Blogging and Personal Exposure (ooh, sounds kinky!)

Things have been really confusing and stressful and exciting and awful around here lately - between the election and college application deadlines and family crises, we seem to be finding ourselves pretty much standing on our heads and making pitiful little bubbling noises much of the time. Which makes it pretty hard for me to get up the energy and the organized thought processes necessary for the presentation of interesting blog material.

Which brings up the interesting philosophical and ethical questions involved in blogging as a practice. When so much of one's personal life is made up not only of one's own concerns and thoughts and behaviors, but also of the concerns and behaviors of others who have significant impact on our lives, what are the reasonable parameters of disclosure when blogging?

To maintain complete privacy is to render your blog boring and to hold your readers at such a distance that you risk not engaging them at all. To be completely candid and open about one's life is to risk violating the privacy of others, as well as potentially exposing oneself to certain safety problems.

If you are a blogger, how do you balance these concerns? Do you have a conscious policy, a set of boundaries that you impose upon your own blogging practices?

If you are a reader, what expectations do you harbor towards your favorite writers? Do you expect to read about their political views? Their religious views? Their ethical positions? Their private lives?

What responsibilities do you think bloggers - and writers in general - have towards their family and friends, their readers, and even themselves, in terms of maintaining privacy vs. personal disclosure and honesty?