Well, personal in the sense of "being of no interest to anyone else". Unless you're willing to comprehensively detail your longstanding attempts to queer up fellow workers as a source of "ironic" humour - it would serve as a useful sociological exemplar of the homophobia embedded in Australian male-itude.

Or not. Just leave me out of it, you sweaty-palmed freak.


I note in passing that PBS have belatedly noticed blogging. My favourite bit of the report was this:

TERENCE SMITH: But the question remains, is weblogging journalism? Joan Connell maintains that the weblogs on her site are.

JOAN CONNELL: One of the values that we place on our own weblogs is that we edit our webloggers. Out there in the blogosphere, often it goes from the mind of the blogger to the mind of the reader, and there's no backup.

And I would submit that that editing function really is the factor that makes it journalism. Are you making a mistake here? Do you really want to say that? Do you really want to use that word? Is that libelous?

All of those basic journalism questions that we always ask.

There you go - as we've always suspected, the difference between journalists and normal people is that journalists know when to keep their mouths shut. Silly old me thought research skills and a commitment to informing the public were the defining characteristics, but, no, it's self-censorship. That'll come in handy if I ever consider a career change.