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Do you separate your professional web presence from your personal one? If so, how? Why? And what methods do you use for keeping them both updated? Let us hear from you in the comments!
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7 Responses to Open Thread: Advice For Personal Versus Professional Web Sites?
halavais - September 30, 2010 at 10:44 am
Personal? What’s that?
stevefoerster - September 30, 2010 at 10:54 am
My web site has both professional and personal elements. Other than a few references to my libertarian ideological positions, none of the personal elements are all that controversial. However, neither do I go out of my way to play it safe. The way I see it, if you don’t like who I really am, I probably wouldn’t enjoy working with you anyway.
lexalexander - September 30, 2010 at 11:20 am
I started blogging off and on in late ’97, before I knew what it was called, and have been blogging continually since 2002. This led to my starting blogging (and doing other things with new/social media and Web 2.0) at the job I had in the mid-2000s with a daily newspaper. There was a good deal of overlap, but interacting with people online was my job, plain and simple.Now that I’m doing PR for a college, things are a little more nuanced. I don’t blog about the day job, period. I interact with people on Facebook in both personal and professional capacities with the same account. I maintain separate personal and work Twitter accounts. My blog posts show up on Facebook, so I don’t blog anything I would mind my mother reading. (Mom’s pretty tolerant of PG-13, however, so these days I’m more likely to keep my 12-year-old daughter in mind.)I typically blog from a desktop, but I can do it from my Droid phone if need be, using WordPress’s Droid app. Ditto Twitter, although I frequently will Tweet (to personal, work or both) or post to Facebook from the Droid using Tweetdeck. There’s a Droid app called PingDroid that will let you post to a wide variety of social media accounts at once, and ping.fm will do the same for desktops.A few things to keep in mind:– Once you post something online, you should presume it’s out there forever. Some things can be scrubbed, but it’s difficult.– Accordingly, don’t post anything you wouldn’t mind seeing, or mind your boss seeing, on the front page of the paper or the 6 o’clock news. And some bosses tolerate a lot more than others.– Blogging about your job is generally a bad idea unless it’s your job to blog about your job.– Blogging (or blog-commenting) anonymously/pseudonymously, particularly about anything personal/controversial, is a good idea but not a perfect one. Someone who really, really wants to out you will probably be able to find a way to do it, whether through technical means or, as recently happened in a case here in N.C., via a court order.
ghsmith76 - September 30, 2010 at 12:22 pm
My mostly static professional website is just that.My blog is job related but I am careful to speak to the category (Higher Ed Technology) with careful reference to my specific CIO role and activity. But you can’t talk about EdTech without real observations or examples. But “careful” is the important rule.Twitter is mostly professional for me.I leave the personal to FaceBook, YouTube and Flickr
pbradl42 - September 30, 2010 at 5:13 pm
I mix – although twitter tends towards collegial interactions and facebook towards student interactions. I teach at a small liberal arts college that professes to educate the ‘whole person,’ and as we faculty are, in many ways, meant to model the academic life for our students, I think it is important that we be ‘whole people’ in our digital lives as well as on campus.I’m certainly not going to put intimate details of my life on twitter, but I think there is instructional value in allowing my students to observe me engaging critically with the culture (and my colleagues) in real time. After all, I’m asking them to do just that, and let me observe (i.e. grade) it, all the time.
drj50 - October 6, 2010 at 4:40 pm
I have both, with a link from my professional site (on university server) to my personal site (hosted elsewhere).There are lots of good reasons to have both. A little bit of personal information makes faculty and staff three-dimensional (e.g., has kids, rides horses, volunteers as a literacy tutor). As pbradl42 says above, “I think it is important that we be ‘whole people’ in our digital lives as well as on campus.” But the school’s website is not the place for pictures of your summer vacation, or to advertize that you have your daughter’s girl scout cookies for sale.This is especially true in “sensitive” areas like politics or religion. I recently came across a faculty member’s “personal” website on the school’s server that very nicely handled her religious commitment. Her educational background included one religious college (there were links to all of the schools she had attended) and she included her church (also with a link) among her interests. There was also a link to a personal page (hosted elsewhere) that told more about her religious commitments. This hit the balance really well — open about things students might be interested in, but not proselytizing on the university webspace. The same would apply to political viewpoints, advocacy for various causes, etc. This applies even more for those of us working for public institutions. We cannot use public resources to advocate for candidates, causes, religious points of view. But we can, with discretion, disclose our interests, and invite visitors to connect to others sites where they can find more information if they choose.
natekreuter - October 11, 2010 at 12:49 am
I blogged my reponse, which might indicate the answer:http://www.natekreuter.net/archives/450