Ye Olde School

Jason's latest retro feature reminded me that I too used to have a boring webcam on my site, and how folks used to setup multi-blogs with everyone's webcam shot going down the side with their posts intermingled. You could probably do the same today fairly easily with RSS and a bit of hacking.

So anyway, there's now a shot of me taken every 60 seconds from my office. Not much to see unless you work with me or IM me and wonder why I'm not answering ("oh, he's not on the cam, so he's probably eating or on the phone or something").

I've long weighed the issues between private and public life and tried to strike a balance. Five years ago, I was all free software, free love, and free information. I practically had to be stopped from posting my SSN on my site. A few hard lessons taught me to scale that back, but it's still my belief that deep down, once we all have blogs and all our thoughts and dreams are out there in the public database, we'll be less prone to privacy attacks. If everyone can see everyone's skeletons in their closet, they cease to be skeletons anymore.

At least that's what I tell myself when I inevitably see someone save a webcam shot of me picking my nose.