Week1: Is a blog message personal to its Author or is it public on the Internet?

I think this message boils down to the idea of intellectual property and just how publishing a piece of text on the Internet can affect your rights over your own property. UK Copyright Law is pretty good at granting the individual power over their own creations, yet the Net can become an unseemly grey area over what others can do with your work.

Ultimately it is up to the blog owner to control their work. I personally release all of my work onto the public domain under the Creative Commons 2.0 license, ensuring that other can see and share them but are prohibited from using them for personal gain, and must provide full accreditation to the original creator.

Another point of view though would look at the very content of the message. A typical blog post could range from the latest news out of Redmond to what the author had for breakfast that morning. In the end you must treat a blog how you would treat a soapbox, you can stand high on it and shout any message you want, but you have to understand the implications that your message could reach a far wider audience than any other communication method before has offered.

As a final conclusion, anything posted on the internet and not protected by some form of access control should be thought of as public. The message may be personal to the author, but once it is placed within the public domain it is fair game for spiders, lechers and regular visitors.