item publicly is that once it becomes public it is available to anyone. One way to avoid this is to make all content come from an anonymous source which is so radically opposite from sharing thoughts and opinions with friends and seems unstable because it requires complete secrecy to prevent the whole endeavor from imploding.

So for now I will try harder to refine my filters for not telling personal secrets or damaging information and when I have something interesting and secret I will just put it into the queue for a tidbit to include in a piece of fiction. I will need to maintain that the blog is more about impressions than reality.

I've discussed how to filter content for blogs with friends who are musicians and artists as they have a trickier road than I do because they are dependent upon their popularity and also operate in a politically sensitive world of local music where you can't anger radio hosts, museums, club owners, or other artists because they can effect your radio play, sales, and bookings. So while they may have interesting entries to post they can't just post them online. I'd imagine that this is a common challenge for people now. They have to evaluate privacy, politics, and risk now that the barriers for publishing have been demolished by technology.

Little incidents that almost got bigger make me imagine that there must be a brewing storm of blog lawsuits that are going to start soon with people losing their jobs due to blog entries, libel, slander, etc. The folks who have been in news professionally their whole lives and have dealt with some of these probably are glad to see everyone else saddled with their headaches. Unfortunately as a member of everyone else I never took the required ethics course in journalism school.