About 100 online writers fill a conference room at the Omni. They have name tags like “lisarocks” and “Pineapple” and “Michelle (aka Booger).” Down the hall at the Herbalife Convention, folks with full names and spiffy business attire swap vitamin anecdotes. Here at JournalCon, people are waiting for drinks.
Vodka, orange juice, and Clamato line the conference table.
“Good way to start the day,” says an audience member. It’s 10am.
At last night’s “Web Writers Gone Wild” mixer, a few people overindulged, and this morning’s panel graciously offers a little hair of the dog for those brave enough to write down questions for the panelists.
A hand shoots up. “Please, I need a pen!”
The panel is “Everything You Wanted to Know About Having a Successful Journal/Blog but Were Afraid to Ask.” Some sample questions: Why did you start your Web site? (To be fabulous, of course.) What do you do when your boss stumbles across your Web site? (Find another job, fool.) Have you ever regretted something you wrote online?
Now that’s a good one. When it comes to chronicling your life online: Who hasn’t? Online writers — bloggers, if you must — are well-acquainted with the particular regret of the angry post, the spill-your-guts post, the take-this-job-and-shove-it post. They have a rocky relationship with the “send” button. All writers grapple with what part of their lives to disclose, but Web writers have it especially tough. The more they share, the more popular their site becomes. But the more they share, the more dangerous their site becomes. Combine an impulse toward confession with the veneer of anonymity and the immediacy of the medium — not only the ease with which a writer can update but the lack of any editing whatsoever — and you got trouble. Oh man, everyone’s got a story.
Some good ones were shared later that afternoon at a packed panel called “For Better or Worse: How the Web Changed My Life.” Bored at her office job, Lee Eddy used the company scanner and webcam to build her online journal, http://ladeeleroy.diaryland.com, on which she sounded off about her coworkers. One day, the boss called her in.
“Do you know what this is about?” her boss asked. “Awesome,” thought Eddy, who is also a local performer and comedian. “I’ve won Employee of the Year again!”
But no. They’d found her Web site. She was fired that day.
Same thing happened to Rob Hummel-Hudson after his boss found a nasty post about a colleague. And Linda Sharps wasn’t fired, but her father hasn’t talked to her since discovering a post in which she lambasted her stepmother.
It’s important to note that none of these people made their journals public. Well, they wanted people to read them — but not “those people.” And yet, “those people” found them, because in the age of Google, people just find things. Linda Sharps’ father was looking for a margarita recipe. Whoops!
These are the kinds of mistakes online writers make all the time. Ethics trail behind technology still, and the dilemmas abound: Should you write about your job? Your kids? Your girlfriend? Your girlfriend’s kids? The lesson seemed to be this: Write responsibly. You never know when what you write could come back to bite you in the ass.
“Whenever I write about someone now,” said Rob Hummel-Hudson, “I like to think of them sitting in the room with me. Could I face the person I was writing about?”
Now, I’ll drink to that. 
This article appears in October 24 • 2003.