I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about social networking and online presences. I’ve been blogging for over five years, and I’ve loved the whole interactivity of it all, with people providing feedback and comments and contributing to all the various social microcosms around the Internet - a phenomenon that’s certainly accelerated with the rapid growth of social networking communities like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

But you know what? I’m tired of being so public. Back when I first started blogging, it was my mission to become the ‘number one Jenneth’ in Google, and once I accomplished that, it became a bit of a game to see how many pages I could populate with my online contributions across different websites. However, now, what I’m craving more than anything is privacy. I don’t want people to be able to see my uploaded photos in Flickr when they do a search on my name, or see my blog posts on Gear Diary or my status updates in Twitter. I’ve started wanting to keep my life to myself.

So I’ve made a pretty major decision: I’ve decided to remove myself from the Internet. I’m going to stop blogging, stop replying to threads on discussion forums, delete my profiles from the various social networking communities I’m registered with, and remove any photos and videos I have on Flickr and YouTube. I’m also going to write to any website that mentions my name and request that they remove it.

I realise that this all sounds rather drastic, but I don’t like the idea that everything I write and upload to the Internet is there for all eternity - a life of obscurity is a much more desirable alternative. It’s been a lot of fun interacting with all of you on Gear Diary - maybe someday I’ll bump into you in the real world.