back in the saddle (for now)

Papers are due, reviews must be submitted, books must be read, and to top it off, classes must be attended. School has returned. And in the process this blog has been completely ignored. Not just due to the continual ebb and flow of business and laziness, but to some contemplation as well.

I started this blog as something of an experiment, an attempt to better understanding the current blogging phenomenon through participation and immersion. Against some of my initial expectations, most of the benefits I've experienced through blogging have come surprisingly close to home. These include:
-a continual and multi-faceted exchange between other friends and I (some fellow bloggers, others just readers) -- people I know primarily through face to face interaction but whose exchanges have now carried over into the digital realm.
-a memory cache for myself. A searchable, time-indexed journal of the mundane findings/readings/experiences of one's life may or may not make for good public reading, but is quite handy for personal reference.
-a good motivation for writing and analysis -- not necessarily deep analysis, or even decent writing for that matter, but the more practice the better.

That being said, the comments and interests of previously unknown visitors is a great experience and is another nice aspect of blogging, but much less a part (for me anyway) than I had initially thought. As a result of posts to this blog, I've been approached by reporters, made contact with folks from around the world, and at times have even had to take down information previously posted due to unforeseen sensitivities. But it's still the things close to home that ground the activity.

In the end it's not at all surprising, having a digital persona rooted in your physical persona, and spreading from there. I'm convinced (in no small part due to my daily swim in the seas of HCI literature) that the ultimate role of successful technology is not the transcendence of traditional physical and social worlds, but their enrichment.

Perhaps that's a bit heady/pretentious for this post, but for now I think I will continue to use this space to leverage the benefits I stumbled across above -- a repository for the random and not-so-random miscellanea of my life and milieu, as seen through my eyes and through the networks (both online and off) surrounding me.