Thursday, May 8, 2008

Blurring the Lines

I apologize in advance if this post bores any of you to tears, but it's something I want to explore and discuss. We recently received updated employee handbooks at work and there's a new section on blogging. Our company has a really supportive environment for personal blogging and even maintain a corporate blog. All they ask of us is to "not cite our clients, partners or suppliers without their approval" and "be respectful to the company, employees, clients, partners and competitors." It's fair, but raises the question: how do you mix business and pleasure in a world where everyone can see how you feel?

I ask this because office gossip spread like wildfire the other day and allegedly one of my colleagues was offended by a post that another colleague had written about them on their personal blog. Without going into more detail than that - because I don't know more than that, and, frankly, it's something I don't really want to know about beyond having a better understanding of what went down - it makes me wonder how to openly express your thoughts and not worry about offending people.

I'll admit that I'm cognizant of offending people on here, and I've written things that at some point that probably did offend someone. But I have to remind myself sometimes that my blog is written for me, not for other people. While I appreciate the fact that people actually read my blog, my blog is an area for me to discuss what's important to me, and sometimes things happen where I'm upset and I want to talk about them. Sometimes I'm upset about work and sometimes I'm upset with the people I work with, but I try to exercise extreme caution when discussing work - especially anyone at work - because I know that some people in my office read my blog and I don't want to be put in a bad situation.

So what do you think? How do you retain the ability to talk about things important to you when the lines are being blurred?

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