The Blog That Won't Die

Greetings to any of you who haven't read this blog in a while, or read it at all before. The above title isn't meant to be arrogant or boastful, but something I hope to keep based on what I've learned in the past about keeping a blog going. Originally, this blog died off during the college years due to a number of aspects I have tried to address.

Now, I say tried, because this blog in its current incarnation is not new; I've been blogging for about two months. I did this so as to not make any promises that I couldn't keep.

When I first started this blog in college, I did it mostly as a way to express thoughts through writing to the public. There were two large problems with this. First, my motivation to keep going was highly dependent upon people reading the blog. Blogging, as well as Facebook, are applications where people can perform actions without being noticed by anyone. As such, it seems that most people, even if they did read, didn't do anything to mark their passage. Since I was dependent on knowing that people actually valued what I did, the blog shut down. Now, I've tried to make this blog with less dependence upon needing others to read it; I write because I need to, and because I feel that it would be good to have it available to the public although I'm not dependent upon that factor very much. The second main problem with the original blog, was that I didn't have much free time in college outside of what I already had commitments to. Now, especially since I'm living far from most of everyone I know from college and early life, I feel that keeping such a portal of deep thoughts is important.

Now that this blog is going, and I hope it go on for a long time, I'm excited for what's coming up. Aside from content, which is mostly centered on cultural, sociological, and identity analysis, I've been working through some thoughts about how to better keep track and thereby understand the ideas I write about. One has been through keeping visual maps of what ideas I consistently think about. These maps would essentially link different articles to articles by association of what the articles talk about, so that I can form a visual representation of where my thoughts are going and what the different facets appear to be. The creation of these "idea maps" will allow me to review and reflect upon what I've thought about before; very useful if somehow I've gotten off track or forgotten some of my central purposes. To anyone who has tried to keep journals, it should make rummaging through them to remember what they were about substantially easier.

So that's where things are going. Again, I encourage you, if you are going to read this blog consistently, to comment with your own thoughts or drop me a line; it should help each of us to understand each other better, and I look forward to any furthering of that.