08 June 2003

Personal Blog Censorship

Roy is censoring himself because he is conserned about what future employers think of his rants. Although I have the impression that Roy doesn't have much to be embarrassed of, I've been thinking about this concern related to a custom blogtool I'm planning.

I've been playing with the idea of a three-level writing style: public, protected and private (ok I am a programmer), public is default. Then the stuff you want to write, but restrict, could be tagged with

<protected>this can be compared to the recent project in our company where Joe did this internal company confidencial thing</protected>

and the stuff that you want completely for your own future reference could be tagged with

<private>I should maybe further elaborate on this or write an article. This text is about the code in C:\mycode</private>

The only thing that would be needed to make this work is a password for the "protected" user (this can be only one user for simplicity's sake), and a slight filtering in the RSS generator that will filter the protected text for regular readers, and the private text for everyone but the administrator.

update: I've changed the examples, to better show the intention. Protected text is text that generally is only interesting to a limited set of people, or might be company or personally confidential. Private is for personal notes. I use my blog for my own future reference, and some things aren't interesting for others.

 

Filed under:

Comments

# Roy Osherove said:

But you;d still get all of the rss feed into the aggregator, so someone oculd build a reader that does not filter content, right?
even if you encrypt, you'd still have to somehow un-encrypt at the client level.
hmm. perhaps something like PGP would be of use here..

Sunday, June 08, 2003 3:12 AM
# Mads said:

The protected/private stuff wouldn't be published to the regular RSS feed. To see these entries you'd have to be authenticated, just like you have to be before you enter a new blogentry.

Sunday, June 08, 2003 3:18 AM
# Frans Bouma said:

why would you write something in a public place that's only be ment to be read by you? Weblogs are public, if you are concerned about what you write will hurt another person, do not write it. Also applicable to: if you are wondering if what you write is interesting to another person do not write it.

Sunday, June 08, 2003 3:27 AM
# Mads said:

I see how my previous examples gave you the wrong idea. I've altered them and elaborated a bit on what you could use this for.

Sunday, June 08, 2003 3:39 AM
# Kenneth LeFebvre said:

I would love this kind of thing.. :) there are certain things I would love to be able to publish to my blog for friends that I trust, but don't want other people to see.

Until now, the way I have handled this is by maintaining multiple blogs. However, that's a pain, because I tend to forget about one or the other for days or weeks at a time...

Sunday, June 08, 2003 7:21 PM
# Damit said:

I actually saw this entry earlier today and wrote an entry about it: http://dotsql.dyndns.org:8674/weblog/PermaLink.aspx/91915ec2-c249-4550-859d-804fd5b58d99

Basically, my view is that such a system wouldn't be appropriate for weblogs.asp.net -- or any other bloghost which is of a technical nature -- but it would be a good thing to have for your own blog. Though it depends on whether you view your blog more as a journal or as a website. :-)

Monday, June 09, 2003 4:19 AM
# Damit said:

Sorry about the double-comment, but the permalink changed to

http://dotsql.dyndns.org:8674/weblog/PermaLink.aspx/06e0c735-5016-4c9a-a0c9-0f24884225eb

mostly because the upgrade to BlogX didn't go as smoothly as I hoped.

I'm all for such a system for semi-personal blogs though.

Monday, June 09, 2003 5:53 AM
# Mads said:

I agree that this is not appropriate for "technical" blogs, but it implies that people should keep different blogs for different purposes. In the future your blogpostings might be routed to different targets/aggregators depending on the subject of your blog. In this scenario, where the "blog-input" is universal, and the destinations of your entry might be several, and completely different, such a "censoring" of blogentries might be a general good idea. General blogiquette on when to, and not to use it however is another discussion entirely.

Monday, June 09, 2003 8:16 AM
# Damit said:

I won't disagree on your comment, but I wonder how you would implement a restricted list; would an aggregator/target have to log in to view the entry, or would it just be redirected to a different RSS URL?

Tuesday, June 10, 2003 3:55 AM
# Mads said:

The simplest would be no protected/private in regular public feeds, and a need for login to get this content. This can be compared with the webservices the aggregators use for editing your own blog. If authorized you get the extra content. Several approaches could be used to acheive this.

Tuesday, June 10, 2003 9:48 AM
# Damit said:

Sounds reasonable to me and in fact I think it's the approach Livejournal (and some other sites) is taking when they publish RSS feeds for each user.

Anyway, it'd be interesting to see which aggregator/weblog this first appears in.

Tuesday, June 10, 2003 3:54 PM