Intriguing, this whole Inter-Web thing

I just realized the difference between writing for newspapers, writing on a personal blog that only friends or colleagues will see, and writing on a personal blog that is also career-related and "published" in a public sphere.

I'm not so self-centred that I think a million Canadians will be reading this blog. Nor do I think it likely that a potential employer of mine -- or potential high-profile colleague, as the case may be -- will stumble upon it anytime soon.

But I was three paragraphs into a satirical rant about a certain columnist whose piece I read in today's Globe (or rather, stopped reading halfway through because it was so freaking boring)... when I realized that it's probably not a good idea to post stuff like that on the internet.

Even if it's just my friends and family and maybe classmates who are reading this, so far. Even if perhaps 90 percent of Globe readers would agree with my assessment of said columnist. And even if I'm just a lowly j-school student with no current "real job" prospects.

Even so. As one of our recent online media lectures made so clear to me, the internet can be an amazing tool. It's no longer about the amount of information you can access online -- it's about the fact that you can make all kinds of information come to you, with very little effort. But that also means that anything I post on my small blog could end up in anyone's inbox, for no apparent reason other than that they have an RSS feed tagging anything with the label Journalism or Globe and Mail or Careless Ranting.

All those warnings our teachers gave us about not posting inappropriate pictures or comments on Facebook in case employers saw them are now making sense. But this time it's my own writing that made me think twice: not two days has this blog been up and running, and already I've had to stop and rethink the line between personal opinion and material that I'd feel comfortable publishing in a newspaper.

Interesting.