Becky and Jon and Mary

The last two weeks seem to represent a wave of “privatization” going over the amateur family blogosphere. Lots of people have been posting about, and planning to make their personal blogs private. I think it’s a smart thing, and could potentially prevent problems. It’s smart to be cautious about what you put online, and anything that might endanger your family, or prevent you from gainful employment in the future is suspect. Because so many have decided to do this, we figured that we’d look dumb if we kept our blog open. Instead of taking affirmative steps to lock down our blog, I wrote this arduously long list detailing why we’re not going private…yet.

1. We try to avoid posting personal identifying information. We’ve tried to keep last names off the blog, phone numbers, addresses, and even emails are limited. This is not to say that a diligent searcher could not find our blog, but we try to limit the amount of very easily available information.

2. We try to limit discussing politics, religion, dietary habits, and medical views, as well as anything else that might potentially affect our friendship with others or my future employment. I can rant about these things on other pages with limited viewership and/or no identifying information. My blog that I write for my parents doesn’t need those kinds of things. Besides, if you write about a hot political/religious/dietary/medical topic, someone searching for information about that topic may run across your blog, see your view, strongly disagree, and then leave a nasty comment that will make you feel bad for a week.

3. We don’t really care about ex-boy/girlfriends who may stalk us. Come on in, have a look. I’m sure that our life doesn’t seem any more exciting than yours. In fact, because you can see how ordinary our life is, you probably care about us less, rather than more. Heck, if you feel like it leave a comment, we'll probably just feel more special.

4. Weirdos might stalk our family, it’s true. It’s something to worry about, but I’m not overly concerned. First, I feel confident that as the number of these types of family blogs has increased, the signal to noise ratio on the internet has made the odds that you will specifically be targeted lower. Second, even if a weirdo viewed our blog regularly, the odds that this would affect our lives in any meaningful way are lower still. Lastly, the weirdos that might look at your blog are more than likely people that you knew in a past life who are curious about you. As mentioned above, upon learning how tame our life is now, they will probably just get bored. Mystery is more exciting than bland reality.

5. We have lots of family and friends who may visit infrequently. I don’t want to keep an aunt, or second cousin, or long-lost high-school or college friend from having a chance to see what we’re up to. Anytime I run across a private blog, I am reluctant to ask for permission to view the blog, regardless of how well I know that person. I don’t want to bother them. I figure if they wanted me to see their blog, they would have already sent an invite. Private blogs are especially frustrating for people who aren’t regular followers of your blog, and may be uncomfortable asking for an invite. We don’t have huge viewership, but we like to let infrequent guests have a chance to catch up with us.

6. It helps to get more hits to Becky’s photography websites. She runs a blog at http://ravenbergphotography.blogspot.com and a website at http://slcphotobooth.com and we love to drive traffic to these sites so that we show up at a higher spot in the search engines.

There may come a day where something happens that will lead us to make our blog private. Until then, guests, licensees, and trespassers alike—enjoy. Here’s to knowing about our ordinary life.

P.S. This is in no way designed to offend those who have chosen to make their own blogs private. There are a lot of reasons to go private, and I’ve considered it a lot lately, which is precisely why I wrote this post.