Posts from the past

So, a friend of mine asked me to remove his real name from the writing he did over at our old, soon-to-be removed blog. When I inquired about his reasons for wanting to do so I was given the answer that he doesn’t want his name to have any hits when entered into a search engine.

I respect my friend and I have the utmost respect for privacy. On the other hand I think that having your real name next to your writing on the web creates a sense of responsibility. It makes you think and carefully pick your words and phrases instead of puking all your thoughts onto the keyboard because no one will ever be able to connect them to your persona. Many people want their name to stand for something, be it quality, reliability or something else entirely.

Given this line of thinking I was curious and asked for the reason behind this intent. He stated that has almost completed his education and is about to start applying for different jobs. He doesn’t want his potential employers to find anything about him on easily accessible sources.

I have to admit that while I respect his decision and already took the content down after mailing him an archive with his posts, I don’t understand the motivation at all. Is there a reason to cover one’s tracks when one writes about his personal interests and they remain fairly mainstream things?

Personally, I tremendously enjoy writing this blog - it’s an outlet for my creativity, it’s my home on the web and it’s a place I can use to share stories, helpful articles and just my thoughts with whoever wants to read it. I have even found myself using it on my letters of application and potential employers have talked to me about having checked out my blog and having seen articles related to the work I was applying for - or even just stuff that happened to be among their own hobbies.

I don’t write for a particular audience when dumping my thoughts like this. Letting the thoughts flow and the words stream out of my fingers helps me clear my mind. There are quite some posts on this website that have started their lives as scribbles or singular sentences in Day One, the diary app that I adore. Such as this one.