Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Self censorship or just common sense?

In today's Nature there's another installment of Prospect by Paul Smaglik (yes, it's not open access -- unclean! unclean!). If you don't read it, Prospect is a column geared towards postdocs and other beginning researchers and aims to give them career advice, often verging on the banally obvious. Today's was a little different -- it's entitled "Could blogs replace résumés?" and suggests that "perhaps it's best to treat your blog as a public document that you wouldn't mind your next boss reading". Well, I suppose -- realizing that what you say on the Internet can come back to haunt you is not new and dates back to the early days of Usenet newsgroups, but at the same time it isn't possible to say anything interesting without potentially pissing off somebody.

1 comment:

Jonathan Eisen said...

I agree - whenever I obsess about not pissing people off, what I say or write is pretty boring. The key to me for blogging is to try to be passionate but not rude ... I have crossed the line quite a few times ... but then I edit down my blog after the fact if I am really wirried about it. Fortunately, it is har for people to find you pre-edited blogs ...