Mathemagenic

Jill, in between the lines:

I love reading between the lines of blogs - though sometimes I’m completely wrong about things! So it was fun to see an interpreted and confirmed version of what went on behind the scenes of Jason Kottke’s and Meg Hourihan’s blogs in the last few years:

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Me, I’ve gone a bit quieter with my own between the lines. Realising that a lot of students and colleagues and bosses and journalists sometimes read my blog has got me drawing sharper lines between public and private. I’ll let you know when I get married, though :)

This echoes my own struggles. When preparing for our wedding I was drawn between desire to share and need for privacy.

From one side, I've learned so much about bringing different cultures together in a wedding while reading stories of Wendy and Joey getting married - I'm grateful they blogged so much of it. I felt like doing something similar for unknown readers (anyone needs help regarding paperwork to marry a foreigner in Moscow?). And I also wanted to share the fun with those friends who do not come for dinner often enough to hear the stories.

From another side, I wouldn't be myself doing something like that - I close the curtains so strangers on the street can't peek into our living room (and if you walk in a residential neighbourhood in the Netherlands you know how uncommon it is). In same way - I’m not comfortable making things too explicit in my blog.

We tried to figure out something in between for our wedding - figuring workarounds, mix of technologies and practices to share and to keep it private at the same time (I was close to reposting here "wedding blogging policy" from our private blog, but then did a check and figured out that having a quote here makes it too easy to find ;).

I just hope that one day I will need less workarounds for selective sharing - deciding for a piece of information how far it should do - to the whole world, to friends, to family or to my personal online space, visible only to me. It works now in many bigger group spaces (e.g. Flickr and LJ), but I want it to work in my own space and I don't want to depend on the registering all my friends in yet another online something.

Fingers crossed. We've got so many buddy lists around that they should turn into something really useful.