LY #100 Blogging vs Newsing

Today I had an experience that taught me one of the big differences between writing this "change of life" blog and writing news.  In trying to track down the reason for a school decision that annoyed me I found that I was talking with friends, people I like and respect, and getting answers that weren't answers that I'd accept from students.  When I question students, I want them to refer to facts and to be able to tell me their sources.  When I got information from friends I got rather amorphous "best possible sources" without any data.  And because they were friends, I didn't push it.

If I were a journalist, I'd be required and expected to push.  Same with sales.  Salespeople have to be able to push.  Now, I have a good friend who is an excellent salesperson who has a deep belief in the humanitarian activity being sold.  My friend tells me that sales is all about establishing relationship. 

Yet relationship is the very reason I'm not a salesperson or a newsman, as my father wanted me to be.  Well, until he found out I was going to be a "college" professor.  (Somehow he never was able to say "community college professor.)  Being a professor had more status, in his mind, than being a newsman.  Anyway, my big problem with any activity requiring pushiness and hustle is that I can take no for an answer.  Especially from my friends.  My foot doesn't get stuck in doors.  I'm not the squeaky wheel.   When it comes to addressing conflict, I must quote Charlie Brown:  “No problem is so big or so complicated that it can't be run away from!” 

Since this is my hundredth retirement blog post, I should have a little celebration.

Boston July 4 fireworks on a TV in a Boston flat

Long Time No Sea

Which is what Lewis and Clark said just before they reached the Pacific Ocean.

Last year I resolved to post often -- that resolution died very quickly through a combination of laziness and lack of purpose.  Then I hit a couple of walls last spring that left me considering the whole blog thing.

First wall was legal:  what can I actually write about my life and not get sued over?  I was so excited last spring to take my first cell phone pictures of a student group presentation that seemed to me very creative.  Then a few of the students in that creative group basically blew off their final written work.  I wanted to post the picture and also write about my disappointment but news stories were surfacing about teachers being sued or fired for blog posts. 

Another wall is my conflict avoidance.  I had one nasty criticism about a post and it evoked such an unfortunate scumble of unpleasant emotions that I realized I probably don't have what it takes to engage with lively topics in the wild west of the web.  While I enjoy live intellectual debate and have found methods to manage personal face-to-face relational conflict, the whole anonymous attack thing took me back to graduate student days of receiving nasty anonymous reviews of material I sent to journals. 

So I'm not sure, at this point, what this blog is for.  When I find out, I'll tell you.

Day Two

What counts as "blogging"? For the purposes of surviving my resolution this year, I will be counting entries in either this blog or Another Bag of Poodle Papers. I will not accept Tweets as blog entries.

One of my Facebook friends turned me on to another New Year's idea: picking a single word for the year. I believe the idea comes from Christine Kane. My word for the year is "Metamorphosis." My New Year's Day ritual is to construct a collage vision for the year and then post that in our kitchen. The collage construction is never completely conscious. I just select images that seem to be necessary and that go together. I'll post a picture of my latest college later in the day.

Happy New Year

I fell down on the job last quarter. I didn't talk about the successes and failures of my classes. Sure, I thought about it, but, hey, I'm a slacker. What can I say.

Some of the data on blogger bloviating shows (?) that folks spend very little time reading any one blog entry. 2005 informal analysis by ProBlogger suggests people spend 96 seconds per blog. { http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/03/17/how-long-do-your-readers-stay-at-your-blog-length-of-stay-statistics/ } I've tried for the past half hour to find more up to date stats but without much luck.

This could be because people don't really notice the passage of time while on a blog, according to the qualitative study conducted by Baumer, Sueyoshi, and Tomlinson of Irvine. www.ics.uci.edu/~ebaumer/chi1132-baumer.pdf

Of course, such a study may be difficult because it takes a lot of work to go to blogger websites, contact them, and ask for their data collection.