To blog or not to blog...

My family has expressed concern for information posted in my blogs. Though I have asked, they haven't stated specific examples of problematic information herein. Nonetheless, their point is one I take seriously.

This post fits in with my last post on honesty and how open information should be. Do blogs provide information that is/could be abused? I wonder where the barrier exists for civil liberties and security concerns, at the same time I love to read the blogs of friends and to explore the wealth of information provided by open websites like Wikipedia and Flickr. There might be someone stalking this blog searching for information about my residence, my school, my family, or me. The dedicate savant will only find so much information - but only because I'm fairly careful.

I've heard the anecdotal stories of federal intelligence agencies scouring the internet (which was originally set-up for internal military communication) for news. Of course, now there is an excess of information on the internet making this 'harvesting' of information (think terrorist research) difficult. My school made the news in this regard after a church bombing when a news reporter was denied direct information from the school (i.e. name of superintendent, etc.) and subsequently found it all online. This made national headlines as a major security concern post-9/11; now our school's website is shut tight with hardly any information therein.

An internal school email highlighted a MSNBC article called "When murder hits the blogosphere" today. The intent of the email was to warn people of providing too much information; the article spoke of two young teenagers who committed murder and of their blogs, which, please note, had no direct relationship to each other. In the article, the blog was not used for murder nor did it document the murder. The point of the article was that newsreporters and common people could find interests and pictures of the students retroactively (about their prior states of mind) after learning of their deed. Read it for yourself.

My school currently forbids pictures or names of current students on the website due to the above national report (and other factors that are not appropriate to publish). It's something I'm looking into because I feel it greatly limits our ability to advertise ourself and our good works. Yes, I'm probably being too narrow-minded but it's hard to get students, faculty, and staff to come to this great school post-9/11 given that it's an American-based curriculum and the American Embassy has no staff with dependents (i.e. children) in Pakistan.

I'm going to keep blogging, but I respect and urge you to respect the warning that too much information can be abused (even though it wasn't in the above article).

Please share your thought on information posted to the internet - as students read my blog and have their own blogs. I'd like to know what you think since I haven't reached my own clear or objective conclusion on this matter.