Have I ever mentioned that, way back in late 2000, long before Heather Armstrong lost her job for blogging, my cousin, Ian Lind, resigned his job as a reporter when he was threatened with job termination for trying to make transparent on his blog the process of a newspaper being bought out by a larger company? (The archives of his blog should be required reading for reporters.)

I think about Ian a lot when I blog about university life. When I was a "pure" academic, meaning I was teaching and was a grad student, I knew I was taking a risk when I linked my name with my personal blog and wrote frequently about teaching and research. I might have put myself in jeopardy of not finding a tenure-track job (such positions are only a remote possibility for a Ph.D. in the humanities, anyway!). But there wasn't really a chance of me being fired for blogging because, hey, there's this thing called academic freedom. Since moving over to the staff side of the academic endeavor, however, I've been more careful about writing about my work as an academic technologist.

Fortunately--as you may have gathered from my other posts here--academic bloggers discuss quite frequently the various advantages and liabilities of blogging as an academic, pseudonymously or otherwise. The latest helpful posts come from Dr. Crazy, who gives us The Ethics and Conventions of Blogging While Academic, and Dean Dad, who writes about Blogging Boundaries.

I wanted to highlight this section of Dr. Crazy's long and very thoughtful post, because I think it applies to bloggers inside and outside academia:

There is a period of adjustment to the public nature of blog discourse. At first, I'd suspect that most of us don't really believe that people will read our blogs. We feel as if we are sending off messages in bottles and we wonder whether any response will ever come back. During this period, each of us is prone to make mistakes in judgment. It's not that we don't know that this is a public mode of discourse, but rather that we think our voices in that discursive network are insignificant. But if that's the case, then why write?

Well, I chose to start blogging for a number of reasons, but chief among those was that I felt like my experience as a junior faculty member who was single, who came from an elite graduate program but who now works at a regional state school, who was trying to balance professional demands with a personal life that had been pretty much on hold throughout my 20s, did not have a place in the narratives that describe professorial life. I felt when I started a profound disconnect between what I'd thought my life would be like once I got that coveted tenure-track job and the life that I actually had. And I felt a profound sense of alienation from academic community, in spite of having that tenure-track job. In other words, I felt like the narratives available to me ultimately marginalized me. I felt insignificant, and so I wanted to construct an alternative narrative.

Now, when I started I didn't know what I was doing. And the voice that I started with ultimately could not be sustained by me with any level of comfort. So ultimately I moved house and modified the voice and the kinds of things that I chose to write about so that I would feel comfortable. But that was a valuable learning experience for me, and I'd be reluctant to change that experience and I'd be reluctant to say that some sort of code of conduct should have been policing my behavior, even though in my former guise I was much more likely to write in ways that were angry, frustrated, and identifyingly specific. But I moved through that phase, and I moved out of it. I think that people who keep blogging ultimately do.

Check out the comments on both Crazy's and Dean Dad's posts for some interesting discussion.

And now I want to know: What blogging indiscretions have you made, and do you stand by your decision to publish them? What lessons have you learned about what's bloggable and what's not?

Leslie Madsen-Brooks, a recovering academic and an fledgling academic technologist, blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and Green West Magazine.