Shifting gears

I just got back from two beautiful weeks of vacation and returned to a fairly full inbox and about 300 unread museum blog and museum-related blog feeds. In my mailbox at work was the summer issue of History News, the magazine of the American Association of State and Local History. And in the magazine, in the History Bytes column (get it? it's for web issues!), is the recent dilemma "To Blog or Not to Blog." Blog awareness has been here for sometime. I feel like I was able to produce my thesis at a point just as the blog wave was breaking on the museum shore, which is fortunate timing for a work like I produced. A thesis on blogging today would likely take a very different form, as there would be a great deal more material to work with, and a greater amount of material published on the subject.

But I am not writing a thesis anymore, so my devotion and fervor about blogging is beginning to fade. Don't get me wrong, I still think blogs are great, and really love when institutions speak with a personal voice and take you behind the scenes. I continue to hope that my museum's blog (which I write, not as often as I should) would be one I'd like to read.

No matter how this sounds, it is no eulogy. This was meant to be official notice that I am shifting gears on this blog. I'm widening up the focus. This has been happening for a while, but I'd not acknowledged it. For the time being, I am going to post as the mood strikes me and see what develops.