I like the idea of my own blog, but the reality is I like interaction and readers and I have a LOT more of those, engaged readers, on Google+ than I have on either blog.

It’s the engagement of the readers that’s attracting me. Granted, I’m pretty careful about who I circle, and while over 2k people follow me I don’t follow that many at all. I’m just over 300 that I read, but I add more all the time, and sometimes remove people. There’s such a feeling of community, of conversation, of participation on Google+ I find I’ve spent far more time there than here.

I need to figure out what’s going to happen next obviously. Mirroring or merely importing those posts to here is a possibility but it seems like it’s diluting things. If you’re on Google+ look me up. If you’re not… the conversation there is absolutely incredible.

The sweat comes in when I’m not working. When I’m just me and I’m dumped into a social situation where I know the people who invited me but nobody else. I’m awful at those things. They’re exactly the same as the work situations in numbers of people or how well I know them… but my comfort level is off. Suddenly I’m no longer chatty or friendly or smiling. I’m stand-offish, and could just as easily stand in a corner, sip a drink until it’s gone, find the host, thank them for the invitation and sneak out the door after having “made an appearance.” What I’m describing isn’t rare either. It’s really normal social behavior for me. I don’t know why it’s so different. I’m confident, social, affable, and outgoing at work functions. Throw me in with non-work people though and I’m an awkward self-conscious wall flower.

Podcasts. I really like podcasts. I drive a lot for work so I listen to a lot of them. One of my favorite episodes was from Lisa B. Marshall, the Public Speaker from Quick & Dirty Tips. She talks about how to talk to people. She talks about her Mom starting to talk to people in line at the grocery store and how mortified she was by it. I’ve started trying to do this. It’s a little thing, a silly thing, a safe thing. Nobody gets better at something without practicing it so I’ve been practicing my chatting people up out in public with strangers. That way if I botch it I won’t embarrass myself in front of people I know. My hope is that this will help when I get to the next social function I attend that’s not work related. With the practice under my belt, and the confidence of having done this before in non-work related venues I’ll be able to do it a little better with people I will probably see again, and hopefully for more than just “making an appearance.”

So, if you’re shy or reticent to just jump into a social setting give this podcast a listen. Then, most importantly, practice it on people you’ll never see again.

So why do I care about Facebook if I’m so careful about what I do on the Internet? The most common thing I hear about people when I bring up privacy concerns is “If you don’t have anything to hide what do you have to worry about?” My answer to them is, “Why do you use curtains or walls? Why do you shut the door when you go to the bathroom stall?” There are times when you don’t want the whole world up in your business. If I have co-workers and bosses who follow me on facebook, and I did, and they didn’t like what political sites I visited that suddenly showed up on my facebook page could that have consequences? Of course it could. Should it? Nope. But it could. What if it showed that I was on facebook while I was supposed to be working. Would they know I was on hold for the weekly conference call? Of course not.

Those are just the easy work related issues. The thing is. What I do on the Internet is no more Facebook’s business than it’s my phone company’s business if I go to the mall or to Wal-mart. It’s not their business. They don’t need to know it. Just because they CAN know it doesn’t mean they should know it. If they wanted to enrich my Internet experience they’re welcome to it, but ask me first. Let me CHOOSE to ask for it. Don’t opt me in.

I don’t really feel like I should have to explain my expectation of privacy honestly. The part where I expect and want it and am being asked to defend it is almost as offensive to me as my perception of Facebook’s violation of my privacy.

From a social hacking point of view what can we find out about a person from their facebook profile? Often they list their parents’ names which may include “mother’s maiden name” or “Father’s middle name” as appears in some security questions on some websites. Perhaps they show you graduated from Monkeyspanker High School and that security question is also asked, “What was your high school mascot.” Now decent social hackers would know that. That’s sort of my other point. Why should all that information be gathered up by the fine folks at Facebook for the social hackers out there to use? Maybe I don’t list my Mom’s middle name, but perhaps my sisters do, or my brothers, or my trans-gendered first pet whose name was “Sieze-her” and with all the information out there linking back and forth whether I put it out there or someone else does it’s out there.

I won’t deny that I greatly enjoyed re-connecting with my friends on Facebook. That added value to my life in general, and to my enjoyment of the Internet specifically. It was really good to meet them again as adults after having not seen them since high school. There are some really interesting people out there that I knew back when we were just high schoolers.   I will miss them. If Facebook were to decide that our privacy were important I’d gladly be back, but as much as I love re-connecting with everybody I feel like staying says it’s OK if a company has no respect for their customer’s wishes. It’s my saying it’s OK to treat my personal information as a publicly tradeable commodity. I’m not OK with that. My leaving may not make a difference to Facebook, but it will make a difference to me.

Thursday I’m going to be on Farmville meeting a friend of mine to watch Survivor together and then I’m going to log off my account, perhaps deleting it if I can find a way to do that.

SmartyPig is an online bank I use it for saving towards specific goals both necessary and luxury. I think of SmartyPig as a reverse credit card. Instead of putting something on the card and then paying for it. I pay for it in small, manageable payments, and then, when I have enough, I move the money back into my bank-account and go buy the thing I was saving for. Rather than paying the credit card company interest on the thing, I get paid interest while I save for the item. This helps stop me from making impulse purchases, and gives me time to anticipate the purchase and shop around for best place to buy it.

When I first heard of SmartyPig and the really high interest rates (3.05% APY as of 5/27/09) they were offering compared to my other banks I was very skeptical. If it’s too good to be true it probably is was my assumption. I set up a trial account for my car stereo. 286 dollars. Yes. I can afford that as a one time purchase, this was a test of SmartyPig though. How easy was it to set up an account and would they really give me my money back at the end? Well, it was that easy, and yes they did.

SmartyPig is owned by Westbank and my deposits are FDIC insured. I started the account with twenty-five dollars and couldn’t do anything with it until the twenty-five dollars posted from my Wells Fargo account to SmartyPig. Once it was in though (about 3 days), I could adjust the amount of my monthly deposit as well as the total goal I was saving for and the time by which I wanted the goal met. I could raise the goal really high or down to $250 (the minimum goal you an set). I could even close it out and get my money back out and transferred back to my Wells Fargo account if I wanted. They didn’t hold my money or make me leave it in for any length of time. It was still my money, and still accessible by me. I set it at the goal at the cost of the car stereo, set the time for a couple months down the road and watched the money automatically transfer from one bank account into the other. I was notified at every step of the way by e-mail that a transaction was about to take place, and that one HAD taken place. It was very transparent and painless.

Once the goal had been reached it stopped withdrawing money and was willing to just sit there, continuing to acrue interest until I took it out. I opted to have it transfer out to my Wells Fargo account and in two – three days it was in my checking account waiting for me to go get my stereo, which I did.

So, I use it now for all my short term savings goals. My emergency fund is in INGDirect still. In the examples above I pay my insurance annually to not have to think about it or pay any weird fees for splitting up the payments and I’m saving towards a nice birthday present for myself. So, I tell it when I need the money and how much and it figures out how much it will be to get to that goal. Then I forget it. I make sure to set the goal a week before I need the money to allow for bank transfer times and then I just forget about it. It’s similar to bank offered billpay except I’m making interest on the savings.

My other goal is for a Kindle2. I really want one. I’m hoping that between now and when this goal is reached there’s a service pack to allow the Kindle2 to read PDF’s. I don’t want the DX as it’s big and I want small. Big would undo the advantage of the small form factor I’m looking for in the Kindle2.

Oh, a note on public and private savings accounts. These two savings accounts I’m talking about here are two that I’ve made public for examples. You don’t have to make your savings goals public, obviously I don’t make all my banking public, but these two were good examples of uses for SmartyPig.

I’m not a lawyer. I’m a manager. The company I work for has no official policy regarding the Internet and employee bloggers. As a blogger myself who talks about work and management I have done as much research as I can into not just my rights as a blogger employee, but my responsibilities to my employer. I got most of my information about bloggers rights from the EFF.org‘s blog site.

A blog, a weblog can be anything from a personal blog about cooking, family, kids, or any other of a lot of hobbies or it can be a business blog managed by a major corporation meant as their public face to the Internet public. What I do is somewhere closer to the personal. I talk about my take on management. I blog about my personal life, and my personal take on management. My blog isn’t now, nor has it ever been an official blog about the place where I work. In fact I work very hard to not mention where I work or what line of work I’m in other than retail sales. (My first weblog was called a Journal, the word blog didn’t exist yet and was from February 1999.)

I don’t blog about work specifically for example. I’m not a representative of this job while I work. I blog about general management topics. Some of the topics about which I blog are inspired from work, but none are “ripped from the headlines” as it were from work locally. Twitter in this case is something I’m treating as a blog. It’s sort of a micro-blog, 140 character limit is certainly micro.

Four rules of thumb to follow when blogging about work:

1. Never use real names of businesses or people.
2. Never blog it close to when it happened in time.
3. Moderate ALL comments and don’t let comments through that violate rules 1 & 2.
4. Never blog from work or during work hours.

1. Never use real names of businesses or people.
When I’m telling a story about where I work now or have worked, or even when talking about another business I have dealt with I don’t give real names. When I talk about people I often refer to Mongo and Roy. Neither of those are real names of real employees. They’re nicknames of a couple guys I know who don’t mind at all that they live on in my blog as examples. Don’t try and be clever either. If your boss’ name is Stan Buehler and you say Ban Stuehler it’s going to be pretty hard to make the case you’re not talking about your real life boss.

2. Never blog it close to when it happened in time.
If something at work demands a blog entry and you are dying to blog it go for it… but edit the time stamp for some time in the distant future. It’s possible your boss or employees may read your blog and will know that you’re talking about them. Let time pass, let the heat go away and revisit the post before it goes live to see if you would re-write it or tweak it. Make sure you’re still saying what you meant to say but without getting too specific. The more time you can get between whatever it is you’re talking about, and the post the better. Best choice? Everybody in it’s dead from old age! lol

3. Moderate ALL comments and don’t let comments through that violate rules 1 & 2.
I’ve got employees that read my blog and co-workers and my boss knows about it as well. I believe one of the owners of the company I currently work for knows it exists. I write as if they’re going to read the blog. I don’t let any of those people comment on my blog in a way that may get either of us in legal trouble or fired. It’s my blog and I feel responsible for what is said there. I’m pretty sure I’m not, but if an employee said something horrible on my blog while I wasn’t looking and their boss saw it and they lost their job I’d feel bad. I am very up front with my employees and co-workers about MY policy about work and my blog. It’s not company policy, it’s my blog’s policy, and as the blog-owner… I don’t have to ask for permission. IT’S ALL MINE! MUAHAHhahahahahahaha.

4. Never blog from work or during work hours.
This one to me is an ethical thing. If I’m being paid to work I should be working and not blogging. That being said, I’ve twittered from work and will probably do so in the future. I don’t blog during work hours though. Now, if you’re going to blog from work, maybe your job is one where you have the time and are able to. Do it smartly, edit the time stamp so it doesn’t hit while you’re at work. There’s no sense in giving your boss ammo against you for an unemployment hearing. “See, here he’s supposed to be working and he’s plainly blogging about World of Warcraft! How is that related to his job of widget cranking? Obviously he was off task and blah blah blah…”

The job market out there isn’t all that great if you’re looking so when you’re online think a little before posting. Think before twittering. Think before doing anything insane on Facebook or Myspace. Any interviewer worth their salt is going to have checked a lot of those sites for you before you walk in the door. While you don’t have to live like a saint you should certainly be aware that future employers as well as current ones are not ignorant of the Internet and there’s a great chance they’re curious about what you’re saying out there.

We’ll see if that’s the case here or not.

I’ve been a dreamhost.com customer for two years and they’re certainly a good host. I can’t complain about level or service, quality of service, or price. They’re a great host if you need one I recommend them. I, however, don’t need a website. I have a blog that I only sometimes write on. There are free hosted blog options out there. I post pictures on flickr, and other files on box.net or Dropbox. I can’t seriously come up with a reason to keep a website where I have to do the maintenance. I like to write, not maintain a website. Luckily, there are sites that will do the work and let me do the playing.

So, I’m switching to blogger, or blogspot, whatever the name… it’s a google product and I’m a fan of google. My URL simplerich.com is aimed here for now and should stay that way for a while yet. I’m planning on keeping my name, just not sure how to get it aimed at google without forwarding it through dreamhost like I’m doing right now. If I can figure that out, and I have a ticket into my name server folks right now to help with that. So, my hope is that you guys don’t notice anything except more writing. I’ve considered leaving the site aimed elsewhere in an attempt to lose readers I don’t want… specifically from work so I could speak a little more freely. That idea lasted about two minutes. Don’t worry. I’m working to keep my URL aimed here, just like my feed.