someone i know who uses her blog as a place to vent said if you don’t like what i have to say here then don’t read it. to a point it does make sense… celebrities are in the tabloids all the time and reading some interviews it seems that after a while they train themselves not to read the papers anymore.

but we’re not celebrities and though we have a right to express ourselves, is it fair to hurt the people we write about? i guess blogging is like journalism to a small extent – you have to be responsible for what you write for and back it up with facts in order to have a clear conscience!

otherwise, one can always master the art of vague remarks that doesn’t reveal too much. then again, it doesn’t make you feel like you vented properly too!

I think comings and goings are best mentioned after the fact, if at all.

I find MMOs and chat rooms can be good places for those times when you want to share your thoughts but they’re not suitable for public viewing.

They’re great places to have a vent with acquaintances who have no links to your day-to-day online or offline lives. And in MMOs people are very used to anonymity. It’s the norm for folks to be silent about their real life details.

Sometimes we all need to go aaaaarrrrrrgggggg and stomp around having a good old vent about someone. It’s totally natural and human. Normally it’s my Mother ;)

I know totally what you mean about Twitter. My neighbours have a young baby that cries constantly. I can’t complain on Twitter because my tweets auto populate my Facebook status. My neighbours don’t follow me on Facebook but friends of theirs do. Complicated, but I have remember to self censor.

Perhaps that’d be a good Twitter tag-line, ‘remember to self-censor’ ;)

I really want to say don’t worry to much though. We’re all human. There are things we’ll say that people will love and things people won’t like at all. You are you and you’re loved BECAUSE of the way you are. Don’t hide it too much. Don’t be ashamed of things you thought/said in the past. Don’t drive yourself crazy trying to self-censor. Be yourself. There’s a reason you make new friends from your tweets and blog posts :)

It’s a tough dilemma, and it is THE main reason why I no longer blog. The problem is, how do I then maintain my online friendships? The most important ones I keep in contact with via IM and Twitter, but certainly the level of communication is much less.

I’m experimenting with a soup account for inconsequential stuff which is fun, but for some reason the URL makes my comments hit people’s spam filters. So not the ideal solution either.