When I first started what could be called a weblog, sometime back in 2000, it was mainly a little place for me to scribble my thoughts about what was going on in my life. You can see a snapshot from early 2002 at the Internet archive. Unfortunately, I couldn’t a copy on the archive from the origins of my weblog. At the time, there wasn’t any large scale concern about privacy on the internet or employers examining personal web pages before hiring people. I think the only people who ever really looked at my weblog at the time were friends at IIT or co-workers of mine.
Most of these entries were short little bits talking about what was going on my life. Very similar to how the kids use MySpace today. In retrospect, it was eerily similar to a primitive MySpace. However, as you know, you can learn a lot about people by looking at their myspace pages. Everything from political affiliations, to tastes in music, to where people, to their current infatuation with the opposite sex. If the parents of those 14-year-olds realized the risk they were taking by allowing their kids to have MySpace pages, I doubt they’d let them post so much information. Fortunately, MySpace has gotten better and added in protections to allow pages to only be viewed by “friends”, preserving some aspect of privacy.
However, this weblog serves a very different purpose. I’m not trying to convey what sort of mood I’m in, or what I had for lunch today. Rather, I use it as a feedback environment for new ideas and a place to post nifty little pieces of technological gadgetry that I’ve developed, mostly related to Linux and Programming. I’ve come to realize that I too had way too much information on my weblog. With a little digging it would be far too easy to find out my political views, lots of details about my wife, where I lived, or how I was feeling on certain days. All of that information is completely orthogonal to the purpose of this weblog and only puts me at risk as I go out from CMU in the reasonably near future. Furthermore, a better question is this: Does anyone really care about the fact that I had a bad reaction to some mexican food in the summer of 2002?
Thus, I’ve done something that I originally told myself I would never do - I’ve removed 234 entries from this weblog that addressed issues that were not core to the nature of the weblog. Some were removed because they had little value, such as a posting about wiring problems in my apartment in Chicago, while others were removed because they contained profanities, views that I no longer hold, or political statements which I really shouldn’t be making. I tended to keep the political views on technology, because I believe that’s an important focus of this weblog. However, my writings on the war, abortion, Palestine, etc have all been removed. Instead, if you visit their former pages you’ll get a message saying the page has been sanitized and a link is provided to this weblog article.
As far my personal beliefs about publishing on the Internet, over the last few months, I’ve become much more skeptical of it. I believe that focused weblogs can be a powerful thing for change, for example Ed Felton’s “Freedom to Tinker” is a great example of a focused weblog. It provides value for people to read entries and comment. Unfocused general weblogs, on the other hand, often provide too much information and put the author at risk. In the future, I hope to not be forced to remove entries that I’ve written, but I will certainly be much more cautious about such entries. Also, I realize that it’s possible to find most of my previous writings in this weblog. If you’re that desperate for information, knock yourself out. I’m just not providing direct links to it anymore.