Starting over – my new blog and why I’m moving

The title pretty much says it all. After three years of writing CorpBlawg, I am closing down shop and moving to a new place just down the hall: blog.ynada.com.

A few things about this “move” are admittedly a little strange. The new blog is hosted on my personal site ynada.com, just like the old one. It also runs on Wordpress and if you read the descriptions (”my blog about..:”) both are fairly similar. Why would I annoy my few subscribers by moving? Why bother setting up a new blog if I could just as  well continue the old one and simply shift my focus from corporate blogging to new topics?

I think this is my way of saying “that was that, this is something different”.

The bulk of the material in CorpBlawg is about corporate blogging and it feels odd to break up that relative consistency by writing about something completely different now that my PhD project is completed (by the way, I am the process of getting my thesis ready for publication, so keep an eye out for that if you’re interested).

The other, perhaps more important aspect is that I’ve learned a lot about blogging in the course of the last three years and my way of writing has changed accordingly. I think one the most interesting ways of using a blog is as a personal knowledge management tool and among other things, I intend to use blog.ynada.com for that purpose. This means that I will write it in a less essayistic and elaborate fashion than I did in CorpBlawg and use the new blog more like a personal scrapbook for all kinds of bits and pieces that I want to work with later. I’ll save the ‘big stuff’ for what I suspect we are all saving it for – ‘real’ publications, i.e. articles in scientific journals and books. To stick to my my own imagery, I’ll use the new blog less as a megaphone and more like a diary, or (more precisely) like a lab notebook. Entries will most likely be shorter and less polished than before, but more usable to me and perhaps even others, provided that they are familiar with the context of my work. They will be less useful to a general readership and aimed more at colleages, collarborators and at myself than my previous blogging.

So there you have it: a change in style and purpose leads to a change in conceptualized audience and therefore I need a new blog. Ah, isn’t it just lovely when practice so neatly follows theory?

Over and out – and be sure to subscribe to my new blog.