Moving my blog to Facebook or similar gated site

My original reason for starting my old blog was to keep in touch with my family and friends, and to perhaps make some new friends (or find a boyfriend) who shared my interests.  Over time, I expanded my blog's purpose to include networking with economics professors and students, writing about my politics and activism, and making money from ads.  Then I got too busy with my real life and shut it down for a while, until I had free time again and restarted it because I was bored and lonely.

I've been blogging on this second incarnation for almost three months now, but I've begun to doubt whether my new blog in its current format is still effectively serving my needs:

1. Keep in touch with family and friends: It seems to work pretty well for this purpose.  I suck at keeping up with one-on-one pen-pal relationships, so being able to post all my stuff in one place where people I know can read or not read it as their time and interest permit, then comment or email me their responses and personal news when they want, works much better for me.  Most of the people I know IRL read my blog at least occasionally.  Also, I frequently hear from distant relatives and old friends/acquaintances about how much they enjoyed browsing my archives after they Googled their way here, so having a public internet presence is helpful. 

The drawback, though, is anyone -- including stalkers and creepy strangers -- can read what I post here, so I have to censor myself much more than I would if I was writing only to people I know.  My husband doesn't want me posting pictures of him because he doesn't want weirdos stalking him in the poker room and/or outing him as a professional gambler to the fish.  My more privacy-oriented friends and family members don't want me to blog about them at all.  I often start to write about my plans then delete it when I realize that I'm giving out too many details about where I'm going to be when (I've had some bad experiences with creepy men showing up places to pester me after finding out where I was going to be from my blog). 

2. Make new friends: I have made many "friends" through blogging.  However, I am not sure that these are the best type of "friends" for me to be making. 

Over the past few years my social life has become unbalanced in favor of online "friendships".  The primary reason for this shift was that all the moving around I've done (Seattle to Bellingham to Costa Rica to Vancouver to Las Vegas to the Seattle to Las Vegas in the two-year period of January 2005 to January 2007) made it difficult for me to establish and maintain real-life friendships.  Why bother if you're just going to move again soon? 

My online friends were my only social constant for most of that period.  In some ways, it was great.  Whenever I was feeling lonely in a new town, it was comforting to know that Phil, Scorpius, Wayne, Andrew, Shawn, Bill, etc. were just an RSS feed update away from virtually hanging out with me chatting about Battlestar Galactica or whatever.  On the other hand, being able to easily assuage my loneliness online has reduced my incentive to ever leave the house.

Also, I've noticed that a hugely disproportionate number of my blog "friends" are single heterosexual males (SHMs).  Perhaps this is just an innocent correlation due to a combination of my primarily "male" interests and the additional free time that singles have available to spend socializing online.  But I suspect that in many cases it's because their interest is more than friendly.  This was flattering when I was single, but now that I'm married I'd prefer that my friends not fantasize about having sex with me. 

I realize that sexual attraction is not every SHMs motivation for befriending me (so no need to leave ego-deflating comments about how much you *don't* want to have sex with me, thanks :) ) but it's the motivation of *enough* SHMs that it makes me suspicious of all of them.  Especially since I am apparently not very good at reading people in this area -- I've been surprised by how many of my SHM "friends" suddenly stopped speaking to me after I got married.  (Many of these former "friends" also used to pretend that their interest was only "friendly" when I was single, so I've stopped believing SHMs about their true motivations for friendships with women.)

I like and want to keep most of my current friends, but I don't want to make any new long-distance or SHM
friends until I've balanced out my social life with other types of friends.  Since my blog seems to primarily attract long-distance SHMs it no longer fits my friendship needs/goals.

3. Find a boyfriend: Well, I got married -- unrelated to blogging -- so that's not a need any more.

4. Networking: My blog has actually been quite effective for this.  I got my last job (in less than 24 hours!) because of my blog.  Also, when I was still thinking about graduate school in economics, I made contacts and found out about programs that I wouldn't have otherwise made or found out about.  I've been approached for other jobs and freelance gigs (that I decided not to pursue) as the result of my blog as well.  So I think that in general, a blog is a good way to network.  However, I strongly suspect that an ungated mixed diary/political/hobbies and interests blog is not the most effective way to network professionally.

5. Write about politics and activism: Having my own blog for this made sense when I was a candidate for office.  However, I don't plan on doing that again, nor do I plan on blogging about politics frequently enough to build up a sizable audience interested in reading about it.  If I want my political posts to actually influence anything, I think I would be a lot more effective as an occasional contributor to a more popular frequently-updated politically-focused group blog.  So I might take ElfNinos Mom up on her invitation to write for Last Free Voice when I have something political to say.

6. Make some money: I made a surprising amount of money with my old blog until the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act killed 95% of my income and forced me to get a job. :(  Not all of my blog revenue was from internet gambling ads, though -- some of it was from Google and Amazon as well. 

Since then, I've spent a lot of time pondering what did and didn't work for making money on my old blog, as well as researching how others have made money online, and I think I could be successful at it again.  I considered putting ads on this blog, but just like with networking, I'm pretty sure that a mixed diary/political/hobbies and interests blog is not the most effective way to make money online.

...

So.  Writing through the above, it doesn't seem like this blog, in its current form, is effectively meeting my needs or furthering my goals anymore.  What, if anything, would work better?

I enjoy blogging about my life and want to continue, but I've decided that want to restrict the audience to only people I know in real life and my closest online friends.  So I'm exploring social networking sites that would allow me to do that.

I don't like MySpace -- it's ugly, full of the wrong kind of people, and has a confusing interface (I still haven't figured out how to configure it to prevent strange men, spammers, and bands from approaching me yet still allow real friends to find me).

Facebook appeals to me because the privacy settings are pretty configurable.  I can decide what kind of information each class of people -- friends, friends of friends, my "networks" (UNLV and Las Vegas), or the general public -- gets to see.  It's also already relatively widely used, has a lot of neat features, and is a hell of a lot classier than MySpace.  I like the school- and local-oriented networking features.  Although it's more of a social networking site than a blogging platform, there are blogging plug-ins, so I think I could do almost everything there I can do now, maybe more.  However, I wish that I could customize the privacy levels more -- either with custom-made groups, or even on the individual level -- instead of just having one big group of "friends" with equal access to my friends-only content.

LiveJournal is another option.  I haven't experimented with it much, but I've gathered that you can set up different "friends filters" to manage who gets to see which posts, which makes the privacy settings much more configurable than Facebook.  It's just a blogging platform, though, and there isn't a way tostore non-post profile information privately like in Facebook.

Any other ideas?  I don't know much about the social networking sites, is there something out there as fully-featured as Facebook, but with more customizable privacy settings?  I'd prefer to go with something that is widely used, so as to increase the likeliness that friends and family already use it or would have more use for it than just reading my blog.  I'm also interested in suggestions for sites that are more professional networking-oriented -- I might create profiles on different sites for different purposes.

Also, if you are a friend or family member, please let me know which social networking service(s) you already use. 

Comments

[Patti]

Livejournal is by far the best social blogging platform. It's geared toward blogging, and has a rich feature set geared toward exactly that-- think things like email post with full privacy controls. Friends filters are the absolute nuts in terms of controlling who can see what-- you can post something to the world, friends only, or just a subset of your friends. I sometimes post something to all of my friends but one (and hope the rest of them can keep a secret.)

[grant]

You could start your own social network at Ning ( http://www.ning.com/). You'd have total control over virtually every aspect of it. Though it might require too much configuration for you.

Also, on Facebook you can setup a limited profile on a per user basis. Or you could, last time I checked.

[Kerry]

*Sniffle Sniffle*

Go ahead and leave again.

*Sob*

That's your problem... Too darned popular.

Having never had that problem myself, I can't fully empathize with your position. Yet, I've found myself slowly walking away from blogging for a very long time...because sometimes you're just too busy having a life to document any of it. And I think I'm okay with that.

So, g'luck! (But rest assured that I will stalk you out on my next trip to Vegas)

[Glen Raphael]

However, I strongly suspect that an ungated mixed diary/political/hobbies and interests blog is not the most effective way to network professionally.

Actually, I suspect it is. Being ungated means your audience grows organically to a degree it couldn't in a gated environment where growth depends on new friends-of-friends joining a particular site and announcing their connections explicitly. Being an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink blog means you have enough regular content to interest a wide variety of readers. True, if you say "too much" you might dissuade employers from hiring you, but in many cases the ones you'd dissuade are exactly the ones you'd *want* to dissuade. (And besides, the added reach makes up for it.) The exact kind of blog you've got is an excellent resource if your goal is to be able to get a job or solve a problem within a day or two of posting a bleg.

[jeff]

creepy men showing up places to pester me after finding out where I was going to be from my blog

That guy outside Ivar's with the fedora and sunglasses - that wasn't me.

[Jesse B]

I use Live Journal. Becuase you can have general posts (for everyone) and friends locked posts (or family, or whatever) for most intimate details.

[Jacqueline]

It probably depends a lot on the industry. I am working towards transitioning into a more conservative industry that will require working with clients and a lot of confidentiality, so I suspect that a controversial, overly-publicly-revealing blog would be less likely to be well-received by potential employers. :)

[Scot B.]

Well, you could use this as a platform for serious stuff (even if sometimes it just points to a political post on another blog) and keep the creepy stalker stuff behind a friendwall on a social site.

[Andrew Ferguson]

I'd use caution with Facebook. They seem to be a blackhole of data (i.e. you can put your stuff into it, but God forbid you want to take it out and leave Facebook).

LiveJournal could be nice, but I don't think private readers can get their private feed delivered through RSS. So you might have a readership drop there.

WordPress (and I would assume TypePad) does have user management features that could be useful. I'm also pretty sure there are a few plugins that could also be of some use and get you what you want with minimal fuss.

MySpace is the bane of the Internets existence and needs to be destroyed.

[Laurel]

Another vote for LiveJournal. There are several layers of privacy available:

- Public; open to anybody (including non-LJ users) to read
- Friends-only; open to anybody on your friends list (you have to grant "friendship" requests to these people)
- Friends-only and filtered; open to certain subsets of your friends list (say family, friends, local friends, etc.) that you are able to set up
- Private; readable only by you

The only real configuration required is setting up the friend filters. It's a pretty simple task, and you can put the same person in multiple filters, if need be.

Later, when you add a new person to your friends list, it will automatically bring up a screen where you can choose which filters to add them to.

My biggest beef with LJ, at this point, is related to the the political brouhaha about their sale to a Russian company with, go figure, ties to the KGB. Said company has all the Russian users of LJ concerned about their privacy and free speech, which I empathize with.

I used an LJ exclusively for several years (going through cycles of public and friends-only posting) before opening my public Wordpress blog (PGB). Now, I still use the LJ to blog to friends about things of little interest to my PGB audience, or things I want to restrict to a more intimate audience. I also discovered an addon that automatically posts things from PGB to my LJ account, so my friends there can read both my separate public blog and the friends-only entries in one fell swoop. It also makes it so I receive email notification of comments on my LJ-posted PGB entries, a feature I can't get with the LJ feed of PGB.

[susan]

Well, whatever you decide to do (i prefer facebook), add me as your friend. I only internet stalk you and Kerry because I think you guys are funny/interesting, but I'm a girl, so it's not creepy. ;)

From a long-time reader, Susan

[J.]

Whichever platform you choose, please do not stop writing generally accessible blogs. I am a long time reader but a passive one; I certainly do not qualify as a friend (although you claimed that I changed your life by introducing you to www.google.ig :)). Besides, I find social networking creepy. I won't miss details about your privacy (the ones you are hesitant to share) but I find you interesting and inspiring so I'd certainly like to be updated on your escapades and thoughts.

[Jacqueline]

I should add something that I left out of my original post: Although LiveJournal has some great features, I am biased against using it as my personal blogging platform because there are some very disturbing subcultures on there that taint the reputation of the whole site with their presence. Although I'm sure that most LiveJournal users (including those who read and comment on my blog, of course) are lovely people, the unsavory minority are unfortunately rather prominent.

When I think of Facebook, I associate it with upper-middle-class college students and college-educated young professionals.

However, when I think of LiveJournal, not only do I think of it as populated mostly by young teen girls, but I also associate it with furries, pedophiliac fanfic writers, pro-anorexics, and cutters.

So, both MySpace and LiveJournal come with the baggage of a bad reputation about the type of people active on each site, but at least on MySpace, the fucked-up people seem to be fucked-up in much more mainstream ways!

I doubt that I am the only one who perceives LiveJournal this way, and thus I'm reluctant to blog with a .livejournal.com suffix when that site is known for attracting a disproportionately high number of immature and/or psychologically damaged people. If I'm going to suffer from any guilt-by-association because of my choice of blogging platform, I'd prefer the binge-drinking frat boys of Facebook as the lesser evil. :)

It's possible, though, that my perception of LiveJournal has been completely warped over the years by my brother's delight in exposing all of its dark little corners. I've read jabs on other sites that reinforce this perception, but maybe it's not as widespread as I think. If I'm completely off-base about LiveJournal's reputation, please enlighten me.

[Philip Welch]

Well,

1. LiveJournal is run by the KGB
2. Facebook is run by the CIA
3. MySpace is run by Rupert Murdoch
4. Orkut was taken over by Brazilians
5. Nobody uses anything else
6. Public blogs have a plethora of drawbacks

I wonder if you can set up Typepad to require people to sign in with TypeKeys to view private posts. Like, specific TypeKeys that you could manage in group permissions ways. I suspect if there was something like this you'd know of it though.

[Glen Raphael]

I think you're off-base about LiveJournal's rep. I used LJ for a few years, still subscribe to blogs hosted there, and hadn't really noticed any of those subcultures. I used to work at a small company where everyone used livejournal. Patri uses it, jmz uses it, various poker players use it... It's like saying "I don't want to watch television because there's too much sports on television." I'm sure you can find unsavory elements there as at any site, but you kind of have to be looking for them.

[Timothy]

LiveJournal can work, but regardless of the truth Jacqueline is correct about its perception. I have a livejournal, I use it to keep track of some friends from college...but, yeah, weird communities all over. And, I used to be a cutter so there you go :-).

You might consider Drupal. It's mainly blog/forum software but you can do a lot of configuration around user verification and such so that guests/unverified users can only see certain areas. You can also restrict down who can start new forum topics, so it's maybe not exactly ideal but it could work.

[Jacqueline]

Phil: I wish. Oh, how I wish. I have also wished long and hard for individual user-level comment moderation settings.

Glen: My brother does go deliberately looking for the ick... but he finds an awful lot of it.

[Andrew]

I'm also interested in suggestions for sites that are more professional networking-oriented...

It doesn't have any blogging capability that I know of, but LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) is quite popular and useful as a professional networking site.

[miss oblivious]

Here's another vote for keeping something of your blog accessible to the non-creepies. I'd rather not have to go find another interesting nerd-girl blog that has all the nerdy AND girly crap that I love on it! But if I must, well, it's been really great getting to know you completely one-sidedly :)

Just another nerd-girl from the Pacific NW who enjoys sci-fi, gaming, and economics -m.o.

[Emily]

I'm just another nerdy female who enjoys your blog (and hasn't ever commented on it before, that I recall.)

I'll also vote for livejournal, as it's my favorite platform and I enjoy and make full use of the public-friendsonly-onlycertainfriends filter options.

Plus I found you through livejournal, in one drama-laden post in the Bellingham community or another :-)

[Shawn Levasseur]

Blogger does allow for "by invitation only" blogs, in case you didn't know.

Though I've had plenty to comment (and crack wise) about every little thing you blog about. I originally came to your blog back when you were working in the Washington state LP, as I went looking for Libertarian blogs.

The geekery, and your persona were what kept me around when you became less politically active after your Costa Rica plans got altered.

Keeping a private blog for close friends and family is a good idea. But, I do think that you ought to keep a toe in the public blog. You don't have to post all the time. Just keep up what's here, and add bit when the muse strikes you (and have available time, of course.)

If you do keep the public blog, I may suggest that you may try to make a few coins off of the traffic, through ProjectWonderful.com. My lowly site gets me something more than pocket lint, but other sites do generate a decent amount from ads auctioned through their system.

Oh look at me, I'm suggesting more projects to keep you from your classwork. Sorry 'bout that.

[Laurel]

I'm not sure about the public perception of LiveJournal. I don't think that the negative perception is widespread enough for the general public to think LJ = freaks and furries, and I think if somebody does have that opinion they probably know enough about LJ to be able to tell if a particular person actually runs in those circles. (It's generally pretty obvious via usericons, listed interests and what communities the LJer in question is a member of.)

I certainly know those people are on LJ, but I usually don't run into any of them unless somebody links to something amusing or weird. I don't consider it any more bizarre around there than the rest of the internet, that's for sure.

[maurile]

Great. Whom are we all supposed to stalk now? Megan McArdle?

You might try Yahoo! 360°.

[Shawn Levasseur]

Nah, stalking Megan won't work, her "Spider Sense" will catch you.