Yesterday I was reading up a bit on what I’ve missed these last few weeks when I’ve been preoccupied; this included some blogs, some news sites, some forums and so on. I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing particularly exciting happens when I’m away. Anyway, one amusing thing I found was a thread on the Indiegamer forums: in short I can sum it up with “people generally don’t care about what you say unless they know you, or if you offer some evidence that your experiences matter.” This got me thinking about one of the main ideas of this li’l blog o’mine: I gladly flaunt my ideas and my opinions, but I want to keep my professional life completely separate from the blog.

Of course some things are apparent: I work with software development; I have an interest in WLAN technology; I do some low-level programming. And so on. But the rest ought to remain secret. Why?

One possible answer could be that I don’t want my employers to read my musings. That’s one of the things brought up in this meta-blog entry named Blogging Vs. Your Career. The blog mentions a lot more, and goes on to quote a list of dos and don’ts from Intuit’s Scott K. Wilder. Some of these are rather amusing - for example:

Do not post anything you would be embarrassed to see on the front page of the Wall Street Journal

Well. I honestly can’t say that I’ve seen all that many blog posts that look like they belong in the Wall Street Journal. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of blogs have nothing to do in a printed paper – because they’re written by laymen for laymen, and most of the time also by subjective laymen for bored laymen looking for a way to waste five minutes. That’s why we have this wonderful brand of people called journalists who write the printed articles instead.

Anyhoo, the reason I found the blog entry at all was through this blog that I saw on Technorati. I really don’t know what to make of aforementioned blog entry. This Dan Farber kindly quotes the Your Career post…but offers no additional information. No comments; no opinions; nothing more than a brief summary.

Why? Why did he post it at all? In theory, this post o’mine contains nothing new either - it’s all a rehash of other people’s thoughts covered with my generic opinions. But I make an attempt to have an opinion at least. What the hell? A blog entry that consists of 80% (give or take 20%) quotes from another one? I don’t get this compulsive repetition.

But I digress. To sum things up: no, I don’t keep quiet of my work details because of any fear of my employers; I’m relatively confident that I can stand for everything I write. There’s a much greater risk at stake: something that’s also mentioned in the list of dos and don’ts:

Do not post confidential client data

It’s not like I work for the NSA or anything, but I’d feel horrible if I accidentally posted confidential information that led to any kind of problem. And that’s way easier done than one can imagine. A nurse in Sweden recently posted about a patient on an online forum. Of course she tried to make him anonymous: she didn’t mention any names and so on. But the age, the location and the disease was enough for another forum member to guess who it was – which in turn led to a whole truckful of excrement for the nurse in question, once this leak of confidential data was brought to the hospital’s knowledge.

A year ago I accidentally gave out classified information to one person; I’ll be damned if I make the same mistake twice – and on a public blog for that matter!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Computers, Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.