Yes, this is going to be one of the posts where the person writing says something along the lines of: “Gee, I don’t really blog much anymore. You should follow me on Twitter.”
Sorry about that in advance.
At the beginning of this year, I resolved to “write more, but not here,” where “here” equalled Twitter.
Didn’t really happen.
Efforts to blog every day trailed off and failed, and in all honesty, I’ve had plenty of good excuses, given the busy-ness of buying a house, having another kid, and switching jobs, in that order.
When I started this blog, in its first incarnation, days after starting grad school, I followed a simple formula that lasted for a long time: Read blogs, link to them, react to them. I’ve done some original writing from time to time, sure, but so much of what I think of as “blogging” is about the read-link-react/debate/dispute/fisk space.
And that’s fine and good and necessary and conversational.
But I do most of that on Twitter these days.
And when it comes to sharing personal stuff (we moved! we had a kid! we bought the house!), most of that lives on Facebook, where I have more control (believe it or not) over who sees what.
Throw Foursquare and Instagram into the mix — and for legacy photo sharing from my dSLR workflow, Flickr — and I’m able to pretty selectively share what I’m doing, what it looks like, who I’m with, and how I feel about it.
So what’s this blog for?
I suppose its best remaining purpose is as a professional-looking archive of everything I’m thinking about next. More about the future, less about the present. Not engaging in the daily volleys of what passes for current future-of-news events (Wikileaks, #3 on your list is wrong/right/different, it’s a paywall/not a paywall, etc.) but writing now and then about the advances and movements in media and technology that seem to be just past the horizon.
That’s a goal, anyway. I won’t call it a resolution, but it’s a direction.
Now if I could just find some time to write…
…or maybe you should just follow me on Twitter.