Changing or Taking Down Posts

I had an interesting conversation tonight with Richard Eriksson (of Bryght) about taking down or changing posts that you no longer feel represent you well online. Now, we weren’t talking about the kind of posts that have gotten people fired or anything, but posts on personal blogs that just don’t seem, well, apt anymore.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about (and writing, for the book) appropriate subject material for blogs, but mostly I’ve thought about them in a business context. For business blogs, there is a question of appropriate content, of course, but it’s all about the business—don’t blog trade secrets or disclose confidential or proprietary info, don’t blog about your personal life in a professional space and so on. And of course there have been plenty of bloggers who have gotten into trouble with their employers about things on their personal blogs.

But tonight I’m thinking about those personal bloggers who have just decided that what’s on their blog doesn’t really reflect who they are anymore, or that what’s there is one-sided. Richard talked about having done a lot of posts that he called “thinking” posts—they were introspective, but not reactive, and he just didn’t want to be that kind of blogger anymore. So he took them down.

There are hundreds? thousands? surely not millions? of abandoned blogs out there. I’ve also talked with many bloggers who have changed what they were doing with their blog, but I don’t think I’ve ever spoken with someone who took down quite so much content.

Before tonight I would have advised any blogger—personal or professional—to leave old posts up, even if you don’t agree with them anymore, as long as they didn’t contain libelous or offensive information. As I think about it, however, I realize that this is more important for business bloggers, who are necessarily held to a different standard of truth and transparency. For a personal blogger… well, people change, and so why not a blog?

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 02/17 at 10:18 PM • Just a Few Words
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Comments

  1. I’ve never agreed with the idea of throwing away journals, and that’s where I started when I came up with my own methods.

    I don’t delete old posts, nor do I hide them away from view or edit them.  I wouldn’t have that luxury if they were printed in an old paper or if I had emailed them out to my friends.  To pretend that I didn’t write something 2 years ago strikes me as dishonest.  I try to write well, and if I decide on a change of direction or something similar, I create another outlet.  I’ve started to create more tightly targetted sites rather than rely solely on categories and tags to keep things seperate.

    I try not to go back and change posts in any basic way after about the first hour of going ‘live’ either.  If it’s new information or it changes my point, I add to the end of a post with “UPDATE” clearly labelled. I’d hate to think that someone out there would point to something I wrote today, and a year from no I decide to re-write it to change my point entirely, or delete the post.

    If I delete that post, I leave the linker hanging, which is something I wouldn’t want them to do to me…

    Posted by richard on 02/18/05 at 04:03 PM
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