During May's WeblogPoMo I was so thrown off by a personal event that it had a ripple effect on my ability to get done, and post about, my planned topic. It's almost like I now have stage fright about trying to get back into my plans, things I want to do and write about here. Am I afraid of being judged? Maybe. Am I unwilling to fail? Possibly. But I rather think it has more to do with how hard I am on myself. If I am to launch into something and again get derailed and can't complete how I'd like to, I'm not sure how easy that would be to accept.

As personal blogs are exploding again, from what I can tell in my small corner of the universe, we are opening ourselves to vulnerability. We are actually being vulnerable, but we simultaneously create vulnerability. I'm not writing about this to dissuade anyone from blogging or blogging more or starting a new blog. I'm just trying to recognize in myself how I see this set of circumstance in the current landscape. What follows is my attempt to break it down.

To yourself

Posting personal topics is a vulnerability to yourself. Being vulnerable opens you up to self-reflection that may be uncomfortable. I have felt this first-hand on my main microblog and 100 Days of Blog just this week. I'm going through some personal feelings related to a community event and putting those feelings into words and shoving them out into the world has made me face them more fully than if I had just locked the feelings away and never reflected on them.

The words now also live in perpetuity unless the sites are taken down. I can look back on the vulnerability in future states and gain insight or relive a traumatic experience. One of these could be a good thing, the other could cause additional harm. I've gone back and read things I've written just within the past six months and been shocked at the rawness of my words. Sometimes I forget even writing them. Is this vulnerability or transcendence?

Being vulnerable can open you to new possibilities or become an inconvenience. If you're learning something new or trying in the open, failure and struggle can weigh heavily on your morale. It is hard to keep going with blogging, and once you've stepped back from the habit it can be a tricky one to jump back into. It's a bit like riding a bike, when the motions are already there you don't even have to think about it, it's muscle memory. But once you've maneuvered your days without it, the practice can become daunting rather than freeing.

We also open ourselves to vulnerability by second guessing ourselves. As I opened this post, what I wish to put on this weblog and what I actually put on this weblog may not match up. Do I stop posting? Do I get down on myself for not having the polished pieces I wish to? It seems so lately, but I've also found incredible release in the unpolished ramblings that make their way daily onto one of my microblogs. Some days I start out thinking I have nothing of value to say, it will be just a repeat of my mundane existence from the previous day, but I've actually found some jewels that I otherwise wouldn't have if I hadn't rambled.

For others to take

Posting personal topics is a vulnerability for other's to take. This is something I recently have been confronted with. I admit my most personal blog posts get published on my main microblog and 100 Days of Blog. Both of these are hosted on Micro.blog and backed up to Github. This is a setting option within your account management for each blog and requires the Github repositories to be public. By being forced to make these public, anyone could come along and pull down the entirety of my posts. Sure, they could do that by scraping the websites as well, but the repository is a more convenient method that is set up just for that task.

Likewise, vulnerable topics could be used against you by other people. Not only people in your life or community, but by institutions and employers. Already we see requests for social media accounts by employers so that they can see what you write about or monitor them after-the-fact. Reports of entering countries, even returning to your own, or going through customs sometimes comes with being asked for the same information. Have they yet started asking for personal blogs or websites?

Your vulnerable posts may have the effect of causing or prompting a reader to also be more vulnerable. In fact, my desire to be more vulnerable on this weblog was directly influenced by another blogger on my blogroll who posted a wonderful if not tragic post about the illness we both have and rolled it into a post about slow technology. The method of both taking time to write the post as energy allows, but also documenting the places where the breaks were taken and providing a date, is a raw example of vulnerability that I admire greatly. What if a blog post was marked up like a Word document with all the edits with corresponding dates? I should experiment with that.

Now that we are scraped

Posting personal topics is a vulnerability now that we are scraped by AI crawlers and other agents and have no apparent effective control method for stopping that (reliably). We know that AI agents are misidentifying themselves, holistically ignoring robots.txt directives, they might actually be using the directives as a signal to scrape a site, and that the companies who create them are not sharing fully the crawlers they deploy, either by name or range of IP addresses.

There has been a lot of upset in the last week about how Firefox has added ad tech to the latest release of the browser that is opt-out by default. The lucrative model today is to take personal data and use it to craft a persona that can be sold and monetized. When we post personal, vulnerable, details about ourselves on our blogs that get sucked up, we're feeding the development of a persona that can be used against us.

Imagine health insurance becoming more expensive because you're blogging about mental health struggles or other health-related issues. What if you're applying for a job and you can't get beyond some automated system due to political statements you've made on your blog. Or when applying for a Visa overseas, you are denied for denigrating a political leader or party. This type of thing is already happening from walled garden social media, but AI seems to be the next realm of digging into vulnerability on personal sites.

To take back power

Posting personal topics is a vulnerability that should make us want to take back power. We've already decided to take back our web by owning our content on our own domains. What can we do about protecting ourselves and intellectual property? I want to feel empowered to write about things that I can't talk about anywhere else, on my site, under my name, it is why I have blogs. I don't have an answer to this yet, and I don't know that anyone else does either.

Many people are working on different methods and user contributed lists to populate AI bot protection protocols. But as I've already discussed, they either are, or may well be, ignored, or worse, used against us. Perhaps our only protection is to be as human as possible on our blogs. If we post only polished pieces, is that human? Humans are anything but polished, we are broken, sometimes lazy, often vulgar, and usually silly. That should empower us to be ourselves on the digital versions of ourselves.

This post has been hard to write. I've struggled to find the words I want to say. It has taken twists and turns I was unsure about. It first went in a direction I didn't intend. I've revised it twice and moved a section above another. And still I'm not positive it is saying what I want it to say. Is this the vulnerability I'm aiming for? I hope to find out.

Your blog is a vulnerability. Make it raw.