Blogging to the world

Good lord.

It's funny how you forget that your blog is actually publicly accessible, and that you might want to, uh, think carefully about what you put on it.

Yesterday I got 9 times more blog visits than my average. When I realized in the morning that this was happening, I was completely freaked. I traced the visits to a post on a site with what is obviously very high readership. The author had posted something about one of my posts, and thus was driving all their traffic to me.

There was debate. And all manner of impassioned emails to me. There were implications.

I took the post down.

It's not that I am upset with the author of the post that directed readers to me, not at all. After all, this is a public forum. That's just it, though - I forget that what I write here can be accessed by anyone. I chug along, imagining that I am writing for my loose little academic-blogger readership - for some kind of virtual community. Sure, my site counter tells me people often find me when they are looking for banana muffin recipes or academic lesbians. But somehow that doesn't translate, in my mind, into much of anything.

A good reminder to be careful.