Here's something which ought to be obvious to anybody, but which apparently isn't. Your blog can actually be read by anyone -- including prospective employers:

Cell phone callers connect with one person at a time while bloggers put their lives on the Internet for dozens to follow. Some of the online diarists document everything from their carnal cravings – mostly for sex, drugs and alcohol – to bad breakups and skirmishes with authority figures.

But even after those adolescent adventures end, the stories stay in cyberspace. And career counselors say the day is coming when the hiring process will include an online name search in addition to the credit and criminal background checks that are already common.

College seniors graduating in the next few weeks might encounter employers who search for personal blogs and Web sites as part of the hiring process.

“When we are kids, we all do kiddish things. But whatever you put out on the Internet, you can’t take back,” said Rae Pearson, founder and president of Alpha Rae Personnel Inc., a Fort Wayne-based employment agency.

But a blog?

It's about as public as you can get, and it can get more public at any time, without warning or notice of any kind. The interesting thing about about this kind of "being public" is that you have no real way of knowing if or when it will happen. When Classical Values was featured on CNN, I not only had no control over it, but had a commenter not told me about it I might never have known.

Is there a distinction to be made between a political/cultural blog written by a cynical middle aged attorney and the types of blogs often created by young students? People have told me that there is, and that it really wouldn't be fair to expose both types of blogs to the same level of public scrutiny. The problem is there's no way to avoid it. Today's high school student is tomorrow's congressional intern, and his juvenile blogger life can well be expected to be searched and researched to discover anything of possible interest to the scandal-obsessed culture.

It's easy for me to say that I wouldn't want to work for anyone who didn't like my blog.

But that's something for the kids and their parents to think about.

(Gee..... What would I do if I ever had kids?*)

* Doh! I'd simply demand that the federal government pass laws to prevent them from being able to read this blog. What a no-brainer.

UPDATE (05/13/05): St. Lawrence University has sued these anonymous bloggers, demanding that Time Warner Cable (the owner of Blogger.com) divulge the bloggers' identities. While I am unfamiliar with the litigation, it illustrates that anonymity is about anonymous as "confidentiality."