I got a mail yesterday from a person that I don't really know but have been mailing with professionally. She wrote me:
"your blog was a curious experience, I understand it is some sort of experiment, but it felt so, "private" somehow [..]"

It got me started thinking (again) about the entire public/private/in-between space of blogs (and moblogs!) which keeps confusing me; the lure of publishing so easily that it sometimes tempts you to tell things to strangers, you wouldn't even tell your close friends. I know that I have an actual audience that reads me; comments like this is a testament to it, and that's what makes blogging so much more satisfying than writing for nobody. Yet at the same time, you just keep forgetting, that A LOT of people might read you; also people you'd prefer not to know anything about yourself as a private person. It's the paradox of blogging: you want to be read and not read at the same time. It's the same damn thing that I haven't been able to explain properly to journalists yet, when they keep asking me why people tell so intimate stories about themselves online. I wonder if I will ever really get it - I definitely fall victim to the lure of exposure myself sometimes.

...But, at least, one of the undoubtedly nice things about blogging is, that unlike human to human conversations, you can actually go back in time and delete your outbursts when you (as often happens in life) end up regretting what you said in the past.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 04:57