sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

One of the difficulties of being an academic and a longtime blogger is figuring out where to draw the line. As blogging has moved away from the "public personal diary" (i.e. LiveJournal) model that characterized it early on, and towards a legitimate publishing practice, it has become a de facto rule that, to be successful, a blog has to have a narrow focus.

For those, like me, who have been blogging since before blogging was called blogging, this rule is frustrating... I want to have a successful blog and I want to build/join a community of readers and other bloggers, and I realize that the best approach is to focus on some aspect of my intellectual work and stick to it. However, I'm also in the habit of ranting about the NBA, or SUVs, or the overabundance of TLAs, and sometimes I really just want to blog about whatever is on my mind.

(Incidentally, I think this is one of several reasons that you now see many collaborative blogs, with several authors posting separately but on related topics: when you narrow the topic, you need several bloggers to contribute. No doubt many of these bloggers have other sites where they blog about their kittens and whatnot, but they separate these posts from their "credible" posts.)

So, what I've decided to do is, in effect, split this blog into 6 distinct blogs. I've created 6 broad categories, and will do my best to be consistent in each category. Since the only people who will really be affected by this are those using feed readers, here's a tip: each topic has its own feed, so you can subscribe to them separately. (Actually, you should be able to specify your own combination of topics and get them in a single feed. If anybody wants to try this, leave a comment and I'll figure it out and explain it.)

Anyway. Onto the topics...

The topic of this post is "Odds & Ends" and, quite obviously, it's the catchall category for the sorts of posts I mentioned above, as well as meta-posts like this one, which are neither rigorous enough to go in my intellectual sections nor personal enough to go in my narrative ones.

The menu image for this topic is cropped from a photo of an old ink pen and a journal, and is slightly reminiscent of the LiveJournal website, suggesting this section is more of an old-school blog. I'll explain the menu images for the other topics in their respective introductory posts, over the next week or two.

Moving right to left, the next topic is "My Life," which will hold anything that is largely autobiographical or narrative.

The "Opensource, Open Culture & Drupal" topic will explore my intellectual interests in "the Commons," the copyleft movement, and other subjects involving intellectual property, freedom of information, collaborative and collective strategies and technologies, and network effects.

In the "Social Media, Technology and New Literacies" topic I'll be posting about the other strand of my academic work, in which I'll focus primarily on concepts like "media literacy" and "electracy," as well as the politics of media and technology. Since my masters thesis will align most closely with this topic, it should be quite active over the next 9 months, although I'll probably put many such posts on my gnovis blog, instead of here. My media production projects (films and whatnot) will end up in this section as well.

My "Sustainability, Environmentalism & Green Politics" section will be more personal than it sounds, as I'll be sharing many of my own experiments in sustainable living. However, I'll also offer more rigorous commentary on political and economic developments on these topics, as well. For me, "Green Politics" has the broader connotations of the Green Party, not just the anti-global warming movement, though I will approach non-environmental topics delicately and less frequently.

In the final section, "Critical Theory & the Academy" I will address two topics in general. The first comes very easily to me, as a blogger: critique and discussion of the role of higher education in society, and the relationship of the academy to the polity, including the impact of blogging and other new media on public intellectualism and academic legitimation. The second topic has always been difficult for me to blog about: critical theory. Basically, any theoretical work that I'm doing (as either a reader or a writer) that doesn't fall in either of the three previous categories -- which means it will often by "pure" theory -- I will try to examine here. This will be my greatest challenge under this scheme.

That's it! I'm sure I've missed something, as I created these topics somewhat hastily, but hopefully I can just massage them a little to make them work for whatever I need to do.

I'd love to get some feedback on this approach, as well as on my new design (which is still not quite finished...). Please comment! OpenID commenting is working now!