Over-Sharing on hte Intarweb

This is an interesting article [nytimes.com] on the New York times about Emily Gould thoughts on over-sharing and being a micro-celebrity in the blogosphere. Well, it will be interesting to anyone who is interested in weblogging, anyway.

Basically, it boils down to a question of how much of your life to share on your weblog, and interesting effects that sharing too much may have on your life.

This is a subject that I frequently think about, even without realizing it. My weblog has had a few distinct phases over the years. Back in the beginning, when I was weblogging before everyone had a weblog, I probably shared too much. And now, it seems that I share so little that this weblog has become boring.

Part of the problem is that my life is a lot more boring now. Before I was married and owned a house, I spent a lot more time tinkering with computers and electronics, and doing all kinds of random crazy shit that made for good weblog fodder (how many people do you know that have actually caused their computer to burst into flames?). Now I spend most of my time working on my lawn (and who really wants to hear about that?).

Another part of the problem is that it is difficult to compartmentalize parts of my life with a weblog. For instance, I might not want my coworkers to be able to easily find drunken pictures of me, wearing panties on my head, while getting a tattoo (uh, not that those pictures exist...).

There are times when I think that it would be a lot easier to maintain an anonymous weblog instead of the one that I post to now. It would be easier to control who was reading it, because there would be no easy way to link the page to me. On the other hand, what would my web presence become? Fluggart.com would end up just being a domain name containing dead links. And vanity searches on my name would only come up with links to The Replacement Killers [imdb.com], and results from Table Tennis tournaments from the early 90's.