Tuesday night was dinner and a movie (a pre-release screening of Juno)
with John
Dodds. John is a blogger so I get to
tell you about it (although he won’t let me publish his picture – I asked).

Wednesday morning Benjamin Ellis treated Liz and me to
brilliant conversation and breakfast.

All week I’ve met interesting and intelligent
people from businesses with which I work, have worked, would like to work, or
simply admire.

But, the etiquette is different.

No one has ever told me, but I know:

It is good form to publish references to bloggers that
you meet and mostly bad form to do the same with professional colleagues or
business associates.

It makes sense. They’re different groups with different needs and expectations.

What’s
the point?

If you’re like me, you may find yourself participating
in many communities in varying ways and at various levels of
involvement.

In order to respect these connections, we need to
know where we are, who we’re with, and how we should behave.

We must always be ourselves, but there are shades
of intensity, degrees of transparency, and wholly different topics of
conversation that become relevant depending upon where we are.

While we
have decided to cross the lines and participate in many communities, the
members of those communities may not feel the same way.

We’ll only be welcome as long as we remain sensitive to that.