Can You Take Back Naked Blogging? Also, Do I Sound Like A Total Dork?

08/16/2008 By

I’m so incredibly pleased to announce that the podcast for the "Naked Blogging" panel I was on at this year’s BlogHer (along with the fabulous Mena Trott and the incredibly brave Koan) is now online and available for your listening pleasure. I haven’t finished listening to it yet, so I’m not sure how it comes off as *just audio* divorced from context, but it was an amazing, thought-provoking, emotional experience, and I really hope that comes across.

I’d love to hear about other people’s experiences along these lines. "If you’ve encountered something unpleasant because of your openness,
something ugly…or even something dangerous, you might be wondering: Can
I take it back?" How have you dealt with trolls, inter-blogger confrontations, personal or professional attacks and conflicts online? And have these things changed how you blog? How and why? Temporarily or permanently? For the better or worse or none of the above?

PS: Thanks to Jory, who was the best moderator ever, and made everything so easy and enjoyable for us as speakers.

PPS: Don’t let the terrorists win.

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  • http://www.mommybits.blogspot.com Shannanb aka Mommy B

    I was in this session at BlogHer and I thought you all did a great job.
    I dealt with my first Troll a few months ago. She blew me up anonymously for feeding my children McDonald's. Like an idiot she posted about me, with link, on her blog and my Google Alert picked it up.
    My feelings were really hurt at first that someone, who didn't know me, would acuse me of trying to poison my children.
    I made the mistake of blogging about it and linking to her blog (it was my first troll, I didn't know not to link back) and was really surprised by the outpour of support I received.
    Shortly after posting I took the link down to difuse the situation and because the troll seemed to enjoy the new found attention she was getting.
    I just had to accept the fact that some people just like to go around being shit heads. You just can't take it personally.

  • http://www.thee-spot.blogspot.com emmak

    I don't know why but although I am very direct in my blog I have never attracted trolls except once a guy wrote me I was a bimbo. I said, "Thanks, no one's ever called me that before!"

  • http://www.sweetsalty.com sweetsalty kate

    Listening to it now… good stuff, and lovely to hear your voice. Makes me wish I had've been there.
    I've been lucky in the way of trolls.. not many, but the few I've had have been unfathomably vicious, making comments about the baby I lost, and why, and me as a mother, and me deserving that loss. I don't read trollish comments as soon as it's clear they're hostile (usually apparent within the first sentence). Glaze over, sigh, hit delete, move along. And if I don't get there in time and another reader kindly responds or rises to the bait, every comment in response gets deleted too. Space scrubbed of all pointless toxicity. Not respectful disagreement, but trolls.
    But no matter how fast and how unruffled you try to remain it leaves you with a sour taste in your mouth, doesn't it?

  • http://www.antigonelost.com Antigone

    I was shocked when a mildly critical comment left me in tears. I hadn't realized how real my blog had become for me. Although I'm always honest, I've begun to leave much out that I'd like to write about. Not because of potential criticism, but because I've already exposed so much of myself to the world.

  • http://loraleeslooneytunes.com Loralee

    This session saved me.
    I'm so thankful.
    'Nuff said.

  • http://www.issascrazyworld.blogspot.com Issa

    Probably not the best coping mechanism, but back when I stopped blogging a year and something months ago, it was because of hate mail and trolls. It just changed how I thought about what blogging and I started hating it, so I stopped. Now I wish I'd never given the hater any power. I'm even more open this time through. Shrug, I guess I just stopped caring what other people thought of me.

  • http://www.momecentric.com Jerri Ann

    I know I'm not special in any way, but I do think what happened is terribly unique and equally hellish.
    I wrote openly…very naked. No one I knew even owned a computer never mind how to turn one on. But then, my cousin's wife got all computer giggy. She found my blog, which isn't terribly hard, if you google "Jerri Ann" you don't even need a last name and you only get me and Jerri Ann Jenista for the most part. Anyway, she read and read and then found some posts where I had written naked.
    She printed these posts out and then…..THEN she had the audacity to anonymously start mailing them to the people involved. For like a week, everyday someone was showing up on my porch with papers in hand, waiving them in my face and cursing like wild Indians.
    The 3 worst ones:
    1. Cost me my relationship with a very close cousin: her son bit my son, he was almost 5 years old so I thought it was inappropriate, my son was 3. I called him a bully and said that he would be just like his uncle….the uncle who is in and out of jail all the time. My mom has cancer and not long after she was diagnosed she asked me to go to the cousins house and apologize. I did, she now waves at me when she sees me on the road and she even said hello in the grocery store one day. Her husband still practically shoots us a bird when we pass their house. She was right that I over-reacted and wrote what I did about the uncle. I think I was right that a 5 year-old shouldn't be biting.
    2. This occurred 2 days later. Another cousin was pushing a different cousin around in the neighborhood. The kid was less than a year old. I asked them to come out to our house because we were all sitting on the porch. The mom of the child knew that we had pink eye the week prior and told them not to bring the kid to our yard. The statement I made that made her mad was "what did she think we were going to do, lick his eyeballs?" The rest of it she wasn't upset with, just me licking her kids eyes didn't go over so well I guess. She speaks, she is very nice and her husband who is actually my cousin mowed my grass last week. I would say this one just rubbed her wrong for a short period.
    3. I was able to watch a cousin when she had her second baby. This cousin is about 5'11" and is big big boned. She played college volleyball. She is just a big girl. She had both children in just a few minutes and acted like there was nothing to it. Me on the other hand was a complete baby with my two c/s and demanded pampering. She was driving the next day. I was writing a post about how wonderful it was to watch a child being born. The comment that I made was, "she just spits them taters out and gets right back to life." She received her copy of the post in the mail. She showed up shortly after the eyeball licking and was laughing her ass off. She thought it was funny that someone was going so far trying to stir up trouble that they sent her the post and tried to convince her that what I had said was horrible. She laughed a lot. She knew it was a compliment of sorts.
    So, I'm much more careful with my nakedness but honestly, if I had it to do over again, I would still write the first one and not put the part about the convict uncle in it, I would still right the second and third one and probably not change anything.
    My cousin (the husband of the anonymous mailer) is a preacher. I outed his wife (she didn't mail the posts to these people from home, but from her job…duh) and he forced her to quit mailing the crap out.
    So, hummmmmm, I would say it has changed 5% of the way I blogged. I just try to watched the most drastic of statements.

  • http://www.momecentric.com Jerri Ann

    Also, I am now writing Marital Talk and I'm doing my best to put a lot out there…not all of it, there are some things that even I don't need to acknowledge to myself, never mind strangers. But, I hope to make it a good open place for folks to read and comment. I just started it yesterday.

  • http://kwanzoo.com/social-trivia Liz

    I don't think anybody can beat Jerri Ann. That's just awful. I've experienced something similar, and though I won't go into details, I think it takes a special kind of creep to bring internet stuff into real life and try to ruin relationships with it. They can always justify it with that awful gossip preamble "I just thought you should know," but it's still a really disgusting thing to do.
    My situation involved someone I didn't even know outside of the internet, so it was much creepier in that regard, although the fallout was notably less severe – the positive side of it being a relative stranger is that he had no idea who and how to target for maximum damage.
    If you express opinions online, you WILL make people angry. On forums and such I've never shied away from being 100% honest when I feel like someone is stupid, blockheaded, or just a big old tool. That'll make you a lot of enemies, but at least your conscience remains intact.
    That whole incident made online-only trolls seem insignificant, but I have some of those too. It's irritating but ultimately it's just a fact of internet life.

  • http://www.dadamama.typepad.com/dadamama DadaMama

    Ooh, I have a good one.
    I started blogging about five years ago. At first, I was pretty open, as no one knew about my site but me. Then, my ex-boyfriend (WHO IS INSANE) found me. He took offense to something I wrote about our relationship, which at that time was well past over. Apparently, he'd been stalking me for some time, though (finding my blog came on the heels of him calling/emailing me every few months to suggest that we "be friends") because he started his own blog to refute what he called my "defamatory" remarks about him.
    He titled his blog, "The Real _________" (he sued my real name, which I no longer use publicly), and used it to spew all the most hateful things about me he could come up with. Some of them were ridiculous, such as his threat that if I ever ran for president, he knew a bunch of people who would help him expose the real me in the press, like "the Swift Boat Veterans Against John Kerry" (WTF?!)–but some of what he wrote was about things we'd shared in confidence. He was WAY more hateful than I'd ever ever been. I think the worst thing I called him was "asshat," a title which I STILL think he deserves to this day. Hell, I would hazard to say he deserves worse.
    After he published his little blog, he started putting links to it on other websites, and emailing it to as many people as he could think of.
    I took down my website for a while, which I had been publishing on a different site under a different name. While my blog was offline, I invented pseudonyms for myself, my husband, and my children. I no longer write under my real name on any website (not even under the comments section).
    I think my ex thinks he won, because he updated his blog at one point to add that my site had disappeared.
    The upshot of all this is that he has finally stopped suggesting we "be friends."
    I have big plans to attend BlogHer next year. I sure could have used a panel like yours!

  • http://karensugarpants.com Karen Sugarpants

    Can you take it back? Sadly no. I only wish I could take 2007 back. I grew, yes, but I wish I hadn't shared so very much. I was stung not by trolls or strangers, but by people I thought were friends. It was eye-opening and heart breaking.

  • http://gwendomama.blogspot.com/ gwendomama

    i wish i had not missed this panel! such is the nature of working at blogher, i suppose – no regrets.
    but maybe if i had not missed this panel, i might not have posted something about blogher at the moment i did. or maybe i would have. hard to say.
    when i first started writing my blog, i had a (a few?)(before i had sitemeter and was all naive like that) nasty troll(s) who would basically slam me for writing about my dead child. because you know – it was TOO DEPRESSING. i was hurt – it changed what i wrote for a few months. when i mentioned him again, it was like there was a whole new internet. some say there was.
    i recently received some very nasty email from someone who felt i was unfair to her in my recap of some blogher activity.
    i did end up editing some of the post that she claimed was a lie (and a legal issue). so ummm….wow.
    next year i may have to get around more.

  • http://diapersandscrubs.blogspot.com sarah

    i'm so late to the blogging experience, but this topic has been on my mind lately (i am also so late in commenting – i meant to do this days ago!). a friend attended this session and wrote about how moving it was, and so it was nice to see it pop up here as well. i started a blog to keep family and friends updated on the progress made by our (2 month premature) son, and then…well…i wanted to curse a little bit more than was warranted by the audience of that blog. so i started another one. but part of what i really wanted to talk about there was medicine/my life as a medical student, and i couldn't talk about that (and wouldn't want to) without talking about my experience as a planned parenthood employee. and having worked at PP through the anthrax scares…through protesters taking our pictures and posting them…through bomb scares…through the escape of clayton waagner…i knew this shit was to be taken seriously. i am still worrying about it, even after posting. this is the debate we had constantly. on one hand, if you hide, you are saying there is something shameful. if you don't hide, you could put yourself and your family at risk. it feels very safe when you are inside the community. it feels very unsafe on the outside.