I’m thinking about a major overhaul in how I do my blogging. First of all, I need to cut down a bit to focus on finishing my dissertation this year. Secondly, the technology and software for blogging has developed so much since I started this blog that I no longer feel obligated to be a conduit for the information that is out there. First of all, as I have posted many times before, much of the information I post comes from one of a few web sites out there. There just doesn’t seem to be much point in my simply reproducing articles already posted on Cursor.org, ThisModernWorld, Tapped, Calpundit, Talk Left, Daily Kos, War in Context, etc. It is easy enough for everyone to check those sites on your own!!! I have already posted about how to do so using an RSS news reader. Those sites have thousands of hits a day, my site only gets 10-30. Seems silly for me to be advertising their posts when more people are likely to see the stories on their sites before they see mine.
Secondly, there are four types of people who use my blog: (1) E-mail subscribers, (2) RSS subscribers, (3) Regular visitors, and (4) Google searchers. At least half of the people who visit my site regularly seem to do so from a google search. Since my information was probably from another site that came up in the search as well, I don’t think I’m helping anyone by reproducing it on my site. As for the rest — only the e-mail subscribers (about 23 people) will suffer from the decrease in blogging, as these are mostly people who may not regularly surf the web to look for the news stories on other sites. But I suspect that most subscribers feel they don’t have the time to read most of what I send anyway, so I doubt anyone will complain!
Finally, I would like to reorganize the site. Right now I have four blogs, most of which are never updated. It seems silly. Instead I will move everything over to a new blog with its own URL. While now there are separate blogs for news, culture, academic issues, and information technology, I plan to write about all of them in one single blog. But I will only write when I have something to say on an issue that isn’t already said on one of the major blogs listed above. Reorganization will take some time, but I will announce it here when it happens.
Till then I will continue to post here — but with somewhat less frequency. You won’t really notice much change, because posts have already been rather infrequent these past few weeks.
