Thanks to all my friends for sending their condolences in various venues. I am uplifted by your care. I’m a right proper heathen but if your views run differently and you can spare a thought for my aunt’s family right now that’d be awesome.
She was a rock for that family. For a very long time.
[I apologize for any odd paragraph formatting below as WordPress is screwing with me relentlessly on this.]
I think or, at least, I hope that I was productively non-productive yesterday. I didn’t do anything directly related to my bibliography, although, perhaps, that could be argued.
I read lots of my own stuff (and comments) from this blog over the past year. While I did, I did lots of electronic annotations in Zotero, copied and pasted anything useful written about articles or books by Hjørland or Harris (or related) into my draft bib, noted blog posts that will be useful when I come to write my bib essay and the CAS paper as a whole in my wiki, and other minor related tasks. This morphed out of the books read in 2007 delaying tactic I was on primarily Saturday.
Late in the evening, I took the content of my 2 posts on Hjørland’s “Semantics and Knowledge Organization” ARIST chapter [part 1, part 2]and got them re-formated into a Word doc with any redundancies removed and internal and external citation lists merged for both at the end. Printed out it’s 11 pages solid. Now I’ve got to put that work—and an awful lot of unanswered questions, some very big—to even more work. Still. This is mostly CAS paper stuff primarily; although, this is the paper with the one Harris reference. Hmmm. Definitely bib material.
I’ve been varyingly unhappy, perhaps unsatisfied is better, with my blog for quite a while. Can’t quite put my finger on what exactly about it that bugs me. But I do know that it’s various, and varying.
Part of it is not being able to cover everything I’d like as deeply and/or as broadly as I’d like. But that’s just life. I do wish that my “Some things read this week…” posts were better. Better in the sense of more fleshed out entries for far more of the things read. Some wrap-up thoughts, etc. “Progress” is important but this is a prime area where I could employ some goals towards Slow Reading. [Please ignore that "progress." I wrapped way too much up in that term.]
Speaking of John Miedema, there was an interesting post and comments at a recent post, “Have you set an end-date for your blog?” [BTW, there are frequently interesting things to read at Slow Reading.]
Have you set an end-date for your blog? Interesting question, and idea. For the right reasons, it is a grand idea.
In a comment, John writes:
Hi Peter, I’ve put one blog to “sleep” so far (http://johnmiedema.wordpress.com). It was my first public blog, had the usual first blog characteristics — wandering mission, odd mix of personal and professional — and was a real learning experience.
Well, I guess—nope, didn’t put it to sleep but gave it a new manifestation and expression, and name—that is fairly similar to me. It explains my 1st blog pretty well, and it explains this one, too.
wandering mission, odd mix of personal and professional — and was a real learning experience
Well, my mission wanders no more than I do so not really applicable, although all output probably evidences differently as far as appearance to others. But an intentional “odd mix of personal and professional,” certainly. And it remains forever—hopefully—a learning experience.
I know John wasn’t implying that these “usual first blog characteristics” are anathema to every blog. Perhaps just those he’d prefer to write. 
Hell, I’d love to be able to write a highly focused topical blog or two. And that’s also a part of my non-satisfaction with this blog. But writing those blogs is not me. Or, at least, not me right now.
And based on what I read yesterday, it has been highly focused for a while now. It’s just highly spotty, and not really intended to be so focused.
End date? Sure. It’ll definitely have one. I’m just in no position to set one right now, unsatisfied as I may be. Let’s hope I don’t just disappear it, though. 
8 responses so far ↓
1 jenny // Dec 3, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Life is too short to feel guilty about blogging.
2 John Miedema // Dec 4, 2007 at 7:33 am
Hi Mark, if I were to write a philosophy of blogging, the first principle would be my opening line on the end-date post, “If something is worth doing, it is worth doing … badly”, i.e., rather than not at all. Few good things arrive on the first try.
That, and the other line I wrote there, that a blog is just sketchpad for ideas. It’s one of the reasons I like to include the odd (badly done) sketch in my blog. It sends a message, “Hey folks, caution, work in progress here, could be sticking my foot in my mouth here.”
Take care.
3 John Miedema // Dec 4, 2007 at 7:40 am
Take that as a vote of agreement with Jenny. Don’t sweat blogging. Keep doing what you’re doing. We love it.
4 Mark // Dec 4, 2007 at 9:08 am
jenny, agreed. but maybe my failure is in not thinking of it as “guilt.” if i did so then that would clearly make it dissolve as a problem.
Hi, John. Thanks for the vote of confidence. I love your stuff, too.
My point is only that there are multiple ways to blog. I’m glad lots of people have missions and perhaps even a well-defined topic. Makes life much simpler if I like what they write and they make the topic interesting. [Like, John.]
I often read blogs for a good while that aren’t about anything I’m really interested in, but the author gives it life.
I accept the first principle, but much more widely.
And I wholeheartedly accept the 2nd point. Again, lots of ways to “draw sketches” is all I’m saying.
The thing I’m “feeling guilty” about, for lack of a better concept, is entirely a sense of letting myself down.
Assumptions:
If more of the things I read were read slowly I would get more out of what I read. [Think John has to accept this one with minimal caveats, perhaps]
If I read more things slowly, I would get less overall read [say in page count. So? The resulting benefits of closer reading of less but more than now might be more than enough to offset any "loss" of an easy "objective" measure. / Pretty much a given overall, though.]
If I wrote slowly my writing would probably benefit. [Much more of an assumption.]
I could funnel the improved reading into the improved writing, ergo …
Something. What? Different. Yes.
One possible offset for the lack of reading quantity is if one is good to better at finding the good stuff first. [I seem to have an odd knack for this, in many domains, so ....]
I like John’s view(s) of the blogging world and I’d like to think that I may well have a blog with a set end date someday.
Heck, I would have loved to do a CommentPress version of the newest LC Working Group report. Talk about an end date.
There’s still some stuff I’m considering with CommentPress for other projects. But that’s one of those “round-tu-it” things.
5 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang // Dec 5, 2007 at 1:15 am
Are you familiar with John Perry’s concept of structure procrastination (http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/)? “All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you….”
6 Jenn // Dec 8, 2007 at 9:51 am
One of these days I’d like to write a “professional” blog–you know, sort of like an op-ed column or even a serial story, like they used to run in newspapers way back when. But it’s not what I need right now.
On a completely unrelated note: I don’t know if you read xkcd.com (webcomic), and if you don’t, you should. This one reminded me of you: http://xkcd.com/353/
Hope it makes you laugh.
7 Mark // Dec 10, 2007 at 4:53 pm
Hi Alex and welcome! I had seen that bit on structured procrastination sometime in the past but I re-read it anyway.
While I do agree that there are some possibilities there I have some issues with it. I would call my issues ethical ones although others would never consider them such.
My concerns, though, include the authors admitted inability to get things done on time. He claims those deadlines are all flexible. But that’s crap! Maybe he’s been a professor too long and not had any real responsibilities in the world. Sometimes deadlines are soft, but not meeting one’s commitments often has huge ramifications on others. But he’s more than willingly to blithely ignore the fallout on others.
The second is highly related and goes to his comments on ordering books for his classes: “I can get mine in mid-Summer and things will be fine. I just need to order popular well-known books from efficient publishers.”
As a student, I highly resent this attitude!! It directly affects students in multiple ways. As efficient as those publishers are this still causes issues for the bookstore staff and any, heaven forbid, proactive students. And I’m just supposed to assume that “popular well-known” equates to quality. Well, call me a bad consumer but I ain’t buying that.
Thanks for pointing out the article, though. As I said, I do think there are some valuable ideas in it; just not the ones about blithely missing deadlines as if that will affect no one else in the world.
8 Mark // Dec 10, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Thanks, Jenn! That is a good one. I generally only read it when someone points out a particular one. I’m not actually geeky enough to get some of them.
I’d like to write a professional blog someday, too.
Seriously.