Is it narcissitic to write a blog? A popular radio personality asserted Wednesday that people that write blogs are the biggest self centered “a-holes” around. Beyond that opinion I have noticed several problems associated with blogging.

My number one problem of the past year or so is that so many things I do can’t be mentioned on here because they have to do with my dating activities. For instance, last summer I went to Disneyland with a young woman (she had an extra ticket). I knew that the “relationship” was a tenuous one and I didn’t want another woman to read about it after the fact and get confused (or think that I see a different girl every weekend). To avoid these and other problems I decided long ago that my dating activities would remain invisible to this public forum. Even the small note I left a few weeks ago about leaving the dating sites behind raised some unexpected eyebrows.

This all leads me to wonder if I’m creating more liability than I need by doing this. A woman I was dating earlier in the year told me she almost decided not to see me again after reading about the breakup in 2006. Needless to say she isn’t around now. Maybe that was why – maybe not, but the fact that I was almost dismissed simply because I had divulged this information made me pause.

Even more disturbing is that this blog (or perhaps website in general) has made it possible for people I absolutely don’t want any contact with to find me and “cyberstalk” me. This finally happened last month (no, it isn’t someone with my same initials). A friend of mine who happens to deal with information security on a daily basis has told me for years the dangers of making myself so public. I thought the “dangers” were worth it to have my information accessible for potential freelance clients (not to mention family and friends keeping up with my activities). However, I don’t seem to be picking up any freelance work because of this. In fact, my only long-term clients have been the results of my own personal networking and have nothing to do with my web site/s at all. And I’m fairly certain that the majority of my friends don’t read the blog.

So why am I risking all this? Who is actually reading it? Only my father ever leaves comments as everyone else (if there is anyone else) is too put-off by having to validate who they are (and before I did that I was getting hundreds of spam comments every day).

I know of five people who read this blog for certain (although with uncertain regularity) and only two are unrelated to me.

I almost consider this just a personal archive – an easily searchable database on all (public) things Andrew. Maybe that is the only purpose it will really serve in the long run. If security gets to be too much of an issue I can still continue to write – but make every entry “closed.” Then I’ll be closed off to the world. Like everyone else.