Reading Real Live Preacher today – I think its been 3 days since I read a blog – and found two interesting entries about how people he knows in the real world found his blog. And it got me to thinking.

I got an email from a friend worked with a couple of years ago. He had seen the release of one of my software products and gone to that website. He read some of the comments on that entry and mentioned he wondered about the icon too. (What’s the deal with the icon?) In his email he mentioned he has a blog too. But when I wrote him back I didn’t tell him about Reactuate. Why not? Truth is if he was even a little concerned about the icon for ColorTagGen he might really be offended my by women posts.

Why do people want to keep their blogs secret from their real world friends? I think it is because you can say the things you wouldn’t say if you knew they were listening. Whenever we are around people we self-censor. For a number of reasons, to keep from hurting them, to avoid subjects that cause conflict, to keep a secret, etc. These aren’t bad things. Censorship gets a bad rap because it is abused, but we all do it everyday. When you have a personal blog, you want to talk about things you can’t talk about with people in general.

Whenever I meet someone new, I don’t talk about a lot of subjects because I don’t know how they will react. I got a job once and the boss told me we weren’t allowed to talk about religion or politics at work, because they’d had some problems with a previous employees getting into big fights about religion. While it kind of bothered me, I understood. Those are two topics I’d avoid if I just met someone.

But if you have a blog, you don’t care about jumping right in to any topic. Unless you know there is someone listening who might confront you in the real world. Or if you want to get people to keep reading your blog. Mmmm….does that mean we avoid subjects to make people like us? Probably. But does that mean they really like us or the facade we put up for them? And isn’t it the real us we want them to like?

I think we want the real us to be liked, but its okay to have people like only part of us. Going back to my job with the no talk rules. I ended up talking to just about every other worker there about religion. One girl – my manager – ended up going back to church because I invited her to church. But there was never any conflict over it at work. The truth was the owner didn’t care what we talked about, he just didn’t want problems. Once we got to know each other and dug a little deeper, we could talk about subjects we might disagree on and not have problems.

I’m going to have to think on this.

How hard would it be to find my blog? Not hard.

So Greg if you come to Reactuate, comment so I know you were here.

Did find out you can’t find my wife’s blog the same way. I was actually a little surprise, Reactuate came up quickly when I entered her name. Didn’t think I’d actually used her name, but a quick search of the site shows I had. Neither of my boys show up in the first page a Google search for their name and blog.

(Music being streamed and not available for insert).