Some sad news from Dare Obasanjo's blog...

I’ve been writing a personal weblog for almost seven years. It’s weird to go back and read some of the posts in my old kuro5hin diary such as my early postings about interning at Microsoft and see how much my perspectives have changed in some ways and stayed the same in others. Anyway…

Although I’ve found this weblog to be personally fulfilling, the time has come for me to put it aside for the time being. This will be the last post on http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog.

He points to another post as his reasoning for this move...

This year was the first year I considered ending this blog because I'd finally gotten tired of the hassle of people complaining about what I wrote here. The final straw for me surprisingly hasn't been work related although there have been stretching points from disgruntled coworkers who lashed out because I use competing products to people complaining to my management chain and theirs hoping to get me reprimanded or even fired for not toeing the party line. I stand by everything I've written in this blog but I've now gotten enough heat and taken enough inter-personal communication training classes to realize that some opinions are more trouble than they are worth. So every once in a while, a quietly drown a kitten of a half written blog post because I can't be bothered with dealing with the feedback. However that wasn't the breaking point, since I've considered this experience part of "growing up".

This is a very sad to me in that I really admire Dare but I completely understand his reasoning.

The inherent problem with "transparency" is that not everyone reading your blog is nice.  There are a lot of unpleasant people in the world.  In fact, in my experience, there is at least one unpleasant person for each workplace (and if you only have one you are extremely luck)

Life lesson: unpleasant people are unhappy and that makes them hate happy people.  If you're a nice, happy person you basically have a target on your back by default.  That's life. 

So there are these unpleasant people out there and they don't like you.  Because of those two facts they are going to use whatever they can to attack you.  Again, this is just a fact of life. 

Which brings us back to blogging.  If you are a nice, happy person who wants to have a blog you must accept that someone is going to use that blog to try to get you fired.  That WILL happen.

Once you get as many readers as Dare you have to start weighing your career against your blog because your words are now in front of a lot of unpleasant people all of which are combing each paragraph for ammo to use against you.  Ammo they'll happily use at the drop of a hat.  As a general rule your boss can only hear about your blog so many times before it starts compromising his/her opinion of you (even if they know it isn't your fault)

Given how many subscribers Dare has I'm honestly amazed he kept blogging this long.