Keeping up with the Blogs'es...Strangeness

Once you become somewhat of an established blogger, one of the biggest challenges you encounter is that of "keeping up with the blogs'es", of sorts;-) This, like the proverbial "keeping up with the Jones'", involves checking your favourite blogs out, noticinig there are snazzy add-ons--like haloscan, bloglines.com; etc -- you can use to embellish your site. Oftentimes, I am personally too lazy to use add-ons till the very last tail-end of its use, when it's gone out of style!:-)

I'm strange that way.

Perhaps not necessarily strange, but as interesting as a British diplomat, who has just made news in Thailand and worldwide. His crime? Simply posting his picture alongside his picture on Thailand's The Nation, where his blog is situated.

Articles in London's, The Guardian, and elsewhere have fuelled what the Guardian calls

a blizzard of comments

, simply because he posted his picture, which Thais were able to recognise...for having seen the face in no less than the red-light district of the capital.

Thankfully, the somewhat-embattled head of the British embassy's political section in Bangkok who "thought nothing of jotting a few inoffensive musings for a newspaper website as he approaches the end of his posting", won't be too snowed under by comments, seeing as he's almost at the end of his posting anyway. He has admitted to having frequented those places and, as far as we know, unmarried.

It will definitely blow over, I'm sure.

What, for me, it calls into question, though is that ever-perennial need to reconcile the virtual and private with reality and private. The ramifications that blogging has initiated are serious and very protracted. If you're a public official--as Jan Pronk a few months ago before he was temporarily expelled from his UN post in Sudan for his comments--it appears it behooves you to be a bit more careful than the small fry like us who are simple citizens with a great passion in blogging.

Either way, you can't be too careful, or too cautious, so a balance is key!