seansblog.com

A recent article by Will Richardson in which he wonders why some people aren’t into blogging inspired me to dust off this inaugural post I’ve had sitting around for weeks, update it, publish it and get this blog a-happening, if for no other reason than to address some of the issues Will raises in his post, which I will do in a later post.

Here I am again starting yet another new blog.

Earlier in the year I started a new blog over at Elgg. My intention was for that to be professional blog - the place where I posted anything related to my work. I was leaving this blog for my more personal stuff.

I chose Elgg for my professional blog partly because I liked their philosophy, partly because it was an elearning-oriented community (my area of work) and partly because I had been asked to assess the viability of Elgg as a platform for NSW LearnScope projects.

As it turned out my input on Elgg from LearnScope wasn’t really pursued, and I also started to feel a bit too influenced, even oppressed, by the culture and focus of the Elgg community - every tag search I did threw up posts and bloggers talking about elearning.

This became a problem for me as I’ve been giving a lot of thought this year to what I want to be doing professionally and I’ve decided I want to expand my focus away from just elearning into a more general investigation into the effect of technology on culture and society.

I originally thought I would combine the two blogs, so I can feel more “integrated”. I was sick of creating an artificial distinction between my work or “day job” interests and my personal interests.

I also thought that it would be better for me to be a “free agent”, setting up my own WordPress installation and creating my own communities using blog rolls, RSS and other online tools using a “small technologies loosely joined” approach, rather than use the social networking tools that come as part of a community such as Elgg (or LiveJournal, or MySpace or Zaadz) and be influenced by the culture of that community.

But now that the work year is starting to kick in for me (as a freelancer I have to wait for funding proposals of my own and of others to kick in before I start getting work), and since I’m still stuck with elearning being the focus of my day job, I’m starting to question the wisdom of only having one blog, and wondering whether I should stick with the Elgg blog as my work or “day job” blog pitched towards an audience who is interested in elearning, and leave this as my personal blog for my more personal explorations and my investigations into new areas related to technology and culture.

But another part of me wonders if I should do this. Should I bite the bullet and combine the two?

I think there is an argument for two blogs if I have two audiences, so for now I will keep them separate, but I feel uneasy about it all. Can I really make the distinction between the two areas of my life?

So I’m going to post here anything that interests me (hence the tag line for this blog). This will be a place where I can explore my own ideas and research and document my journey, without concern for the relevance of what I say for my audience.

I will use my Elgg blog for work-related stuff with a work-related audience in mind.

And that’s the issue - do readers wanting useful information on elearning want to wade through my personal ramblings? I suspect not. Still, I think it will be difficult to separate the two.

I guess only time shall tell.

A warning though - now that I’ve decided this will be my personal blog (for now at least, until I resolve the “one blog or two” issue) there will be a lot of navel gazing going on here!

As for the practicalities… I’ve had my own WordPress installation at this domain before, but on another web host. I had to change web hosts do to horrendous peformance, so I decided it was a good time to redo my blog look and feel.

I had my sights on a particular WordPress theme, but I’ve been a bit delayed trying to wrestle with the CSS to get it to do what I wanted. I decided it was more important to get blogging so I’ve picked a modified version of LetterHead by Robin Hastings to tide me over until I can finish the other theme.

Now I’ve just got to work out what the heck I’m going to blog about!

Don’t get me wrong - the problem isn’t that I don’t have enough to blog about, the problem is I have too much, and I have a hard time deciding what is worth blogging about and what isn’t.

And before anyone goes off suggestiing I blog everything - there wouldn’t be enough hours in the day to blog everything I think about!

(Cute photo of kitty contemplating what to blog about by Sage29.)