One blogger’s ambitions are another blogger’s afterthoughts

subtitle: The small world of bloggers.

I have had some lucky coincidences lately.  The kind that make the whole six degrees of separation idea very real.  It started last week when I went to a talk by guest speaker Barbara Ganley called “Blogging in the Classroom” which was an excellent brown bag session.  Barbara has a wonderful enthusiasm for what she’s doing, and she’s enthusiastic about what other people are doing, too.  In fact, she mentioned several faculty bloggers at UIUC, including Christian Sandvig, the Spence-meister, and Lanny Arvan.

Connections – I know Spencer!  Spencer is cool.  Lanny posts about Akeelah and Barbara. Whoa!  I have Akeelah at home from Netflix right now and I haven’t watched it yet.  Creepy.  Blogging – I’ve been working on turning a newsletter at work into a blog and just last week I finally got the RSS feed to show up in our web page template correctly.

But my big question is — How do these people do it??  Look at Barbara’s blog, Lanny’s blog — these people can write pages and pages of really good stuff in just one post!  Add to that the links on my Blogroll that I haven’t kept up with … Tame the Web, Librarian in Black, the ever informative InfoTangle… and I feel like I’m not writing or reading anything!  Where do they find the time??  Just working at a computer for my jobs makes me want to put in a new pair of eyeballs and stare at trees for a long, long, long time until everything doesn’t look so pixelated anymore (note to self: big school doesn’t mean big budget for decent monitors).   There are many words for this feeling – information overkill, information overload, oversaturation – but very few solutions offered.  I *want* to keep up with all the great tid-bits and insights produced by all these great writers/bloggers, but at the same time I don’t want to be chained to a computer for 12 hours a day.  Suggestions?

It only happens once a year…

… and I missed it. Dagnabit.

Jennifer of “Life as I Know It” – which will have its one-year blogging anniversary next week! – just introduced me to BlogDay, best summed up by the creators’ site:

… created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. On this day every blogger will post a recommendation of 5 new blogs. In this way, all Blog web surfers will find themselves leaping around discovering new, previously unknown blogs.

Why August 31st? Because, according to the website, when written as “3108″ it looks like the word “BlOg”… I know, I know. It was a little bit of a stretch for me, too, but I still like the concept behind it.

And I really like Jennifer’s BlogDay post, linking to other Library Science students from different programs across the country. I’m actually very impressed with her program at Southern Connecticut – the Portfolio, the Plan. These are exactly the kinds of things I’ve been drafting on my own just for my own sake, and to see them laid out so well and so deliberately is very encouraging. Mine are sort of… brainstormed… you could say. Handwritten on paper with arrows and lines connecting the thoughts.

But after talking with my advisor yesterday, I’m getting a clearer picture of what to do while I’m here. More on that after work. Happy belated BlogDay everyone!

Scholastic Frustration

As I mentioned earlier, I've stumbled upon a wonderful criss-crossing web of academic blogs that have reminded and enlightened me about the traps one faces in higher education… namely, one's self. Our procrastination, our hesitation, our second-guessing, our indecision. The theme I see running across almost every academic blog I've read so far is the feeling of not getting enough done. Never enough time. Always more grading, research, proposals, search committees, articles, and clueless students (not to mention those nasty department politics).

And here I am, on the verge of jumping into my own deep pool of – at the very least – a master's program or – hopefully – a double master's leading to a PhD.

Am I crazy?

Reading this article at the academic coach blog has intrigued and worried me. The Intrigue: graduate students making something of a name for themselves with their blogs. The Worry: incriminating blog remarks coming back to bite you.

This article made me stop again and think about whether or not I really want to be identifying myself on this blog. My gut instinct says I would stop writing if I couldn't be writing as *me*. I've noticed the careful anonymity employed by other academic bloggers — using all sorts of creative euphamisms to describe their partners, employers, and even home towns. If I wasn't such a visual person, that might work for me. But I know I'll be using photos in my blog anyway – some of them featuring the people in my life, possibly myself (see sidebar) – and I don't actually use my name on this blog anywhere, so it's not at though a simple Google search for me, individually, would bring anyone here. Nevertheless, I wouldn't want to post anything here that would hurt people.

Ah, but what about those times when something really needs to be vented and the venting would implicate certain persons? Such as right now, someone close to me has a working situation that is downright awful and I would love to lambast the tyrant to shreds, but it could backfire on the someone close to me. So I have to keep my blogging mouth shut in order to protect the innocent.

I'd be doing that whether I was identified on this site or not. Keeping my blog mouth shut, that is. This is the internet. There's no way to be completely invisible anymore.

Anyway… it's a very interesting article about blogging and graduate students. I hope I'll grow this little bloglet into such read-worthy material.

Learning before I even get there

I did a search for "pet-friendly Urbana Champaign" and came across this blog by an English professor at UIUC, which then led me to other fascinating people who are venting, musing, and slowly rushing their way through the forests of academia. Within ten minutes of reading and linking, I forgot all about my original pet-friendly search and became delightedly engrossed in all the wonderful conversations (1, 2) criss-crossing these blogs.

And it drives home a blogging conundrum that I am especially sensitive to, being a blogger novice… how does one build one's blogging community? I've read that leaving comments on blogs you like is one way to get readers, but the collection of blogs I looked at above seem to be from people who all know each other outside of the blogosphere.

Patience, I guess.