A little tarnish on the charm

My fellow bloggers, sometimes, I think, people forget that this is a public forum. As someone who has been a journalist for half my life, I am very aware of the dangers of plagiarism, intellectual property theft, etc. I am also sensitive to the fact that when you write publicly, you are open to a variety of reactions. Not everyone gets your jokes, agrees with your point of view, or interprets facts the same way you do.

I have not had any problems so far with this blog, and I re-read everything very carefully before I hit "publish." There are a lot of things I would like to put out there, but I don't because who knows who is reading this? I know that I get some 450 hits a day here, and though I realize about 259 of those are just me checking in to see if anyone has commented, I'm definitely "out there." In fact, because of my line of work, which has my name on just about everything I do, a Google search of my name brings up several pages. Articles I wrote when Google was still just a noun are still floating around out there. So I try to be careful. I realize that as intimate as I would like this space to be, our comments are not just "between you and me."

So, what is this all about? I can't go into detail. Let's just say this: if you feel someone has done you a wrong, I strongly recommend you contact the person first to get the facts before blogging about it. Intellectual property theft is serious business, but so is defamation of character.