Censor Or Be Dooced?

I've been working on understanding blogs. I'm trying to increase my knowledge on the subject and have started with a book that I found called Blogging for Business by Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos.

In the first few pages they mention the verb being "dooced." The idea that you can be fired for what you write on your blog. Apparently there was a woman by the name of Dooce that had this happen to her.

The idea is not foreign to me. I had just never heard the term "dooced" before. The warning that Julie get's in Julie and Julia has always sat in the back of my mind. Her boss reads about her cooking disaster that made her skip work one day. She had called in sick to fix the dish for special guests that evening. In the post she even said she was feeling unwell. The boss didn't think it rang true. It serves as a reminder that anyone could be watching.

I had two interesting experiences with blogs in high school. Back then everyone I knew was using Xanga.com to blog, facebook hadn't opened up to high schoolers yet. I wrote most of my posts publicly, but one night I made the unfortunate mistake of allowing comments on a private posting. It resulted, unbeknownst to me, in the post going live. My parent's ended up reading the post about them and they were not thrilled. Not only did I have to delete the post, but I had my internet privileges taken away from me for a month.

Another couple of my friends had a nasty spat on the site that actually got them called down to the principal's office. Someone had reported it. They were both forced to shut down their accounts or face suspension.

You could say I've had my fair share of reality telling me to censor what is said online.

Self censoring is important, but the question is how much do you censor yourself? Taking out every little bit of craziness that you do can make you sound droll and unreal. Does mentioning the fact that I was once so drunk I chased the Moon mean I'm walking on the edge? It certainly says I've had poor judgement, but it was a part of my life. Or, is it simply work related posts like Julie Powell made?

How much can we say before we get dooced? Better yet, what is a dooce-able offense? As a writer, it's an interesting question and one I will contemplate as I go forward.

Editorial note: I checked up on this Dooce person after my original post (she doesn't exist). My memory warped what I had read in the book. Dooced is a blog written by Heather B. Armstrong and she was fired because of her commentary on work. Still, outrageous actions can lead to consequences and my questions still stand.

How Wicked is Wikipedia?

Almost every professor I had at college told their students not to use Wikipedia as a source for their papers. They did say that it was a good place to start to gather information to start research with, but never to rely on it wholly. I heard the same spiel when I was in high school.

I understood on some level that it wasn't completely trustworthy. It is after all an amalgamation of knowledge from individuals around the world and while there are monitors and editors on the site you never know how often misinformation might be added to a page.

The incident that best demonstrates the sharing of misinformation was Steven Colbert introducing and the quickly demonstrating the concept of Wikiality in the summer of 2006. Wikiality was defined on Colbert's piece The Word as, "together we can create a reality we all agree on—the reality we just agreed on."

He then went on to encourage his viewers to alter the information about elephants on Wikipedia. I was between my Junior and Senior year of high school as I watched people flock to the internet and write, "The elephant population in Africa has tripled over the last six months." Wikipedia ended up having to freeze the changes being made to the words elephant and Africa as a result.

Because this was such a highly publicized event Wikipedia responded very quickly, but the idea still stands that any article could be altered by anyone all too quickly.

That being said, I've never found any inaccuracies in my use of Wikipedia. I did as my teachers suggested and followed the sources at the bottom of each page and I used books at the library regularly. In fact I like finding physical sources more than I like using the internet when it comes to research.

Mostly I find a guilty pleasure in checking out a book that hasn't been used since before the seventies or eighties. I did it several times when I was at college and nothing gave me such a thrill as seeing a book getting it's stamp card taken out and replaced with security and due date stickers.

This week I've been doing my research on viruses exclusively on Wikipedia. Over the next few days I'll go through and find primary sources to back up the information I found.

I'm just curious if anyone has some wild or wicked Wikipedia stories out there. Rest assured, I will let you know if I find anything interesting.

How Do You Measure a Page?

Anyone with a word processor knows that a page of writing can vary in the amount of words it contains. Double space, single space, size 10 text, size 12 text, and let's not forget font!

In high school it was common for my school mates and me to talk about tricks for getting a paper to look longer. There was changing the size of periods, and commas, messing with margins, and of course determining the size of the paper's title. Today I laugh at what I used to do. College professors never let you get away with that sort of shenanigans. That aside, I learned to love research and writing.

So why bring up all these alterations?

The answer is simple next week I'm going to start writing a page a day (offline). Picking one of my many fiction ideas is going to be another can of worms, but I'll go through my files and notebooks and pick one. So what do I consider the length of a page?

Honestly, I've always been a pen and paper girl. I like the look and feel of crossing things out, writing in the margins, using different color pens and pencils, doodling little images of characters for later reference. However, most know that a paper page never really equals the quantity of one that is typed up.

I used to do three, typed, double spaced pages a week for writing club in college. Keeping this in mind I think I'm going to do one written page a day, and when I have to rewrite I'll take that opportunity to edit and digitize the book.

So I have a question for you, if there's anyone reading this out there. How do you measure a page?