I have a rocky relationship with the practice of maintaining a personal blog.
There are plenty of people I admire in academia, the arts, and tech, who blog as a form of scholarly communication, yet I have been hesitant to throw my hat into the ring. Fermenting one’s ideas in private is important, and I don’t fancy a public archive of my own evolving naïveté. Yet I envy the masterful and careful bloggers in our midst who have amassed deep compendiums over the years. As someone who spends a good portion of his day pontificating on the web’s history, I hold the value of a public, long-term, personal knowledge repository in high regard. On Saturday in a post celebrating the 10th birthday of waxy.org, Andy Baio shared the three simple ground rules that he laid out when he founded the blog:

1. No journaling, unless it’s relevant to people who don’t know me. Example: “Today I went down to 7-11 and bought a Slurpee. Strawberry is my favorite flavor!”

2. No tired memes, unless I have something to add. Example: “Take this quiz and find out which Smurf you are! I’m Jokey!”

3. Be original.

In the spirit of these three rules, and with the intent of having a place to share my research more frequently and freely, I am newly devoted to slowly cultivating this humble web log, with the hope of shaping it into a repository of careful, if somewhat infrequent dialog.