Google Some Public Embarrassment

There's a story in yesterday's New York Times where the writer discusses her nanny's blog, and the tawdry sexual exploits contained within. OUR former nanny, a 26-year-old former teacher with excellent references, liked to touch her breasts while reading The New Yorker and often woke her lovers in the night by biting them. She took sleeping pills, joked about offbeat erotic fantasies involving Tucker Carlson and determined she'd had more female sexual partners than her boyfriend. Now, while it is just plain stupid to discuss your sex life in any public forum, at least not if you want to have a respectable life, the only thing worse than that would be Alex Halavais says it took him mere minutes, using There is a great rebuttal post where the nanny explains how Olen, the "reporter", took singular incidents and statements and made assumptions in her article that they were a pattern, how the Times sat behind technicalities in refusing to alter the column before it saw print, and how the blog is, by far, no "Nannies Gone Wild". Bravo. Regardless of any mistakes this nanny made, the irresponsibility falls squarely on the "journalist" who saw fit to publish details of a private citizen's private life. Some comments from the blog:

1. by the nanny: "Olen is both paranoid and narcisstic and that is a lethal combination".
2. Wouldn't a livejournal be a more appropriate forum for Olen's feelings than the pages of the New York Times?
3. Your life is not fodder for her journalism career.
4. Yes, Ms. Olen's exploitative cannibalizing of your life is vile. She found the hip words by which to make her pitch to the NYT - nannies! blogs! hot lesbo action! - and "furthers" her career on your back. As I said - vile - and a real yuppie move that confirms her in my mind as someone for whom I can't imagine working.
5. Even though you are not mentioned by name, the fact that the author is would make your identity obvious to anyone who knew you worked for her.
6. Wow, that NY Times article is entirely inappropriate.
Oh, and for those of you who want to discuss your sex life on your blog: don't, it can only come back to bite you, and you gain nothing in doing so. If you must include some sex, feel free to steal this paragraph: And then I [censored] [censored] [censored] [censored] with my [censored] [censored] [censored] [censored] [censored] and couldn't feel [censored] [censored] [censored] tuna salad. Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog.