One of the other things that spending time with the family over the holidays has shown me--indeed what this year between schools in the city that I grew up in has shown me--is that my audience is pretty darn close.
I've had blog entries quoted back to me a lot in real life. Though my situation, or my worries, are not quite like ernie's, I understand where he's coming from.
When I was using livejournal more consistently apart from tychoish.com, it often felt more like a sort of public message system. Kind of like the whiteboard on your dorm room door, except that people would actually read it without trudging through the snow.
My entire online existence has been in some ways a struggle with and against my readership, because a rather size-able portion of the people that I know IRL read my site. In the end that's probably a good thing: I don't have to repeat myself in emails constantly and I almost always think several times about where something is going to end up before I post it. The down side is that I'm probably more gaurded and stilted than I would be if I didn't know my readership personally.
Interestingly I think this makes my use of the pen name, particularly interesting. Rather than protect the people I do know from discovering who I am online, as I suspect many--particularly academic--bloggers do, I'm trying to protect people I don't know in real life, from finding out who I am. Though I suspect that I'm going to start shifting that.
Some other time I'll talk about the development of a readership, I guess. For now, there are better things that I should be doing. I suspect for you as well.
Onward and Upward!