Please don't read my blog.

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How public do we want our thoughts to be?

That question isn't one that gets raised only in an era of blogs. Way back when personal web sites were still the rage it got asked from two different angles. On the one hand, who wanted to read people's grocery lists, or the banal reporting on a plethora of issues that served as online diaries - what I ate, what discs I bought, what movies I saw, and the like. On the other, over-exposure was even more embarrassing. The personal web site of a suburban husband, for instance (and yes, I remember such a site frm a number of years ago) who told about how he'd dress up in his wife's wardrobe when she was out of the house, and posted photographs to prove it, was fascinating, not because someone like that existed, but because it was hard to understand why the world had to know.

Blogging may not add a new dimension to all this, but it makes posting that grocery list oh so easy. And though knowing that only strangers read our blogs, such that we can be both public and private at one and the same time, may be comforting, there must also be some sort of lingering fear that someone we know is going to identify us. The Onion recently published a wonderfully low-keyed spoof on the perhaps even primal fear that our mothers might read our blogs.

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