Counter-Stalk 1.01

Writing a public blog about your private life can be frustrating. It’s almost inevitable to have some uninvited guests digging through your blogs/facebook/twitter/plurk if you don’t watch out.

I thought of writing this post before but worried that I would come off as an obsessive stalker. Well, I still don’t know how to get around that, so I am already making a sacrifice for offering my experience.

Disclaimer: This post is written purely for educational purposes. I do not personally participate in cyber-stalking, except out of necessity, like when answering favors or doing research or in the rare case when I am really really bored.

Here are some points to watch out for:

1. Crank up privacy settings on social networking sites, Facebook especially.
2. Don’t publish anything you don’t want your potential stalkers to find out.
3. If you think your potential stalker can’t find your blog, try Google your name or the user IDs you most frequently use.
4. Make your blog private, so that only those who are invited may enter.
5. Make your blog search engine unfriendly, so that it wouldn’t come up in search engines. WordPress can do this, but I don’t know about others.
6. Don’t publish your blog address anywhere online. It’s quite often neglected. This includes on any profile pages and blog comments.
7. Use a new online alias so that your blog comments won’t show up if someone searches your name.
8. Watch out when leaving your email address. This is another identifier.
9. Tell your friends not to quote your posts. If someone is looking for your blog, she might also be digging your friends’ blogs.
10. Make sure the web pages you link to don’t have trackbacks, otherwise your URL will show up there.
11. Avoid posting hypertext links if you are bad mouthing someone. Your web address will come up as the referrer if the page you are pointing to has tracking function. The author might come back to see what you are saying. Make the link plain instead.

What did I miss?

[In case you are still wondering, that's my elbow.]

stickK: Contract Yourself

I’ve been using stickK for a week now (via Freakonomics), and I think it’s pretty interesting. So what does it do? Here is a short excerpt from their FAQ section:

stickK helps you achieve your personal goals through “Commitment Contracts.”

After signing up with stickK, you will be able to create a contract obliging you to achieve a specific goal within a particular time-frame. By creating a contract to meet one of your goals, you´re actually testing yourself and saying, “Hey, I can do this”. Not only are you challenging yourself, you´re also putting your reputation at stake.

Every week I’m asked to report if I’ve achieved my goals. It’s working great for me so far, because I constantly remind myself to keep up with it.

Right now my daily goals are:
1. Exercise (anything)
2. Spend at least 30 minutes on writing

I wonder how effective money stakes actually are, because people can simply lie to get out without paying. Would the incentive be any different without money stake?