Bloggers in the Crosshairs

There are lots of things we can accept as not particularly good for your health. Smoking comes to mind. Loading up on salt in your diet isn’t so smart either. And for me, playing basketball against guys who are typically 10 years younger produces a healthy revenue stream for my orthopedist.

Blogging should not be an activity that falls into the high-risk category. Yet, for a number of profile, influential bloggers this appears to be the case.

Consider GigaOm’s Om Malik. He is a true innovator and helped craft a viable Web-based publishing model. Yet, at about this time last year he suffered a heart attack at a relatively young age.

Om is still banging away on the keyboard, but much of the content for the blog now comes from his cadre of supporting writers.

Even scarier is today’s announcement from TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington that he plans to “take some time off and get a better perspective on what I’m spending my life doing.”

The impetus for Arrington’s decision was a recent encounter with a scorned entrepreneur at the DLD Conference in Germany. This knucklehead crossed paths with Arrington in a crowd and spat in his face before slinking away.

Oh yeah…there was also the death threat Arrington and his family received last summer from a nut case with a felony record and a gun. Arrington was forced to hide out at his parents’ house because the police can only intervene once a person acts on the threat.

Erick Schonfeld wrote an excellent post about Data Privacy Day in which he pointed out:

“The more of our lives that we put online, the less privacy we have. It is as simple as that. And this is a problem that will just get worse over time. You cannot be fully engaged on social networks, blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, and all the rest without opening yourself up to phishers, scammers, and identity thieves.”

Bloggers put a whole lot of themselves out there for public consumption and the risks that come with that are real. I know. I get lots of nefarious Email solicitations for investment scams and business opportunities.

Plus, I even warranted my own threat last year after writing a post on crisis communications. It was vague, so I gave it little attention. But, in light of Arrington’s dilemma a threat might register a bit more.

This is a real issue and something an executive should carefully consider prior to engaging in social media. My take is that the value delivered -- increased visibility, thought leadership, lead generation and search engine optimization – far outweighs the risk.

Hopefully, TechCrunch’s Arrington will reach the same conclusion. His contribution to the technology community is incredibly valuable.