DailyNotes/2005/01/27

Lloyd asks in how much do you reveal from this window?:

How much of yourself do you think you have revealed in your weblog, over the years? And is it an accurate (as opposed to idealized) version of yourself that your reading audience sees? Finally, do you feel that you can continue sharing your life in this way, for the foreseeable future, and what consequences might you face down the line, if you continue to do so?

I won't be able to do justice right away to the multiple threads in Lloyd's question, but let me give it a shot. I think that I've revealed a significant amount of myself in my weblogs and my wikis, much of which I intentionally reveal but much I suspect is revealed even without my knowledge or intention. I have strived to be honest in my writing, which leads to some level of accuracy. But we also know that no matter how honest we are, we are limited in our wisdom and understanding and ability to self-disclose.

I plan to write openly for the forseeable future. Indeed, my wiki and blogs are more active than they have ever been. I write openly as a calculated risk that what I write about will hold up over time and that what I'm doing here is worth doing. I write thinking that there is no real way to take back what I write and that folks down the road, even decades later, might pull up what I write today. It's a scary thought at times. I feel exposed, as though I am planning to run for president one day and have to worry about every dirty piece of laundry confronting me just when I am about to make that crucial campaign speech. Only time will tell how good of a call I am making to open myself in this way.

Let me leave off with a quote from Jakob Nielsen in Durability of Usability Guidelines (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox):

The lure of the present is especially strong when writing for the Web. In writing a book, I'm highly conscious of people who will be reading my text ten or more years into the future. But when posting to my website, I tend to write for today's readers, even though 80% of the pageviews will occur after an article has passed into the archives. Luckily, most of my old analyses hold up pretty well, and ten-year-old articles continue to be 78% relevant.

However seductive the present might be, writing for the Web is writing for the ages, not just for the moment. (People who post stream-of-consciousness entries in their weblogs, for example, might want to consider that they're also writing for managers who might hire them in twenty years.)

A noteworthy caution for us all.

I usually like to work in parallel on a number of entries. Here I list them so they can be easily noted and accessed:

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