I’ve taken a few peeks lately at an incredibly sensitive, incredibly personal blog written by a co-worker. She talks about love and relationships and fun and pain, and she is one hell of a writer — and I would never, ever, ever do what she is doing.

Fifteen years from now, when she’s up for an executive’s position at some company, a HR department is going to use the Internet Wayback Machine or a similar service to discover that prose….or a supervisor or direct report will find it…or an attorney….or, well, who knows? And she may considerable regret about what she wrote Way Back When.

I think about that sort of thing every time I write a blog post. That concern caused me to abandon and erase a couple of pre-blog-software web journals I kept in the 1990s and early 2000s (not that there was anything particularly worrisome in either of them). And even here, where everything is admittedly on a public forum, I cut down on random prying eyes by not using common blogging software and keeping the blog out of Web-search spider crawls.

The result is that I’m really writing this for myself and a few friends — but I’m not out there seeking an audience. And you’re not going to read very much about, say, love and loss.