I think Sam did an excellent, thorough job on this post, and I really don't have any difference of opinion with the points he makes. However, I'll add a few of my thoughts and experiences to this post.

> If you take something off right away, you're *probably* safe -- that is, unless the online journal company logs all updates -- but more often than not, mistakes made in revealing too much personal information are not discovered until a day later, or maybe a month, a year, three years, or ten years down the road.

Time has a habit of passing quickly, and it often takes memories with it. If you write something now, there is a chance you'll forget it at some point, especially if it was written in the heat of the moment before you had time to cool off. Granted, such things can usually be worked out between friends, but you'd never know if someone stumbled across something you had written about them, refused to ever talk to you again, and you were never the wiser.

> I may lose a lot of you here, but, to be perfectly bluntly honest, I don't believe that anyone younger than around early/mid twenties (here I speak of some kind of weighted average between "physical age" and "maturity" -- maturity counts but cannot entirely obsolete the experience that comes in no other way than by the passing of years) is mature enough to know how to handle the responsibility of an online journal
>
> Why do I think this? Basically, because you don't start to understand the value of privacy until you're at LEAST that age. (I'm 28, and I'm *still* in the process of understanding it.) Online journals, however, give people the opportunity to give away their privacy irrevocably, before they've had a chance to comprehend the value of what they're giving away.

I couldn't agree with these two paragraphs more. I'm sure some people probably read that and thought, "I'm not in my early/mid twenties yet, but I KNOW I'm mature enough to have a silly online journal." But it's not an age discrimination thing; it's an experience thing. The older you get, the more things you experience, and the more you'll realize how easy it is to lose your privacy. I'm 23, and I've experienced a little of that. Now, I don't mean to argue that I think I'm experienced and mature enough to have an online journal, but I'm simply using myself as an example. I've always valued privacy, but it was exactly a year ago when I began to really understand what it is to lose that privacy. I watched in disbelief as someone tried to tear me down as a person, violating my assumed privacy in the process. This individual stole pictures from my Web site, attempted to infiltrate a Web ring of which I am no longer a member (because I didn't want to jeopardize my friends more than I already had), and basically tried to make my life miserable. A year later, that individual still visits my Web site an average of once a week. Though I refuse to think about it, that person could very well be reading this post, and all others I've written. It's a very sobering feeling to realize that your privacy has been invaded, and to know that once it's been invaded, things will probably never quite be the same.

Anyway, my point in telling that is that you can't really understand the value of privacy until it is taken away from you, or at least seriously challenged. It's not a case of, "you're too young to have an online journal," but more a case of, "you have no way of knowing what could really happen to you."

> A related issue: if you go the route of using journals to communicate with your friends, you're possibly unwittingly making decisions about who your friends are.

I wonder if this has had a bigger impact on RinkWorks than I had first thought. As I said in an earlier post, I joined the online journal gang because I learned that there were hidden journal entries I could read if I got my own account and became a "friend" of the journal user. I did that, and I discovered a rather large amount of journal entries from quite a few of my friends I've made through RinkWorks. I suddenly realized that I had been "out of the loop," so to speak, just because I didn't have a LiveJournal account.

So I wonder: Are some of my friendships here really so fleeting that they will fade away if I don't become involved in everything these friends are involved in? If I hadn't given in to the LiveJournal phenomenon, would I still have some of these friends? I think I would, but I would no longer know them as well. And over time, that subtle barrier would take a toll on my friendships.

Ellmyruh