Greetings! Hopefully you are all deep into your exploration of Web 2.0 tools. Some of the tools (like Twitter) can make you ponder hard on what their practical uses might be, but part of the fun of exploring is asking and answering questions like that.
We had a question raised recently by a 23 Things participant that we thought we should share with all of you. The question related to the privacy of blogs: as in, are they private? Is there a way to make them private, so they are not indexed by the major search engines?
The short answer is no, there is no sure way to make a or keep a blog private. Using a tool like Blogger, you CAN change the settings so that Blogger doesn't publish your blog to other Blogger users. But that does not block the search engines from indexing your blog's contents. See this page for more details on making Blogger as private as possible: http://dwarfurl.com/da1b6
Blogs are by nature social networking tools. They are meant to be shared. That being said, a certain measure of discretion is always wise, be it in a blog, an email message, or a listserv posting. We in no way mean to alarm anyone with this email, we just want to make you all aware that your blog is out there on the Internet, and people can read it, so write for it keeping that fact in mind.
If you are interested in hearing more about this topic and are coming to CLA 2007, be sure to attend the Master Speaker session with Shel Israel. Shel is the co-author of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. More information about the book is at http://dwarfurl.com/14407.
