Inquisited.com

So I’ve had friends asking me why I bothered to get a private domain name for something as trivial as a personal blog, as opposed to putting it on a free host like Blogger or Wordpress. The main reason is this: privacy.

If you’ve been online for any amount of time, you’ve probably realized that whatever you put on the internet is privy to anyone who has a computer and web access, which is to say a lot of people.

Now obviously a little publicity never hurts. But the problem is that bloggers often publish posts containing juicy bits of personal information without realizing their full ramifications. The longer you’ve been blogging, the most likely that is to be true. Remember that post you wrote years ago about your rancorous breakup with your ex? Your penchant for tongue piercings? Your profound antipathy towards zoroastrianism? Your future wife, grandson, employer and interns are all going to be reading that.

No worries, you say, because you can always just delete the blog. If you think that’s all it takes to erase yourself from the permanent records of cyberspace, you’re in for a surprise. Don’t believe me? Go to the internet archive and search for your site. You’ll find it there in its fully replicated glory, right down to the first month you started it.

The only real way to stop this is to tell archive.org to exclude your blog from the archives through the Robots.txt file on the root directory of your server, which isn’t possible if its hosted on a domain that you don’t have direct control over. Today, only archive.org keeps regular, time-based snapshots of internet, but in the near future search engines themselves will likely do so as well, thus multiplying the risks of the blog equivalent of a wardrobe malfunction manyfold.

We exist in 2 worlds - our physical world, and our digital world which consists of blog entries, facebook profiles, forum personas and instant messenging monikers. And soon enough, everybody is going to be googling everyone else. In fact, this is already beginning to happen. Your blog, in particular, is perhaps the most revealing - its like like an online tattoo of all your thoughts, intentions and memories.

Of course, there are some people who wouldn’t be the least bit bothered by this. Some might even take it in the completely opposite direction by using their blog to establish an online brand of sorts. But either path you take, you exercise far more control over the information you want (or don’t want) netizens to see with your own domain. And that, in my opinion, more than justifies 10 dollars per year spent maintaining it.