Link: To blog or not to blog, is there a danger?
Permanent article linkThe Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article which argues that a blog is often a bad thing to put on your resume or even to have within a google reach of your name. As a proof, they show a lot of negative things they found out about interview-ready people whose lives turn out to be more complicated than expected.
Perhaps when the person in question is an education professor with plenty of publishing opportunities and the blogs are only for personal aspect of their life, they should not have it listed (or searchable by their name).
On the other hand, for technical people a blog is often the best way to show what we know, what we care about, the problems we solved that might be useful for other geeks to know. And we have enough strange people in our midst with or without blogs that even some technical bile does not change our opinions of people.
At the same time, the article has some strong points about political views, etc. Putting them into the name-identifiable blog is like tattooing your affiliation on a forehead, bound to cause issues. One's choice of course, but a much bigger choice than people seems to realise.
I have my political views, but they are not in the blog. Nor are my food preferences or pet love/hates. On the other hand, if somebody decides to judge my English from the blog, I might be in trouble..... :-)
BlogicBlogger Over and Out
posted on 7/13/2005 10:16:00 PM 
2 Comments:
In the future, they'll be able to mine blogs and do psycho-analysis. They'll be able to create profiles on demand.
I see this happening in 10 years. It may not apply to your situation, you'll probably be old by then, but many of the younger bloggers would regret it.
Trust me, many years ago, people used to think that nobody would be able to find their posts in the future. Google came along and crawled every nook and cranny of the Internet.
Hmm, leaving the 'too old' comment aside, you are right.
However, unless you were able to issue an effectively issue an SQL query across the whole web, it would be pretty hard to find this blog by searching for my real name.
Of course, an agency (such as google) could do a statistical correlation between my style of writing, topics I chose to write about, other services I log into at the same time, etc to have a high probability profile between a username and a real name. Then employees would buy the information from that agency the same way banks pay for access to your credit record.
Certainly something to keep in mind.
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