Tagging Tips and Non-Bloggy Remorse
Well, remorse is not quite the word, but I feel a loss of not having time and attention to blog. My focus on work is intense and utterly time consuming. I'm getting a ton done, but not bloggging.
So today I pass along something discovered by linky-accident, a nice post on tagging from Michael Clarke. I also enjoyed Michael's description of his work which included his mission to deliver "social value." If I were not working so hard, I'd write Michael and ask him to say more. (If this tempts you Michael, I'm smiling...)Web Worker Daily posted about smart del.icio.us bookmarking. It’s worth reading the whole article as they do provide useful tips for dealing with the frankly grim bundling interface on del.icio.us and highlight the useful Firefox plug-in for posting bookmarks to several different user accounts. Given the seven varieties of fuss going on about careless deployment of online user identities (e.g. expelled students, refusals to award degrees, Canadians civil servants banned from YouTube etc.), this sort of capacity to manage different identities is going to be increasingly important in terms of keeping your personal and your professional life separate (and avoiding unwanted leakage between the two).
I liked this post for two reasons. It had some great practical links about tagging, which I keep knowing in my gut has significance beyond what is obvious to me at my current state of practice, and because he touched on identity.
I'm not sure we can keep our personal and professional identities separate. For some of us, this is not a desired state, but for others it has profound impact. What I want to know is what are our internal processes and values about how we manage those identities? What sort of practices do we need for genuine self expression in all parts of our lives?
Ah, for a couple of months sabbatical to think, research, converse and write. But now it is BACK TO WORK.
Happy Mother's Day to all the moms in countries where this is celebrated today.
posted by Nancy White at 7:00 AM
2 Comments:
I think that you're right that we can't keep our professional and personal lives completely separate. However, we do have control over online identities and we can keep a fair degree of separation there. I have one username, ChristyInsDesign, which I use for most of my work-related identities. However, I have another username for any religious discussions, such as on Beliefnet forums. (Not that I have spare time to hang out on Beliefnet much lately, but I have been fairly active at certain points.) It isn't a foolproof system, of course, but I'm pretty cautious about revealing personally identifiable information while using my other identity. I want to keep a level of separation there, not so much because I would hide my views from people I know and trust, but simply because I don't want a potential future employer someday to Google my name and judge me based on those views.
For me, the process is primarily of using that other username for anything personal where I want to have some privacy. Knowing I am reasonably anonymous lets me be more open about my religious views than I think I would be otherwise, and I value not needing to censor myself. Mentally, this isn't a big challenge for me; these activities are pretty separate and I find it easy to switch gears between the two.
I'm not quite sure if this is what you were thinking about with keeping identities separate, but it did seem related to me.
Hey Nancy - thanks for the props and how odd you should pick on that post of mine, given that I've previously commented here under (you guessed it) a different online identity! I've been blogging as a parent for a while and deciding to blog from the perspective my more work focused identity has involved a constructing a whole raft of new IDs, google accounts and so on. So far, I haven't got them too mixed up but cookies, overlap of concerns and numerous other practical details do make managing it a pain. I've had to set up two user accounts on my Mac at home, for example, to try and keep chinese walls in place. And all this is before one starts looking at the psychological issues of addressing this kind of fragmentation of self and the concerns of different selves...
What is certainly being highlighted, over and over again, is that the workplace in general is yet ready to accept the "whole" person, warts and all - even if the warts (see the link about the 'drunk' teaching student) amount to a silly hat, a sillier caption and a paper cup. Oh, and tagging is one of the most important things in my (professional) life at the moment...(Note: as I prepare to push the 'post' button, I note that Blogger has defaulted to an inappropriate ID!)
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home