It’s ironic that I wrote a post about whether blogging could be a hobby for Research Whisperer, professed my love of blogging, and yet I haven’t posted here since mid-February!
The issue I discussed in the RW post was: if you’re blogging about work topics, and the blog profile adds to professional gravitas, can it actually be a hobby? Hobby implies something you do in your leisure time, not ‘work’. My lines were blurred, and have always been in academia. It’s a common problem.
The first thing I drop when I’m under the gun for other blog deadlines is this one. My personal and first blog.
I recently deleted a whole heap of posts from this blog. I had used this blog as a repository for AASRN-type info and updates for quite a few years, before the network developed into having its own identity and social media outlets. Even as I hit ‘delete’ on mass-selected posts, I was wondering whether I’d regret it.
In the end, I decided I already hoarded too much material – in real life on my bookshelves and in my filing cabinets, online on various file-saving apps and cloud storage zones.
I also recently deleted a Livejournal account that I’d had for about a decade. My finger hovered over the ‘delete’ for that one for a very long time.
After all this cleansing of my personal blogging activity, what would a person do but immediately start up another work one? INDEED. I’m now managing a weekly work blog for my unit. They’ve had the blog for a couple of years, but it was only activated for one month a year (for #acwrimo in November). Given the ramped up presence that we’ve been cultivating and my crusade to get more researchers online community-savvy, developing the blog into a resource and news sharing site seemed an obvious and very useful step.
I knew it would take a lot of work. They always do. I was actually scared of the schedule for a little while, when I first started it and the publication spreadsheet for each week was full of…nothing. I was contemplating having to cover content for two weekly blogs and doing more of my staying-up-till-11pm-finishing-posts thing.
Having started blogs a few times now, though, I took a deep breath and started writing up the launch post, ideas for future posts, and the 1000 or so invitation emails that would start the flow of content. OK, so it wasn’t quite 1000. It ate my brain.
Coming out the other side now, with about a month’s worth of material received, edited, formatted, and scheduled, it feels like I can breathe out. Thank you to Marg, Linda, Sara, Sam, Narelle, Jason, Emma, Jade, Marc, and Caroline – for posts delivered and promised. You’ve made my job a lot easier. What blog am I going on about? Here it is: The RED Alert.
Now that that blog has settled in, it means I can get back to balancing my blogging commitments better than I have been.
Hello, RW…
Dr Tseen Khoo 
I have a terrible old website somewhere, and a Live Journal. They sail on – abandoned ships on an Internet sea.
Were yours guilt-magnets? For years I thought that I should go and fix up my website. Now I don’t care.
The RED blog looks good. Schedules are so good for these corporate things – a bit of planning goes a long way.
I used to get guilty all the time, but have moved on from that! I know, hard to believe, yeah? I think I’ve managed to get to a level of putting things online where I’m putting them there with a view to accommodating neglect. Nothing should have to have me check in on it v. regularly to still work.
And abandoned personal sites are less of a weight on my mind because people can always track what projects I’m doing, etc, through other presences!