For Heather Armstrong, writing in her personal Web log was all fun and games until someone got hurt. In February 2002, while employed at a private software company in Los Angeles, Armstrong used her personal blog to complain about her workplace. She ragged on her boss. She lambasted obnoxious co-workers. Though she never revealed the name of her employer, a reader figured out where she worked and sent an e-mail message about Armstrong's rants to company executives. Ms. Armstrong, who now lives in Salt Lake City, was canned immediately.

"I thought that since my blog was my personal Web space, I could say whatever I wanted," she says. "Oh, was I wrong."

Armstrong learned the hard way what many in the blogging community are realizing as well--while blogs might look and feel like online journals, they are in fact something much, much more. With the blog's meteoric rise as a form of expression, the medium has unearthed significant discussions about issues ranging from social responsibilities in an online universe to the ways bloggers can balance virtual communities with their physical ones. While nobody has all the answers, it's clear that bloggers must find the balance between living life and blogging about it.

Life in a virtual community
Everybody loves a social gathering. The unpredictable give-and-take of organic conversation, a girlfriend's facial expression, the laugh of an old pal--these are the vagaries that make getting together in person so much fun. Blogs recreate some of these qualities, but only to a point. First, what appears as candor on a blog really is only a semblance of candor, since there's no way to tell if a published persona is true. Secondly, openness frequently goes only one way; even if a blogger bares her soul in a post, it's hard for that blogger to learn about her readers unless they submit comments in return.

The bottom line is that many bloggers and their readers are perfect strangers. Case in point: David Sirota's blog about politics. Sirota, who once served as a spokesman for Democrats on Capitol Hill and now lives in Helena, Montana, writes a few times daily on issues that span the partisan spectrum. Generally, the postings skewer Democrats and Republicans evenly, presenting a balanced view of politics and the political process. Still, when Sirota meets readers at political events, he says they are often surprised to find out that he's just a regular guy, and not some crazy political zealot.

"Some people who read my work but have never met me assume I am mean, nasty, or that have a chip on my shoulder," he says. "That couldn't be farther from the truth, but sometimes I hammer it in to make a point, and that becomes the persona of my blog."

Another risk of blogging is the illusion of control. Because bloggers are not confronted with the usual tangible or visual cues of a physical community such as tone of voice, body language, and even the energy in a room, many assume they have control of a virtual community when they do not. In truth, bloggers have little control over what will happen once they post a message--who will read it, whether readers will receive an intended meaning, or how they will interpret it at all. Even with emoticons and virtual expressions, online communication can be haphazard and easily misunderstood.

Just about the only kind of control bloggers can have over the communities they create is in the comments forum. Blogger, blogging software from Google, comes with tools that enable bloggers to edit comments for obscenities and other inappropriate sentiments. Bloggers who own their own blogs have yet another option: blocking the IP address of repeat offenders, essentially preventing certain users from even accessing the comment function in the first place. While some Internet users see this as censorship, Armstrong thinks it's perfectly acceptable for bloggers to patrol their comment boards.

"I'm the one paying for this, so if you don't have something nice to say, you can go give your opinion elsewhere," she says, adding that she recently disabled her comment feature altogether because it was becoming too cumbersome to edit. "This is my space, and one of the few things I can control is how people play in it."

Interpersonal substitute?
It's no secret that blogging obsessively can become a big problem. Nobody knows this better than Mike Masnick, CEO of Techdirt, a popular business and technology blog based in Belmont, California, With many of his blogging co-workers working remotely, sometimes days go by when the only communication they have is through blogging or instant messaging, what they consider their virtual water cooler. To help combat this, Masnick organizes at least once weekly conference calls with the entire staff, and makes sure to get everyone together in person for lunch or dinner at least once a quarter.

Aliza Sherman, author of Cybergrrl at Work, warns against becoming too reliant on virtual interactions, but says there is a place for it in some circumstances. A few years ago, after she blogged about her personal experiences with miscarriage, other women with similar experiences found her blog and began posting. Because there are few real-world support groups that meet face-to-face to talk about issue, Sherman says the experience of sharing her feelings with others has proven to be invaluable, both for her and for them, and that many of these strangers have become virtual friends.

"I would prefer to speak to other women about miscarriage in person," says Sherman, who runs a number of blogs on a variety of topics. "But online, we have a degree of privacy, of safety, and we can find solace in support from total strangers online."

At LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas, students in Professor Annie Olson's first-year composition class have gone to great lengths to combine their physical and virtual communities into one. Olson first encouraged students to keep blogs as part of her class in 2002. Once class ended, a student by the name of Eliot Landrum decided to keep the project going. Landrum, now an engineer in Dallas, developed the Yellow Project, a collection of blogs affiliated with the school. Gradually, the page started becoming a pretty popular place for students and faculty to find LU blogs.

As the community developed online, Landrum moved to build a physical community too. He scheduled monthly meetings at a local coffee shop, and bloggers from all over the LeTourneau universe were invited to come and discuss blogs. Landrum says attendance was about 15 per month, and that those who attended these meetings were people who would not even meet in the normal course of daily life on campus. He adds that over coffee, tea, and caramel macchiatos, group members read their submissions aloud, discussing everything from writing styles to current events.

"I thought physical meetings might be an enjoyable way for the diverse Yellow Project group of writers to get together," he says. "They turned out to be laid-back and fun."

Getting real
Experiences like Landrum's are what have led some experts to challenge the very notion of blogs as "virtual" communities. These experts would argue that even online, the Yellow Project was a very real community, as evidenced by the number of people who turned out for the meetings in person. Shel Israel, co-author of the forthcoming blogging book Naked Conversations, is one such expert. Israel prefers to say that blogs create "geographically diverse communities," since the communities are quite real, and can be comprised of people from all over a particular area, or all over the world.

For Mark Turrell, CEO of Imaginatik, an idea management firm in Boston, the issue is even simpler than that. Turrell, who keeps a blog about his field, says blogs create "ego-centric" forums comprised of two types of people--the egoists, or the ones doing the writing, and the voyeurs, or those who log on to read. Turrell notes that there are weak links between the egoists and their voyeurs, and no links at all between voyeurs. As such, he says, it behooves bloggers and readers alike to identify a community that interests them, identify whether they will play the role of egoist or voyeur in that community, and act accordingly.

"Blogs create an important new dimension to new forms of community, a semi-continuous flow of thoughts and insights that certain people may like to see," he says. "How valuable that ultimately will be on the larger scale, I am just not sure."

Matt Villano, a freelance writer and editor based in Half Moon Bay, California, recently kept a blog about the three months he and his wife spent living in Peru. Just about the only people who logged on regularly were his parents.