A NYT magazine article probes the thesis that blogs are transforming the lines between the public and private, and that "off the record" for even the most intimate part of the human experience -- peoples' sex lives -- can't be assumed.

OTOH, could it ever have been assumed? Did gossip start with blogs? :)

Anyways, an excerpt from Jeffrey Rosen's piece:

ne of the first sex scandals of the blogosphere ended, of course, in a book deal. In May, Ana Marie Cox, the Internet gossip whose Web log, Wonkette, focuses on Washington, published a link to another blogger who called herself the Washingtonienne. In the blog, Washingtonienne, a Capitol Hill employee, used a Senate computer to post intimate details about her experience sleeping with six different men, some of whom were paying for her favors. Washingtonienne listed her partners by their initials and occupations, from the married ''Chief of Staff at one of the gov agencies, appointed by Bush'' to her current boyfriend, a fellow Senate staff member. Praising Washingtonienne for her candor and honesty (''You go, girl!''), Wonkette identified her as Jessica Cutler, a 26-year-old mail sorter for Senator Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican, who promptly fired her from her $25,000-a-year job. After a flurry of interviews in the newspapers and on TV, she sold a novel based on her blog to Hyperion for a figure that Wonkette estimated at $300,000. Cutler's agent announced that she would pose nude for Playboy but would not talk to the media until the book was published. Her privacy, after all, had to be respected.

The men whose initials Cutler posted were not so lucky. In an effort to identify the Bush appointee who was paying for sex, Wonkette posted pictures of 13 chiefs of staff at federal agencies under the headline, ''Would You Sell Sex to This Man?'' One of the suspects was a law-school classmate of mine, Frank Jimenez, who had recently served as chief of staff at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. When I saw the photo, I wondered if his career was over. Happily, the following day, Jimenez was completely exonerated by Wonkette: Cutler's ''F'' was married, while Jimenez was single. But during those hours of uncertainty, Jimenez experienced the peculiar anxiety of being falsely implicated in someone else's Internet exhibitionism. ''I went to the gym during lunch, and when I came back, there were e-mails and voice mails from concerned friends,'' he said. ''I was amazed at how many friends were following the story in real time, like a cyber soap opera.'' Jimenez, who said he was never so glad to be single in his life, added, ''I would hope that bloggers would be more circumspect about what they post on the Web: it's no different than old-fashioned gossip spread by word of mouth, but modern technology has magnified its impact a millionfold, and it's potentially more harmful because of its permanence.''

As Web logs proliferate -- Technorati, which tracks 5 million blogs, estimates that 15,000 are added each day -- the boundaries between public and private are being transformed. Unconstrained by journalistic conventions, bloggers are blurring the lines between public events and ordinary social interactions and changing the way we date, work, teach and live. And as blogs continue to proliferate, citizens will have to develop new understandings about what parts of our lives are on and off the record.