The other day someone asked me a question that I didn’t have an immediate response for (yes, it finally happened) and I’ve been weighing it for a few days. Here it is:

Do you ever have a case of bloggers remorse?

Do you ever wish you could hit the unpublish button, take back your words, or at the very least profusely apologize in hopes that you can win the readers back? Maybe reconnect with the business relationships you broke off?

The remainder of the email goes in detail of this persons paralysing fear of blogging anything controversial, anything that may offend someone. So before I give you my opinion on what I think you ought to do, here is some soul searching that I did and what I came up with.

There are not many posts that I regret. Frankly, I regret more of my misplaced humor jokes and inappropriate / unprofessional posts than I do the controversial stuff. For example, at some point I put up a post of me hugging The White Rabit statue from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at Disneyland with one hand, and extending my middle finger to the people that keep on bugging me (software publisher) about deadlines. That apparently offended one british gentleman to the point that he confronted me about it and his inability to do business with my company if its lead with such attitude. I kept my calm and tried to reassure him that there is a certain joke behind it all. In this instance, I regret both posting that picture and the missed opportunity to tell him to go fuck himself and his sensibilities. On the other hand, we have many negative posts about Microsoft’s security, patching, shortcomings and more – and believe me, those have cost me far more friends than I’d like to admit to. I’ve written a lot about the dangers of unqualified small IT shops that pop up after every layoff. I don’t regret trying to keep my profession clean of hobbyists that took the wrong turn at the community college career night, but I do feel bad that so many people took the SPF term to mean I think every one man shop is unqualified to provide IT advice. Would I take back any of my SPF posts? Not for a second. How about the riff raff comments? That one even earned me a shirt!

But do I regret them? No. Do I feel like I will ever take the words back (you can’t btw, Internet = forever, and once you prove yourself to be an asshole there is just no Undo button)? No. Do I feel I was wrong?

That is the key question you ought to ask yourself if you’re going to blog openly and honestly. Can you admit your mistakes and move on? We are all human, we all make mistakes, we all have bad days and hopefully you live long enough to express remorse for anything you feel you didn’t do right the first time. Blogging too, gets a second chance.

But unlike real life, blogging mistakes need a justification. There is no blog jail. There is no blog rehab. There is no blog “unpublish” in blogging. There is reason though. This isn’t a bar fight, in which on pure emotion you made a mistake. This is a conscious conversation with people that choose to read what you have to say. Explain to them why you are saying what you are saying, it will be that much easier to correct yourself. There is a reason why you write these posts – you try to do something good for the fellow man. Whether you do it for free, whether you make them pay – you are doing something positive and people read your blog because of it. Or you’re a restaurant critic. 

In a nutshell, if you are going to be an asshole make sure you’re consistent, that you can justify what you say and can handle the consequences that will come from it. But you’re doing it for the common good and thats a small price to pay, otherwise why bother blogging at all?

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