In her Sunday Six, Noel posted a link to this ode to the blogosphere. 

“When you blog, you figure out the merging of your personal and professional self — and then you own it.”

I’m fortunate enough to have dabbled professionally in industries (technology and entertainment) where it was not expected that there be an iron curtain between your personal life and your work life (even less so in the latter, of course :-p).

I have professional contacts on Facebook who are just as privy to my more revealing notes or status updates as my closest friends. It’s entirely possible that my coworkers read my blog, considering I mention both the company name and the product name and nobody is above Googling themselves once in a while.  

This is probably just the California progressive-social-reality-distortion-field kicking in again (as, in something like 33 states, you can still get fired for being gay), but I think it’s becoming increasingly acceptable to have social relationships with your co-workers, as in some cases it may even increase productivity and (buzzword alert) synergy.

In a personal example, a few weeks ago I was asked to add user status messages to Teamwork. We have a little box, now, just like Facebook, where you put in what you’re doing, and then it shows up timestamped in everyone’s project activity feed (yes, we have one). It’s been very interesting to, since then, see how my coworkers have used the feature. At first only the more hip ones used it at all, to say what they were working on, but over time the others have caught on and the messages have gotten more personal and revealing. From tame stuff like “[person] is in the office, but sick! Stay away!” to “[person] is working in a coal mine” to, this week, “hoping Santa will bring me a nice warm pair of socks.” (Yes, the pure Bay-ers still think this is cold. I laugh.)

Above all things, knowing that the people I’ve worked with hook up, break up, travel, see family, stay out late, and have ups and downs serves ultimately to humanize them and, in the face of a sometimes considerable age gap, makes them easier to relate to on the job.