ya gotta keep 'em separated...

ok, i just had a bit of drama that had me back-tracking my internet steps for about the last hour. so i am a librarian, as is evident by the title of this blog. thus being so, i work with members of the general population who i do not want knowing everything about me on such a personal level as some of my online entities allow. however, being a forward-thinking librarian, i also maintain a professional presence online, and i work very hard to make sure there are as few as possible linkages between my professional and personal online personas. (obviously i realize that a savvy user can track me down if they really want to, but still, i do my best to maintain a distance between the two...)

the other day i decided to start writing a new blog (i cannot link to it here, you'll see why in a second). right now i have this one, and i also am the sole author for my library's blog (which i recently created.) my new blog would be library-related, but would allow me to speak as myself, instead of being the "royal we" of the library. it would thus allow me to fulfill my (incredibly dorky) desire to participate in the biblioblogosphere.

 all was fine until i foolishly went into my technorati account and claimed my new blog under my old username (that also has this blog under it). duh. super-duh. in my new blog i had linked to my work blog. now when you looked up my work blog in technorati, it showed that this new blog linked to it, and when you clicked on the author of the new blog, you saw it was also the author of this blog (wow, that was a mouthful, huh?). so i spent the last hour unclaiming and unfavoriting blogs so as to destroy the chain of association. this is also why i can't link to my new blog here, because then when you looked at the new blog in technorati, it would show the link from this here blog. oh yeah, and i had to go into del.icio.us and un-share all my personal links, because my new blog links to my blogroll through del.icio.us.

is it me, or has my online life become incredibly more complicated than my real one?! i mean, i used to be one of those people who didn't really care that i was putting so much out there on the internet, because, really, who the heck was paying all that much attention to me? but then you read stories like this, and, little by little, paranoia starts to creep in. at least vox lets you at least control the privacy of your posts. thank god for small favors...

what do you guys think? am i just being paranoid? is anybody else facing these issues? how do you deal with them?