I am slowly coming out of the blogging closet. For the first year that I had this blog, I kept it a secret. Partly, I just didn't want to deal with any negative or spam comments, which seem an inevitable side effect of public blogging. Partly, I didn't want to create any expectation of regular postings on the part of any readership, real or imagined, that would add to my already overactive sense of personal responsibility.

Of course, this defeated one of the major points of blogging. From the personal blogs where I had been lurking (see Cool Strangers), I had come to the conclusion that what makes a personal blog worth keeping is its function to foster communication within a community of people who know each other in real life. Getting your ideas out to a broader audience of strangers is secondary. Even if you are, like my cool strangers (and as I like to style myself), a damn good writer with ideas worth sharing. Not being a part of a community that was into blogging, I just kept my musings to myself.

Then Brian told me about his blog, so I told him about mine. From there, word got out to the rest of our small group and Brian's readership. Around the same time, Holly and Graham's Mum and Dad debuted their family blogs, which contributed to my sense that my own personal world was gaining critical mass of bloggers and maybe I could take some tentative steps into the conversation. I changed the settings on my blog to make it plottable.

Then I told Peter about my blog, and he proceeded to COMPLETELY FREAK ME OUT by posting a comment under an assumed name. I wasn't really bothered, although a bit surprised, by having a comment from an apparent stranger. The thing that troubled me was that this stranger was talking like he knew me, like I had personally invited him to visit my blog. I got so hung up on trying to figure out why this stranger was greeting me so familiarly (do I have a cyber-stalker already?) that it took me several minutes to get past the first sentence and realize that it was an assumed name and that I did know the commenter and had invited him to visit my blog.

Maybe one of these days I'll tell my family about my blog. Or maybe I'll keep it a secret from them so that I can write about them behind their backs. ;)