It is hard to believe that I have been blogging for over five years. And what is clear is that being an assistant professor is not all that conducive for blogging and this is materially evident in my sparse posting pattern over the last few months. It has been particularly bad in the last month thanks to a week long international trip, back-to-back sickness over Thanksgiving week, and finally going to Washington D.C. for the AAAs.
But this retreat from blogging as well as teaching on so-called Web 2.0 software, like blogs, has made me rethink the value and limits of the craft of blogging and so I am going to take some time (that I feel like I don t really have, but oh-well..) to write them down as I am preparing a short piece for on the politics of Web 2.0 and I hope I can transfer some of these ideas there.
So as I have already mentioned, I am an now infrequent blogger. Prior to the era of RSS, this could have meant the death of my blog because if people went to visit my page and there was no new post and then this happened a few more times, they would just stop visiting.
The magic of RSS is that it brings the blog post to you and this alters the landscape of possibilities within the context of what has been nothing short of a seismic explosion of blogs. What I am finding and this will be no surprise to anyone is that it is just too difficult to keep up too many of a certain class of blogger the prolific poster who posts medium to long posts and worse, nearly everyday! To make a point about the effects of this, allow me to tell a story: Two blogs I really like are Joe Reagle’s blog on
Open Communities as well as
Tenured Radical. Both provide captivating posts but I recently unsubscribed to Radical Tenure and not Joe Reagle s. Why? My decision was purely pragmatic. Because she posts way too much, I just can t keep up. If I stop reading her blog for 2 weeks, and then pay a visit via bloglines, I am faced with a blogolanche and I am trying to avoid, at all costs, overwhelming situations. On the other hand, if I stop reading Joe s blog for 2 weeks, there may be one or two posts so I feel like I can spare the time to continue reading. Ironically, I will now visit Tenured Radical every month, much as I did prior to the RSS era, just to take a quick scan and see if there is anything I must read.
There is another class of blogs, such as
Sivacracy, that update their site frequently but the posts are tidy and short and so I can usually keep up and they provide important news for my projects. But the type of blog that provides longer ruminations has proliferated (and I really like reading those) but I suspect that as the blogosphere has expanded, less people can commit to those types of blogs. In other words, today, you may hang on to more readers, if you only blog 1 to 2 times a week instead of 3-5 weekly posts that are medium to long in length.
Now I may be completely OFF the mark with this by generalizing my own experience so I would be interested in hearing people s experiences or better, if anyone could point me to someone who studies these types of pattern, I would really appreciate it.
On a related note, last week I taught a now famous
piece by Cass Sunstein on political balkanization on the Internet that is in part secured by blogging. His core argument, which I think stands to some degree, is that the blogosphere is less an arena where people with different inclinations and views meet to debate, and thus change their views, but is an arena where your pre-existing ideas are reinforced because you are simply reading and debating with people who hold your worldview.
As I mentioned, I think this is true in so far as you don t see people on the left and right engaging in some debate that substantially transforms their ideas. But the argument is faulty or missing something crucial about the nature of politics, in so far as that the so called left or right or so called liberal and conservative positions are truly not unitary so that if different types of liberals/lefties are engaging with each other to change positions and ideas within that group, well then, the critical function of blogging is in fact well and alive. To state using an example, there are plenty of liberals who, in my opinion, could use a little radicalization and perhaps this is happening in the blogosphere because people come across a spectrum of ideas and positions from within their political pole.
Finally and this point really is not mine but I am poaching it from
Jeff Juris who made it last weekend at the AAA meeting during his presentation on activist videos. One of his findings was that activists were the only ones watching video s documenting protests when hosted on radical political sites like Indymedia. When they were placed on Youtube, the audience expanded considerably: conservatives were also watching them, but they effect was not to make their more sympathetic toward the left and their political points, but simply to reinforce their position, which is evident in the archived comments expressing their great distaste of the left. This is a perfect example of the Balkanization that Sunstein talks about but with an important reversal: it comes from confronting difference not avoiding it!
But Jeff made the excellent point that there is a critical function in preaching to the choir: it ensures that the choir will not stop singing! That is, your political passions are not simply ensured, they must be renewed and given the massive amounts of apathy peppering our population, renewal by confronting what you believe in, is vital.
So my advice is keep producing posts, keep reading even if it tends to be stuff you already believe in BUT please, post less. Less, I think, is really becoming the new more….
My tool to query apache logfiles via SQL seems suprisingly popular.
Just as a recap the process goes like this:
With four plane tickets already in our hands, it's official. Clara, Sabri,
Joni and I will be flying to
Here are the updated stats about the usage of the Homepage field, comparing with those from my 
When I was a kid, I often started to read a book and didn't do anything until I finished it. This is what I did yesterday until this morning again... :-) Nowadays I do this rarely, but if it's happens, I have a lot of fun in a fictional world. 
Since some weeks I’m really busy, private and at work. It’s going into the end of the year and everybody is in hurry. There seems also coming some changes for our family down the road in the future, but more maybe later. Additionally one months ago 
Sunday afternoon I came back from the QA meeting in M rida (Spain).
I host some of the pictures on my machine: 
Monday in the evening I got a phonecall from the company where I had a personal interview last tuesday. They can adopt my apprenticeship. Yay… There are several reasons why I want to leave my current workplace (Stadt Grenchen): I have almost nothing to do, I learn nothing anymore, some people in my team were an interpersonal catastrophe, noone knows what the work “responsibility” means. I don’t want to go into the detail, but at least they reached that I got several nervous breakdowns, ending at the doctor wednesday afternoon. As I told, my nerves are down, I can’t sleep during the night here, motivation for life was down in the cave. This week I don’t need to work at all (medical certificate) and the next 2 weeks only 50%, so enough time to relax and get healthy again.
Also thanks to my girlfriend 
Well the last few days I have updated many things in a lot of different areas, the most noticeable right away is I have updated my website theme, I’m still not 100% happy with it, link colors are a bit off and such but its “good enough” to go live, if your reading this via an RSS feed go check out my main page and drop me some feedback. ( if your really interested in the theme and want it for your own website you can grab it at 
In shell: 
I'm packaging Ruby's 
Katherine and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary over the
weekend. We still don't think marriage has changed us or our
relationship that much; having lived together for many years beforehand
was really a much bigger step.
A number of fairly major other events have happened to me in the past
year, which I don't think either of us could have predicated.