Choosing Readership

How does one choose their blog-readers? Certainly it's not always up to one's own discretion, word will always spread (as I became painfully aware during 'the situation'). I know I wouldn't feel comfortable spreading the word about someone else's private blog. However, if you give out readerships to more than a few people, you run the risk of offending those who you don't give it out to. Of course, there's always the easy excuse, "I didn't think you'd be interested," but that sounds a lot like, "I didn't think us close enough that you'd be interested in anything personal to me." In order to avoid putting people in that position I don't think I've ever asked for someone's blog url, and so I only know the ones that I've either linked to or been told about, and further I've avoided letting other people tell me about other people's blogs. The only blog url I've ever given out is TallE's, but only after it was linked to on ICUltimate.com, an action I'd consider to be the breaking into the public blogosphere.

So does that mean I can link to TallE's now whether it be an in-post link or one of the ones off to the side? I'm pretty sure I can't link to the other three I read, in case any of those three wouldn't want one of the other five people I know of reading mine to read theirs as well. Pretty sure there's only five people reading here, though I guess really there's no way to tell unless they comment. And not everyone has blogs, so it's not like it's a 'you can read mine if i can read yours' kind of thing.

Maybe the answer is in the purpose of the blog. My goal here is just to record thoughts that I'm not particularly ashamed of. I may occasionally criticize an individual, but I'm pretty sure that all the people reading here can take such criticism constructively since they all know me pretty well. But is someone like... say... T.O. capable of accepting such criticism? What happens if he were to read about how bad of a teammate I think he's been, how his actions have been selfish and destructive? Do I have the freedom to speak openly here? I suppose without password protected blogs I really don't, despite the effort we put into it.

Jim Strathmeyer once said that idea behind ghenry was that we could talk about people as if they weren't reading it. Granted, that was his philosophy towards life and he was a giant asshole about it, but is that what we're trying for here?

I wonder how many other people have blogs I don't know about. I wonder if I should invite anyone other than Tallz, Josh, Vatz, Sean, and K2 to read here? By the way, if you're not one of those, you weren't invited, and so you should comment. Nothing worse than an unknown lurker.