Yesterday I read this post on Schneier on Security about this guy who thought his house was burglarized because he posted about his vacation on Twitter in real time; (stuff like “On the road now”, “Got here in one piece”) and reading the comments that people made to this article asking ‘Why Twitter’ made me think about ‘why Blog?’ and ‘What to blog about?’
Nowadays everyone seems to have a blog, but when I first started keeping a blog very few people did it. So I used to get this question a lot. Another popular one was: What do you blog about?
So, why do I blog? That’s a difficult question to answer for me. I Blog for multiple reasons:
1. I like writing. So it give’s me a place to post my thoughts and idea’s
2. It gives me a way to keep people (Friends/relatives) who want to know about me updated with my life
3. Allows me to post notes about how I did something or how I got something to work so that I can refer back to it later
4. It lets me talk about the stuff I do and places I visit.
Basically this blog is an expansion of the stuff I post on my website, in more detail and with a lot more regular updates. When I started out, I used to post atleast once a day. Then it went down to a couple of times a week, then to a few times a month. Now the frequency varies with how busy I am and what all is happening in my life.
What I don’t do is post about stuff that affects other people or happened to them. I also don’t post about work and my job. The reason for that is simple, what I post out here is available for everyone to read. If I complain about work or post something like ‘oh we had a hard time today because all the developers were drunk’ or ‘the code we write is so bad its a wonder anyone buys it’ or something; then anyone searching about the company or me will find it and its not good for the company or my image.
So instead of trying to figure out what to post and what not to post I avoid posting about work and work related issues. That doesn’t mean that any talk about work is banned, just that 99.999% of it is about non-work related stuff.
In the case mentioned above, did the Twitter post cause the house to be burglarized? I don’t know. It could have. All it did was tell people that they weren’t home. The same information is available from their away message on email, message on voice mail greetings, from their secretary and tons of other places.
It doesn’t make Twitter bad. You just have to use common-sense to decide what to post and what not to. Same thing with any media: blogs, websites etc etc.
Well this is all for now. Will post more later.
– Suramya