Deciding what belongs on your internet (your public facing website) and what is better placed on your intranet (your organization's internal website) seems like ano-brainer. It's the same as determining what you would tell a stranger compared to what you would tell your sister or your best friend. Nothing tricky about that, right?

Then why are so many websites filled with material that the general public neither cares about or needs to know? Why can the casual visitor to a university website find handbooks, forms and policies that are relevant only to the business of living, learning and working on a particular campus?

Some of it is historic (that's the way we've been doing it); some of it is what I would call the "Technology Overload Syndrome" or a resistance to learning yet another electronic pattern/gadget/tool/language.

Perhaps you may remember what work was like before email, before voicemail, before the web. Something like a staff handbook was a binder on your bookcase. Annual updates arrived via snail mail. If you phoned someone and there was no answer, you tried calling again later. But the casual visitor to your campus never touched any handbooks.

So why do we have similar documents on our public websites now? Why are we still telling strangers more than they asked for and more than they could ever possibly want to know?

We launched myBucknell almost two years ago (0ur version of an intranet). It's growing slowly (too slowly, one might argue), but clearly a one-size-fits-all website is no longer viable. The public has to wade through all our internal chatter to find out the facts and details, while the current student, faculty or staff member has to read through page after page of "recruitment" material when all she really wants is to submit a form detailing receipts from a recent conference.

Sorting through our content, separating the internal from the external, is time consuming, but it's a task we can no longer afford to avoid. The public wants to know who we are, where we are, and what makes us unique. They really don't need to know how we are organized, how we process our internal information, or what's available in the cafeteria next Monday.

Just because it's easy to tell the stranger on an airplane our life story, doesn't mean we should, or that he wants to hear. It's time we start focusing on what, exactly, we are posting on our public website and why.