Blog beginnings

I first came across Ricardo on Linked-In, where he had answered a question. He caught my attention because he works for PWC, a competitor to Ernst & Young (where I work). So I pinged Ricardo and we've been tracking each other's blogs. It was interesting reading Ricardo's post on the origins of his blog as it matches so closely to my own.

I started a blog internally about two years ago and recently decided to 'go public' for similar reasons to those given by Ricardo. However, I still actively maintain my internal blog and probably post equally frequently to both.

This motivated me to write a post about identities that has been stewing since I Roo Reynolds made a remark at the Online Information Exhibition I attended in December 07. Roo said that he has only one identity and it keeps him honest. Personally, I have lots of identities and I don't have any desire to mix them.

This blog is my professional identity, although I might post a bit of personal stuff in here. I do more personal stuff internally, partially out of fear of identity theft. I have several social networking persona's, the two main ones being Linked-In (professional) and Facebook (social). FB is the closest I get to publishing anything about my life on the web. If FB gave me the ability to have circles of friends I might do this more.

I have considered (but with four children never spared the time) setting up a private blog with logins in order to share my life with my closest family and friends who are scattered across the globe.

As bit of an aside: on identity theft the stories don't get much funnier that this.

What do other's think? Do you keep your worlds apart or throw everything into one bucket?

UPDATE: Someone sent me this link. It's an interesting read, but I think it's overdone. Sure there are people who exhibit extreme behaviours between different identities, most of us just reflect who we are in an appropriate way. In this post, however, I was thinking more about who I want to hear me. I'll tell my wife my deepest secrets, I won't blog them here. I'll tell my friends I'm looking for a new job, I won't post it here or on my internal blog, or on FB. I'll discuss some technical interest here, but internally will post about how EY could respond or use it.

Right now I have to have a separate application for each group and no tool yet enables me to break down my contacts into smaller groups and direct, at the level of a message, communications to these small groups. I'm guessing the future is not far off when I'll be able to do this in something like FB.