(One-Year Anniversary)

Originally posted: Fri, 04 Jun 2004 17:57:07

One year ago today, I began reviewing my readings on this blog. It doesn't seem like it's been that long!

Events My first review, of Latour's Pandora's Hope, was posted to the BlogSpot blog I had set up on the evening of June 4, 2003. A few months later, I moved the whole thing to the CWRL server and migrated it to MovableType. Since then, I've been busy blogging almost everything of consequence that I read, searching the archives whenever I need to review a reading, using posts as first drafts for chapters and articles, and of course deleting innumerable spambot comments.

Side effects One of the unanticipated side effects is that I read more books and fewer journal articles now. I think I trend toward books because they now seem like bigger accomplishments and more significant to blog. But I have also blogged some clusters of articles in mini-framework essays. I should do more of that. Perhaps that will be my resolution for this upcoming year.

Another side effect is that it allows me to "keep score." I tried to keep a tally of books at TTU for a while, but it wasn't very successful. But the blog has allowed me to track what I read. (Disturbingly, however, it doesn't seem to count them for me. How many books have I read this year? A lot.)

Circulation. I've been really surprised at how many people have mentioned the blog to me at conferences (like RSA, last week) or over email. I don't currently have access to server stats, so I really have no idea how many people are reading it, but I'm starting to get used to people casually remarking, "as you say in your blog..."

The blog now appears on a number of blogrolls. Rudely, I have not reciprocated. It's not that I don't read or respect other blogs, but I want the Reading List to be insular -- pure scholarship, not remarks on current events, wry quotidian observations, political screeds, or speculations on technology. I always liked the idea of the Reading List as a semi-private set of notes on the books I read, as my first post stated. So my apologies to those who have linked to my site.

What's next? Since MovableType has gone to a pricing structure that the CWRL can't pay, I'll likely have migrated this blog over to other software by this time next year. (Any suggestions? Obviously I'd like something that makes it easy to migrate from MT.) Either way, I'll keep the current entries in the blog so I (any anyone else) can review them.

Blogged with Flock