There comes a time in any project where it seems like everything is going in too many directions at once. That the center cannot hold and things are about to fly apart.
Blogging is no different. There’s a constant cycle of push and pull inside of me between keeping everything I write here, in a single location, and writing multiple blogs on different subjects. In the past I’ve also been torn between wanting to try different weblog tools. Four years ago that made a lot of sense because weblog tools were constantly evolving and changing. Today the churn in weblogging software seems to have slowed. Movable Type and WordPress appear to have come out on top in the web application space, and Radio Userland still has it’s adherents. And new sites like Myspace or .. that offer blogs as part of a social network don’t really appeal to me.
So here are some weblogs or topic areas that have been sprouting in my mind.
- Information Ethics. Mostly because that’s the really broad area I’m hoping to write my master’s thesis on. In particular ethics and copyright. This idea moves back and forth between a focus on the thesis process in particular and a broader, perhaps group-based, effort at the School of Information.
- Writing prompts and creativity. A perennial interest of mine that’s persisted for at least the last decade. Visions of turning this into a low-level moneymaking effort spin in the back of my head, probably through links to books, other sites, or AdSense.
- Deep Reading. A fleeting thought to write a blog about a particular author and analyze their work. The classics have been especially intriguing this summer, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare.
- I was at Border’s a few days ago reviewing a copy of The Well-Educated Mind. It’s basically another lifetime reading plan, great books of the Western world, or the Western Canon a la Harold Bloom. There are even more lists here. So I ask why do these lists proliferate so widely and nothing comparable seems to appear for mathematics or science?
To fork or not to fork, that is the question. Here’s a backlink to yet more issues that have been surfacing in my consciousness recently.
