Where does the personal end and professional begin?

Even Con Edison ads on the subway entreaty the reader to "join us on Facebook!"

Social networking is omnipresent and unavoidable.

First I used Friendster to keep in touch with college friends. Then I used Myspace to find old high school friends. Then I used Flickr to share photos with family, friends, and people I met in my travels. Then I joined Facebook to keep in touch with aforementioned travel buddies, being that its popularity globally was much bigger than locally-- outside of college populations.

Now we've seen the largest migration ever encountered: the entire world, it seems, joining first Facebook and now Twitter, which have become more than social networking. They are a means for branding, marketing, publicity, public relations....

It was strange enough when my former students "friended" me and, no longer being a teacher, I accepted their requests.

Then last summer, in conjunction with my position at a publishing company, I used my personal Facebook profile to appeal to groups of users who were fans of a particular author, as a means to market and publicize a book.

I was uncomfortable with the invasion of my professional life into my personal, and decided to never use my profile again in such a manner.

But the fact remains, the personal and the professional spheres are more and more seeping into each other, not always seamlessly. Media outlets from the Wall Street Journal to Bloomberg to the New York Times face some very strict policies limiting, or at least guiding, their use of social networking site. Staffers are urged to keep their profiles professional, censor comments from friends and post promotional links.

(As a side note, one can understand concerns from higher-ups over what professionals in the public sphere put out there. Just have a look at the multiple politicians showing their true colors on Facebook. The jury is out, however, on whether such racist stupidity will actually impact their professional career at all.)

But back to why this is concerning me in particular right now.

So, by now there are a few things published out there now with my name in the byline. The ball's rolling; I need to keep momentum. The writers I speak to encourage me to write everyday, no matter what. Hence the increase in posts here as of late. If I am not writing as a freelancer for someone, I should at least be creating material I can use for writing samples.

Meanwhile, as I peruse popular blogs in fashion, in food studies, in wine, there everyone is, advertising themselves-- follow them on Twitter, friend them on Facebook, check out their photos on Flickr.

Web 2.0 offers some fantastic opportunities for self-promotion. I am not always pleased with the results (Julia Allison really bothers me), but if it's done right, without violating any principles or self-respect, seizing the opportunity to brand oneself certainly presents a thoroughly modern avenue to success or, at least, exposure, which, with talent, could lead to success.

Needless to say, branding alone does not a successful writer make. In fact, I think it makes an obnoxious and annoying one. Just because you can manage multiple social networking accounts and have lots of friends and hits on your blog does not mean you are a force to be reckoned with in the literary world. But the exposure from increased blog hits will help. And in order to increase blog hits, two things are helpful: a recognizable and established identity and a means for self-promotion. Hence, linkage of worlds: the professional (if I begin to look at this blog as such) and the personal-- my social networking profiles.

Sorry for all the circular logic. Bloggers are bloggers, not journalists. I think back to my first "blog"-- an e-zine, really, that I circulated throughout the AOL community back when the internet was a baby for us commoners. I called it Brainspew. I find that to be representative to blogging in general.

But back to my point, which I do have.

I am considering jumping off the deep end. Actively seeking increased traffic for this blog-- taking it from something I share with friends and family to something I share with a larger, anonymous-to-me community. Taking it more seriously and using it to build skills as a reporter, establishing my name. My brand.

But how? Should I go full-on anonymous? Or do I go all out? If I go anonymous, I'll probably create a second blog and try to conceal identity-revealing details. Readers who follow me here (few though they are, given my frequent lapses), will know who I am at my new blog, so it's not like I'd stay fully anonymous. And I'd still probably post links to new blog entries on my Facebook profile. But my anonymity would pretty much be controlled by me--I'd reach out to those I wanted to reach.

On the other hand, if I do go public, how public do I go? Do I post a link on my blog to my Twitter? To my Facebook profile? I understand the value of the former-- I can tweet when I've updated and what-not, but I never really understood people who make FB profiles public. Seems a bit stalker-ish.

All this exposure warranted by Web 2.0 really fascinates me. Everyday people become celebrities a la Perez Hilton (whose model is one I most certainly will not follow). It's funny to think of people I don't even know reading my ramblings (note to self: I am not Jack Kerouac. Keep away from the red wine while writing.) Will people really care about who I am, be curious about my personal life, or will they just want to read what I write? Do I even want to broadcast my personal life? I'm sure there's a middle ground, I'm just not sure if the identity I've established with this blog is already a little too personal to bring fully public.

These are the things I think about, with my name out there attached to a few articles, with designs for this blog that would increase my visibility and provide me some more fodder for writing samples. It's like I'm navigating the same waters as the staffers for the Times, the Journal and Bloomberg, but without some higher-up sending me a memo on guidelines, I have to create my own.

Where will my personal life end and my professional life begin?

What say you?