Editing published blog posts – yay or nay?

I’ve been blogging in a public forum for four years. On my personal blog, I have over 600 posts. In all that time, I’ve been asked to edit or remove a blog post a total of two times.

That equals two extra times in my life that I’ve been irritated by my blog. Unnecessarily.

The first incident came in the form of a post I’d written about an old acquaintance who had made an enormous life decision that was very much out of the ordinary. I was inspired to write about it, and I did so without naming names, or outing the subject in any way. I did send a link to the person, who proceeded to comment on the post, using her name.

Later, the person decided that being so “out” was generating criticism and since her story had become somewhat viral, she became uncomfortable.

At first, she simply requested that I remove her name from the comment she’d left, but as we know, Google doesn’t forget. It wasn’t long before I was asked to remove the post. I did it after some thought, but only because the benefit to taking it down for her far outweighed the benefit I reaped by keeping it up.

The second incident was recent. Famously mum about my private life, especially on my blog, I’d come clean in one quick sentence about some current changes in my own life. Really, it was three words embedded within a post, a very secondary detail within the scope of the topic I was covering. But the person on the other side of my three words was not comfortable with them.

They were my words. About ME. About my life. My readers, many of whom have been with me since the beginning, are typically given very little about my personal life because I’m just not one to tell-all on my blog. While I wish I were, it’s just not me. But it was time for me to put myself out there a bit, even if it was just a little detail that no one probably cared about.

Within about 10 minutes, I got a call from the only other person this might matter to, letting me know that this was causing a bit of discomfort. I became annoyed, even a bit angry, because it was about ME, I’d struggled for a while, deciding whether or not I wanted to get a little personal on my blog.

Story short – I took the three words out. Again, my intention is never to hurt anyone else. Nor did the benefits of keeping the words in there outweigh the potential damage they might cause, whether I agreed with it or not. Bottom line – I changed my posts but I didn’t do it enthusiastically.

There are times we, at Mom Central, ask bloggers to change a factual piece or info or to use a more recent image. We don’t ask bloggers to remove or significantly amend posts, because that would reduce the integrity and the honesty of their words. But facts are different from personal stories.

Have you ever felt compelled to edit or remove a publish post?

Jill Notkin blogs at The Daily Grind of a Work at Home Mom when she’s not tweeting@AlexCaseyBaby. She is also the Managing Director of MotherTalk division at Mom Central Consulting.

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