Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

Dear blog,

It has (again) been months between posts, and in these months I have been thinking about blogging, tweeting, facebooking and other forms of online presence.

I am registered in most web-based social forms of communication, but I am not really committed to any of them, all for different reasons.

For instance, I started this blog as a way of putting my research on the web, giving it some exposure, and keeping a log of our research activities (mostly focused on the e-Adventure project). However, maintaining this blog has a curious psychological effect: even though I do not have a lot of readers, I do feel a pressure to write witty and interesting posts. Unfortunately, I rarely find the time (or the mood) to write elaborate posts, and as soon as my workload increases, I leave the blog unattended for months.

I also write in another blog, in which we share stories of all flavors, usually with a geeky perspective. Write? Wrote. My last post there was more than a year ago.

On the other hand, there is twitter. I opened my twitter account a few months ago, because it is another important form of online presence and because I was interested in following twitter content. I do follow a lot of interesting sources of tweets from friends, researchers and media, but I rarely contribute content.

The case with twitter is different: it is not that I do not have the time (140 chars!). The point is that when I do something interesting, it just doesn’t occur to me to tweet about it.

So, if I were to maintain an online presence to expose my research activities, I should develop a tweeting habit and find the time and energy to post on the blog. Or I could just quit both activities, and focus on my articles and classes, which are the activities that they actually pay me to do.

I have been thinking about those two options. Archiving the blog and forgetting about twitter is obviously easier, and will give me more time and less pressure for my other activities. On the other hand, I think I could have fun maintaining an online presence if I could reduce self-imposed pressure.

For the next few weeks, I’m going to do a little experiment on myself. I’m going to try to commit to at least one blog post per week and a tweet per day. I’m going to pretend that no one reads them (let’s be honest, few people actually read them) and just focus on getting the posts and tweets published, without a pressure for quality.

Once I slip back into one of these non-writing lapses (it will happen), I will check back and try to reflect on whether I’m happy with what I posted and rethink what it means to maintain an online presence.