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It all started when we redid our Web page. My boss stopped at my desk one day. "Do you want to write a blog? We're going to have blogs on our new Web site. A couple other reporters are already doing them."

I had to think about it. When I started working as a reporter, I felt strongly that I wanted to be invisible. I didn't want to be a "personality," creating a filter for readers to look at my stories through. I've always felt that, in the best writing, the writer disappears, and the story seems to be telling itself. I still believe that.

On the other hand, after spending seven years as a reporter on Maui, I knew that there were many things people didn't know about how a newspaper functioned, and how reporters worked. I didn't want to comment on the stories I was covering, but I thought a blog would be a great opportunity to pull back the curtain a little and help people on the outside understand a little more about one reporter's process.

As I looked around at other bloggers for ideas, I realized there were already a lot of people blogging in Hawaii about local issues. Some of them were commenting or sharing information on stories I was covering! And there were some great bloggers covering the media issues I was interested in. I didn't want to miss anything, so I set up an account with Google Reader, so I could easily check all my favorite blogs, every day.

Around the same time, I decided to join Facebook, as a way to connect with friends, especially college friends on the Mainland. Within 24 hours, I'd connected with buddies I hadn't talked to in years! We exchanged photos of our kids, caught up with news, and now keep in touch regularly.

Then a journalist friend of mine invited me to join Twitter. I signed up to check it out. I liked it immediately -- I thought it would be a great extension of my blog, a way to share what I was working on and stay in the loop with what people were talking about.

After a while, I noticed that I was connecting with a lot of Honolulu journalists, politicos and all-around interesting people on Twitter, but not many Maui people. At the same time, more and more people I know from my work on Maui were "friending" me on Facebook, which I'd been using primarily to connect with college and high-school friends. It seemed that Honolulu people were on Twitter, while Maui people were on Facebook.

Which brings me to last night, when I set up my second Facebook page -- my "professional" Facebook page. It seemed the most logical thing to do; it felt awkward to be sharing potty-training tales with the folks I see at the County Council, and I didn't want to bore my college friends with updates on Maui current events.

But I'm starting to feel like social networking is taking over my life! Between e-mails, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and, now, more Facebook, "connecting" can easily eat up an hour to two hours out of every day. That's an hour I might previously have spent going to the gym, working on my next book, or finishing my story so I could get home in time for dinner with my family.

Still, participating in these online networks has also enhanced my life and benefitted my work. During the legislative session, Twitter was an invaluable way to keep in touch with what was happening at the Capitol, often in real-time. And Facebook has brought people I cared about back into my life, after time and distance had caused us to drift apart.

While I'll admit social networking sometimes sucks me in, I've picked up some good tips -- from my online friends! -- for keeping things under control. I only check my sites at specific times in my work day, usually when I arrive, at lunch, and just before I leave. After I check them, I turn them off. I check work stuff at work and home stuff at home. And I don't get updates on my cell -- messaging on my computer is distracting enough. The last thing I need is my phone buzzing every three minutes with an update from one of my Tweeps!

I like being part of the "new media." I think that as a member of the "old media," we need to adapt and join the party, or watch it pass us by. But it's only worthwhile as long as the technology is serving us. Once we're serving the technology -- well, you might say we're frakked.