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People Feature
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That might seem a wee bit bitter, but his online description of the actual meeting where he was fired is a solid, measured piece of writing. It's hard to tell what the real truth is, but then again, it's important to take any journal entry with a grain of salt. We are hearing one side, one voice in the many that are out there.

John Halcyon Styn, himself a proprietor of two personal Web sites Prehensile Tales and Cocky Bastard, is a senior editor at collegeclub.com. "Everyone knew about it (the journal). It wasn't a big surprise," Styn said. "I don't know why he was fired, but it wasn't about that. We hired him because he was a free thinker, and he was not fired because he was a free thinker." Adds Styn, "Gus is great. I gave him a reference for his next job."

Reading Gus' writing, one definitely gets the sense that he wanted to push it as far as he could, that he never had any intention of developing boundaries in his journal beyond not naming names. Was he responsible to his employer in his journal? Perhaps not. Does he have any obligation to be responsible? Well, I haven't seen the contract he signed with Collegeclub.com.

Even if you make every effort to act responsibly with your journal, it can still be held against you. Terri Polen maintains *Footnotes*, a journal that dates back in its current form to 1998. (Polen has also included personal entries from as far back as 1981.) She documents her life as a recovering alcoholic, her relationship with her partner, David, whom she met online and her experiences with non-custodial motherhood. Her site receives about 50 visitors a day.

In the past year, the estranged wife of Polen's partner, David, has attempted to maintain sole custody of their children, using Polen's entries as a basis. According to Polen, the bias was, " ... based mostly on things I had written about my drinking, and a half-hearted suicide attempt 20 years earlier." The children were kept entirely from David and Polen for three months, though he now has partial custody. It wasn't until her journal entries were brought up yet again, in January, during a settlement hearing, that Polen actually began to document the struggle. Until that time, she had focused her writing on the rest of her life.

Polen has no regrets, as she comments, via e-mail, " ... The bottom line is that I'm extremely proud of *Footnotes* and of the work I'm doing there, and I have David's 100 percent support in this project, and I would unhesitatingly drag printed copies of any entry into any court of law. The Web site documents all of the ways I've fucked up, yes ... but it also documents all of the ways I've tried to atone for those fuck-ups. And I think that's the important thing."

So, there's a sense that many people are using these journals to heal, as well as to vent. At the recent South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, I attended the panel on Web journals: "Life Online and Confessional Web Sites." There was almost a group therapy feel to the discussion, as participants went around the room and introduced themselves, adding their experiences with their online journals. Some said they did it as a way to communicate with friends who lived far away. Others did it to get to know themselves better.

Sarah Bruner, of syrup.org, spoke eloquently about her struggle to test her boundaries and learn lessons about "the definition of truth, the definition of honesty." Several people mentioned in introductions whether or not their mothers read their sites. (It always comes back to the mother, doesn't it?) When one attendee introduced himself as a psychologist who was fascinated with journals, there was a collective palpable discomfort, followed by nervous laughter

Later, I spoke with the psychologist, John Grohol, and asked him about his interest in online journals. "Therapists have been using journals for years to encourage clients to write out their feelings. A journal allows you to keep an ongoing commentary about your life and reflect upon it ... We tell the story in a different way when we write it down." He's been following them for years, and, in fact has written open-source software to encourage people to post their thoughts online.

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