Coworker: Have you ever heard of blogging?
Me: Sure! I got some experience with them in college.
Coworker: In college?!
Me: Yep. They tend to be pretty popular with the staid academic types. I was going to study them in grad school but then I got weird about teaching and then didn’t know what to do.
Coworker: I have a blog. I can’t believe people study them in college.
Me: Send me the address and I’d love to check it out.
Coworker: I haven’t updated it in awhile, and it’s mostly about my dog training.
Me: Cool!
Okay, think about this with me for a minute. This blog isn’t exactly a secret but I’m not exactly advertising my presence here. Not that I would ever blog about my job, but I’m not aiming to get Dooced over some hobby thing I do in my spare time. That said, I’m still a little stupid with how much I love my blogger and commenter community.
In my head, I said:
OMIGOD YOU HAVE A BLOG THAT’S AWESOME I HAVE ONE TOO I WENT TO A CONFERENCE THIS SUMMER AND MET A TON OF PEOPLE WHO BLOG AND IT WAS GREAT OMIGOD I HAD A REALLY POPULAR BLOG BUT I LEFT IT AND I MISS IT BUT THE NEW PEOPLE BLOGGING THERE ARE GREAT NO I DON’T MISS IT IT WAS TOO MUCH WORK BUT I UNDERSTAND WHY YOU DON’T BLOG ALL THE TIME OMIGOD THAT’S AWESOME YOU BLOG ABOUT YOUR DOG I BLOG ABOUT MY CATS ALL THE TIME YOU SHOULD DO FRIDAY DOG BLOGGING HERE IS MY URL EMAIL ME!
Speaking of work, rather than blogging, don’t you get your benefits soon? I know it sucks to live in a country where getting health insurance is something to celebrate, or where having an AK-47 is considered a more fundamental right than having health insurance, but, well, we live in that country. So, congratulations!
At work, folks mostly know my politics and that I read the political blogs. I freely hand out links to those. I don’t ever mention the ones I comment on, though.
Good advice, Thomas.
I made the mistake at my old job to hand out my URL to several co-workers. I was new to the blogging and I didn’t know any better. :D Now very few people in real life know I have a blog. I like it best that way. When blogs come up, I mention that I’m familiar with them, but I never go into details.
I mentioned blogging as one of my hobbies once at work, and now my boss reads my blog daily. Which actually works out OK for me, but probably isn’t what most bloggers want.
Hilarious! This is totally me. I am very on the downlow with people IRL, which is generally a great way to see what people really think about things like that. Not that I’m, all, trying to entrap people, but you know.
Heh! Cute.
I don’t advertise either of the blogs I’m associated with, but they’re both linked on my myspace, and the myspace grapevine is far-reaching.
i had a job interview with a center at my school for a research position the other day … not a hyper-formal thing, but … the older lady interviewing me asked if I was familiar with blogs and blogging and I said, “Yeah, I have a blog,” because I’ve recently started one and before that had a silly livejournal for years and, you know, to try and prove I was hip and with it and all that, and then she’s like, “oh, great, can you give me the link?”
i sat there for a moment, trying to think of an excuse why not, then finally just went, “No.”
there is nothing one needs less than potential employers reading their blogs, I think. So, now I know to keep my mouth shut in the future. I’ll use your model, “yes, I READ a lot of blogs and STUDY them.” no mention of own blogging activities.
(i got the job anyway, despite the awkwardness of the blogging conversation)
i swear, even though I am officially old and in the way, I must be pretty naive because I can not IMAGINE getting fired for blogging. I mean, I can IMAGINE it, but I wouldn’t have. TO my ear that sounds like being fired for writing a letter to the editor. Or for publishing poems.
(Rhetorical question) Do we actually live in a country where expressing your views off the job is a fire-able offense? DO our employers OWN us even when we aren’t on the job?
I have such problems with the whole job thing. I wanted to be an ARTIST, not have a JOB, anyway. I just hate corporate America.
Multiple people have been fired for blogging. So far as I know, all of them have been fired for blogging about the actual place where they work (or, in Washingtonienne’s case, for blogging about the sex she was having with a coworker, etc.). This is why (especially given that I blog under my real name, at a blog that my boss and coworkers know about) I am very careful about anything I saw relared to work. I’m not worried that anyone will fire me for inflammatory non-work-related opinions.