LJ quandary

[jim_p]

I find myself in a bit of a dilemma with respect to LJ (well, two dilemmas really).

My main problem is that when life is interesting enough to warrant a posting, I'm usually too busy to sit down and post anything. OTOH when there's time to sit down and post something, I usually don't have much to talk about...

For now I'm going to solve that by posting a buttload of back-dated entries for the past month or so... anyone who's interested can check out my complete journal.

My second problem involves what to post about. I had a slightly bad experience with an early posting of mine being related to someone who didn't need to hear about it right then and there... since then I've been very leery of posting controversial personal stuff. Should I just post it "friends-only-with-extra-disclaimers"? (FYI the person who received the information wasn't even on LJ)...

There's another issue I'm dealing with related to the above, but which this window is too small to contain... I'll post about it in the near future...

Comments

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

I sometimes use my friends-filter to bitch about work, or to discuss things that I don't want the general public reading.

Stuff I don't want shared gets posted behind a somewhat tighter friends filter, and/or specifically labeled "please do not share", or both.

[apel.livejournal.com]

Friends-only with disclaimers is good.

I've recently discovered the joy of filters. They're really easy to use and allow you to specifically exclude or include individuals. Nobody but you can see that you're using filters and who exactly is in them. So if it turns out that a certain person will share stuff you've specifically asked not to be shared, you simply remove them from the filter. They'll never know. Very versatile. I have two filters, one for 12 step recovery related posts and one for my web design course notes.

[tb]

I'll go the other route and say that you should assume that anything you post on lj will become public knowledge and will probably reach the person you'd least like to hear it the fastest. Trusting to filters or other technology is naive. People are human and they like to talk to each other about each other.

I've pretty much stopped posting things "friends only", especially as my "friends" on lj do not map to my actual friends; they're a mix of friends and acquaintances.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

Yup.

I don't believe in the the security of a journal provided by a third party, so anything I post I won't care if it gets anywhere.

But my entire net-life has been under that rule, and I haven't regretted anything as of yet. Although my mother did use google to find a posting I made to alt.sysadmin.recovery which included, as a postscript, "The only really bad thing about my new supervisor is he wasn't hit by a bus on his way in on his first day..." Or words to that effect.

"No, mom, the reason it shows up on google is that someone thought the actual content of the posting was interesting, and not the postscript. And, no, I don't care if it gets back to my supervisor."