A new year, a new era, and a new beginning for my blog

As most of those of you who read my blog regularly can see, I’ve been blogging less in 2022, 2023 and 2024. I am not certain that this was a product of more work at my university, but instead, a bit of a writer’s block because of fear of uselessness. Let me explain.

When I began blogging (in 2006, 18 years ago), I did so to build a space for myself to think out loud, to write to a different audience (that was not entirely academic but also not the general public). As time has gone by, thousands of people began reading my blog and using my resources, either for themselves or to teach others how to do certain things in academia. While that made me extraordinarily proud (and still is a high point for me), it also made me feel responsible for posting USEFUL stuff.

And then, at some point, my blog stopped being (for me) a space for self-reflection and think things out loud, and began to remain in my head as a resource that I had to maintain, in one way or another. I felt that I didn’t have enough topics to blog about. That also led to a drought, and huge gaps on my blog.

This end-of-the-year in 2024 helped me think that this is not really a smart way of approaching my blog, especially for me. Yes, I want to write useful stuff, and particularly things that have been revealed to me through the many years I’ve been in academia (and government, and civil society, and industry), but I also want to have a space where I just dump thoughts and think things through. I’ll still write things that I have learned that I feel that might be useful for people to read, but I will also dump here my self-reflections whenever I feel that I need to think things through.

I hope that my blog and resources pages will remain useful for readers, but I also hope that rethinking my approach to blogging will enable me to feel even more free to write about the things that I am thinking about but I don’t have a scholarly space (in a journal or a book) to write.

Here’s to a new era and a new beginning for my blog.

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