The Inherent Dangers of Blogging

Learnt not too long ago that my friend's girlfriend got dismissed from her job because of her blog. It seemed that she has written something on her blog that kinda offended her colleagues and so they proceeded to erase her or something. But the most amazing thing about the whole thing was that these colleagues apparently found her blog by their own efforts not that she specially gave them the link. This episode highlighted a few important lessons:

1)There really do exist very bo liao people in the world who would go out of their way to root out your blog from the Internet. Specifically digging out one's blog of course is only one manifestation of this kind of hyperkaypohness trait. It might be manifested in other ways like eavesdropping on your conversation with other friends, scrutinizing your homepage for "offensive and politically incorrect remarks" or sniffing around with other mutual friends to scavenge for scandals regarding you. This validates the Chinese saying "We cannot not be on guard against people".

2)It is not a good idea to write really personal stuff on your blog even if you are not giving the link to any Tom, Dick and Harry (or Jane, Mary and Lian) because of Lesson 1 above. This is a lesson that cannot be overemphasized as after some time, we might tend to just treat the blog as a kind of diary and start whining and bitching about everything in the world that took a swing at us. Even if you want to bitch about something or whine about something, make sure that it is inconsequential. For example, it is OK to bitch about the government if you are an ordinary Singaporean but NOT OK if you are in the civil service. Of course, the alternative is you start inventing codewords for all the sensitive nouns you might mention and not forgetting to not leave any trace in your blog as to your REAL identity. Hence, calling yourself 007 James Bond would be a great idea if nobody would think that you would ever want to fantasize naming yourself the most unprofessional spy in the whole world (I mean, the point of being a spy is to NOT draw so much attention to yourself and blend into the background, and given Bond's swashbuckling style, it is a miracle M ever allowed him to graduate from spy school or whatever they call their training academy).

3) If you REALLY want to write blatant personal stuff that might get you stoned or crucifixed or its equivalent, don't write it in the blog. This is where the good old diary still comes in useful unless you can lock your blog with some kind of password which even if successfully implemented would make having a blog pointless.

With that I shall end for today and hope that the webmaster of the blog (or whatever you call the person in charge of this whole business) don't read what I just said and interpret my statments as "anti-blogging" and shut my blog down.