An apology

October 20, 2005

I wrote this post to make an apology to those I offended with sensitive material used previously in this blog.

As some of you know, I started taking notes of routines I learned in Salsa classes in February to help me learn Salsa more quickly. After getting some compliments about being able to remember past lessons well from another student, I decided to place my notes on the web in a new medium commonly referred to as web-log or blog and only let two other students and a teacher know of its existence for first few months. By the way, a part of the reason why I didn't publicize it more was because I thought the notes themselves were not especially useful, especially for those who did not attend the same classes and that it might have best use merely as a format for note-taking.

As far as I know, none of the Salsa teachers I talked to have any serious problems with my notes being on the web. The main problem is that my blog also became a "Salsa diary" (as opposed to my "work diary"), in which I was using people's real names, especially those who by any criteria do not qualify as a public persona, in my blog without their knowledge. While this is fairly common practice in blog-o-sphere, this is sensitive and problematic privacy issue especially for a small insulated community like Cambridge Salsa scene as I only realized after hearing complaints couple of weeks ago. To correct this problem, I removed all real names aside from teachers, DJs in their public capacity and some others who gave me their okay.

I always have tried to make sure I never said anything nasty about anyone in the blog. However, it's easy to get misunderstood by poor writing, and a lot of writing could mean more opportunity to get misunderstood when things are read out of context. For example, I wrote in passing two sentences about what seemed to me a harmless episode of a difficult lesson in the class at CDC back in May, and the teacher who knew about my blog (and who I imagined was the only one who checked the website now and then) got a mistaken impression that I did not like this CDC teacher (whom I actually liked and had good relations with). This led me to go back and re-write my post to clarify what happened. There was one other instance in August where I received a feedback about another problematic aspect of my blog, which also caused me to go back to change what I wrote. If there's a problem with my writing, please let me know and I'll do my best to correct it. I cannot erase completely my past mistakes but I will try to make sure they are not repeated in the future. I will also try to be more careful because I also realize that it's no longer easy to discreetly correct things without many people reading it before I notice any potential problems.

Thanks in part to some helpful prodding, I have started talking to people who have been affected (people whose real names were revealed by me) to make apologies in person. So far, I have spoken to maybe 80% of the people. If you feel kindly towards me, please refrain from spreading information about this blog at least until I had chance to speak to everyone and apologize personally. I still worry that there remain some questionable contents, which I have not thought as being malicious. If anything, my tendencies have been to be more freewheeling with my writing when I talk about people, whom I like and care about and have good relations. I ask the people who read my blog with interest to contact me about problematic posts rather than let me get mired in ignorance and suspicion.

Meanwhile, I want to let everyone know that I am very sorry for problems I caused and that I apologize profusely. Please pardon me for outcomes of my action and try to understand that my intentions were not bad. I am sorry.