Welcome to my next chapter
I stopped blogging one morning about four years ago, when the digital confluence of my personal and professional lives became uncomfortable. I was meeting with a potential new client of the design and branding agency where I was working and, in the presence of my colleagues, the client commented about what a wonderful writer I was and asked how I was feeling about my recent breakup with CL.Thrown significantly and uncommonly off-guard in a work environment, I stammered an awkward response and blushed like an embarrassed teenager. I wasn't prepared for questions about her, especially not there, and there was no way I was going to discuss my feelings in a boardroom at my office.
In ludicrously-obvious retrospect, I realize I still hadn't quite fully grasped the power of singular voice on the Internet.
Until that point, most of my focus had been on understanding communities and the power of a collective voice online. Professionally, I was building large sites which empowered communities to create content, disseminate information, interact, participate and grow. My four years at the Discover Channel Online and various other gigs taught me a lot about how to do this successfully.
While I had built and maintained personal websites since 1995, they were always personal – for myself, my friends and my family. After all, who would have found my sites on geocities.com, interlog.com or even ideafist.com unless I had pointed them directly at the URL (search then was certainly not as sophisticated as it is today)? I felt comfortable sharing a lot about myself and my experiences, as I thought I knew who comprised my audience and could craft the message accordingly (leaving out details and embellishing as I saw fit).
When I received that comment and the surge of follow-up interest from some colleagues, I found it easier to turn it off than get into details or explain myself. So I put up a silly picture of myself tongue-kissing Captain Q. Farf at SS's wedding and posted a message about the site being "temporarily offline." Other than one post about joining the Russell Leon Band in 2003, my own voice on Ideafist.com stayed dormant for almost four years.
I have learned much in that time, about communities, voices, the Internet, the blogosphere and life. And I’ve also been doing a lot of writing, though very little of it has been personal in nature. I co-authored the book Practical Intranet Development for Glasshaus Books in the UK, wrote several very thick white papers about Internet strategy, community-enablement online and digital marketing for clients, and have been writing regularly for NOW Magazine in Toronto (about how technology influences society and culture). I've discovered – gradually reminded myself, rather – that I really enjoy writing and find that I have quite a bit to say.
And that's why I think it's time for me to start blogging again. This is the fourth generation of personal site I’ve created in 10 years and it will definitely evolve in content, style and functionality as I get into a groove with it during the next few months.
It will be a place for me to post thoughts and pictures during this next chapter of my life (more on that to follow in a few days – suffice it to say that I've got big changes coming). Of course, some parts of my life will definitely remain private, but I haven’t quite defined those boundaries yet. As I do (and I reserve the right to change my mind), I'll let you know right here in The Adventures of JStar88 on The Blue Marble.
BTW, thanks to Mikey for help with the name.
Anyway, to end the introduction, I’ll just say that I’m back – for now – and I’m excited about lots of things. Much more on that to follow shortly...
1 Comments:
Jeff, you have always been such an eloquent writer and I love reading anything you've written. (Always have.) In the past you have taught me that sometimes minimalism can be more stylish and quite effective. (I still have a one lined mailed letter you sent me ages ago. *sigh*) Please point me to any and all writings you'd want to share.
I have been posting a journal since some time in 2000. This post embodies a great deal of my feelings about the pratfalls of blogging and posting things online in general and specifically a more resent incident (see my journal).
My life has been an open book, who’s pages through time and experience have been starting to close. (Sadly I have also become quite reclusive and have shut out a great deal of the world, but I digress.) I falsely figured that if you knew me and cared enough to look, I’d share and we could keep up on each other’s lives. For the most part this was true and helped enrich and maintain some of my friendships.
Looking back, I notice that there are definite gaps. The gaps seem to be me reflecting, regrouping and in some extreme cases purging to create them.
At times I have found myself uncomfortable with the ramifications / reactions to my just “putting it out there”. The slight reality check was mostly from an isolated source, who had upon several occasions seemed to deem it OK to critique and chastise me about my life and choices I’ve made. I had felt violated and angry that a person who was no longer a part of my life had started feeling close to me. So much so that for him “it wasn’t over” and there was still a potential relationship years and years after a break. I did not like the uninvited man having accessed a window into my life and as a reaction to this, I had started “friends only” posting. This left me in a dilemma. I wanted people to have access and not have to sign up and be approved but I felt it necessary.
That was before search engines became as sophisticated as they are now aand before a recent icky revelation. For me the net, my personal pages and blogs had been tools spreading the word about events and generally for warm fuzzy things. It hadn’t really dawned on me that the it can also be window for strangers to research you. Something I certainly had done time and time again for companies but- (I’ve rambled on and will elaborate in my own journal… and get off this soapbox.)
My natural tendency is to want to share and keep that book open but I too feel the need to define public and private boundaries and haven’t yet got a clear picture.
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