Blog absence

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This is the first blog post after a four months long absence that comes on top of another four months long absence last year (June-October). Several factors have conspired to put a halt to my blogging and I have to admit that I hadn't decided if the most recent halt was temporary or permanent.

Reasons to continue blogging are:
- This is a diary that marks the time for me, work-wise. For me as a white collar desk workers, time tends to float together and it becomes hard to remember what you did last week, last month, last year.
- One specific example of marking the time is the ongoing series of blog posts, "Books that I've read recently" where I have not blogged about books read since last spring, but where I have continued to dutifully read and put books aside that are, so to speak, "waiting in line to be blogged about".
- Another example is that I don't really systematically take notes any longer when I go to conferences or attend seminars. This blog has therefore been a repository for interesting leads, persons, links that is much more accessible than jotted down notes on a paper (that invariably gets misplaced or forgotten in some binder or some pile on my desk.
- I have written quite extensively about reasons for blogging before, primarily in the blog post "On the many functions of this blog". Everything I wrote back then is still valid.

Reasons to quit blogging:
- It takes a lot of time. Sometimes really a lot. My probably longest and most ambitious blog post ever can partly be seen as a personal take on and a primer on design fiction. It could easily be the draft of a book chapter. The follow-up blog post about the other workshop I attended at the same conference (about Sustainable HCI) was also pretty ambitious. Again, it takes a lot of time to write such blog posts.
- Very few people seem to have missed the blog. I think no more than two persons have encourage me to continue to blog and told me they miss the blog. I can on the other hand see that many persons actually read the blog posts (or at least load the webpages).

I haven't decided what to do with the "backlog" of blog posts that I so to speak "should have written" during the past four months. Should I skip them? Or should I write them up and backdate them so that it will seem that they were published when they "should" have been published (e.g. when the events being described happened)? I haven't decided yet but one thing I have decided is that I have to lower the standards (and the length) of my blog posts. It's not a good idea to have high quality requirements for blog posts if the end result is the non-publishing of said blog posts.

This will be the 348th blog post since I started to blog back in 2010. Unfortunately, I also have more than 100 draft blog posts that I have started to write but that were never finished. Some of these draft blog posts are just repositories for notes never meant to be published, but way to many were supposed to become blog posts but weren't. An extracurricular project could be to finish some of these blog posts and backlog them to get them out of the door. The other (psychologically harder) alternative would be to delete them.

Anyway, I'm back and I will from here on try to live up to my original goal of publishing at least one and at the most two blog posts each week.
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