Time flies…

Somehow, without my realising it, the second anniversary of this blog came and went. I’m not sure if I would have done anything special to commemorate the day (7 June), but it’s a bit of a pity that I didn’t actually blog on the day. Despite how it might look, given the lack of posts all week, I’m still enjoying blogging as much as I ever have.

I alluded to the fact that I spent much of this past week thinking: “lots”, “about life, the universe and everything”. What exactly, you might ask? Without going into too much navelly-gazing detail, it’s been a lot of things, which can be summed up neatly into one phrase: What I Want to Do Next. Everything: job-wise, life-wise…

I haven’t come to any conclusions, but I’m surprisingly okay about this. I had a good talk with M about things, and enjoyed being able to ponder and relax while pondering. Late Saturday night I decided to apply for a job that I’d thought I didn’t have the experience for, only to find, happily, that I could actually answer most of the selection criteria very easily. Which is just as well, given that the application has to be in by today. And, even if I don’t get the job, it was good to update my CV and to realise that I have learned a lot and gained a lot of skills and experience over the last few years.

And blog-wise? Been thinking about what to do next, blog-wise, too.

Over the past two years I have learned so much from blogging and from participating in the blogosphere.

Still reading David Weinberger‘s Everything is Miscellaneous.  On blogging, he says that

…weblogs distribute conversation – and knowledge – across space and time. The mainstream media at first mistook blogs for self-published op-eds. If you look at blogs individually, it’s a fair comparison. With over 50 million known blogs (with 2.3 billion links), and the number increasing every minute, blogs represent the miscellaneousness of ideas and opinions in full flower. But the blogosphere taken as a whole has a different shape. Not only will you find every shading on just about any topic you can imagine, but blogs are in conversation with each other. …The links from each blog, and the commenters who respond to each blog, capture a global dialogue of people with different backgrounds and assumptions but a shared interest.

What you learn isn’t prefiltered and approved, sitting on a shelf, waiting to be consumed. Some of the information is astonishingly wrong, sometimes maliciously. Some contains truths expressed so clumsily that they can be missed if your morning coffee is wearing off. The knowledge exists in the connections and in the gaps; it requires active engagement. Each person arrives through a stream of clicks that cannot be anticipated. As people communicate online, that conversation becomes part of a lively, significant, public digital knowledge – rather than chatting for one moment with a small group of friends and colleagues, every person potentially has access to a global audience. Taken together, that conversation also creates a mode of knowing that we’ve never had before. Like subjectivity, it is rooted in individual standpoints and passions, which endows the bits with authenticity. But at the same time, these diverse viewpoints help us get past the biases of individuals, just as Wikipedia’s negotiations move articles toward NPOV. There has always been a plenitude of personal points of view in our world. Now, though, those POVs are talking with one another, and we can not only listen, we can participate.

Everything is Miscellaneous, pp.146 – 147. (Link to definition added, for context.)

Reflecting on the past two years, it amazes me that I’m still blogging, but only because I started without any particular plans or goals beyond just experimenting with blogging and all those Web 2.0 tools. Then somewhere along the line I realised that blogging was a good way to get myself writing (and I think having people read and comment was a definite plus! 🙂 ) I recommend blogging as a way of improving your writing – or at least helping you get over some of your self-imposed obstacles and self-criticisms when it comes to writing anything.

And I’m not overstating things when I say that being a participant, a blogger, has changed my life for the better, professionally and socially. I can share what I know, ask questions, read, learn, experiment, play, watch, listen. It sounds like a cliché but I feel a lot more empowered, more engaged than I used to.

Here’s to another year of blogging (or two, or three, or…)! I’m not really sure where this blog will go over the coming months, but I look forward to more learning and writing and sharing it with you.