I’ve created (or rather resurrected) my personal site. Anything I post here will be identifiable as mine. My thoughts, my opinions, as well as much random stuff. This poses its own dilemma. After all, my name will be directly tied to this content. Google will index it. My opinions will be here, visible for anyone who bothers to Google my name.

Is this is a good thing? A bad thing? Who knows.

In this day and age, anything on the internet will be there forever. Employers will no doubt google job applicants or check out their social media. Many people have been branded forever by one stupid moment. Anybody who is old enough to have been on the internet in the late 90’s will no doubt remember when the internet was a fun, trivial thing that wasn’t ‘real’. And at some point, many people discovered that it had become all too real, and the lines between ‘real life’ and the internet faded.

So that leave me wondering: is it a good idea to put things online or not? after all, if I write my thoughts about politics, or movies, or hobbies, those things will color the perception of the person reading it, which could be good or bad.

However, there is a saying: “whoever controls the narrative, controls the world”. I am far too active on the internet to be invisible. I have a semi professional hobby where I interact with lots of communities, I have been a software developer with lots of community interaction, and there are other places where I am active online. So people are going to find out all those things about me anyway.

So if I bundle my content under my own domain and make it easy for Google to find, I am at least in control of the information that Google will display first.

Plus, I’ve always said that on the internet, there is no such thing as privacy anyway. Anything you write should be written as if it’s going to be read by your wife, children, parents, your lawyer, your accountant, the tax man doing an audit, or a prosecutor in court. So following that rule, there is no point in hiding anyway.

Plus, I try to be a common sense person who likes to look at things in different ways. If my thoughts on something would be so upsetting to you that you don’t want to be my friend, employer or customer based on what you read on here, it’s probably best to know this up front.