Ossamenta

The observant ones among you may have noticed a lack of blogging carnival posts in February. The topic "general blogging about archaeology and blogging" didn't appeal to me, and I wasn't the only one. But now, it's the final blogging carnival post, and I'm not sitting out on that one.

The last question is where are you/we going with blogging or would you it like to go? I leave it up to you to choose between reflecting on you and your blog personally or all of archaeology blogging/bloggers or both. Tells us your goals for blogging. Or if you have none why that is? Tell us the direction that you hope blogging takes in archaeology.

I think blogging is a really good way to spread your knowledge far and wide, meet people who can give you clues to how artefacts work, and learn things from related fields. Find your soul mate(s), realise you're not the only weirdo out there (and if so many of us are weird, shouldn't that just be a sign that we're quite within the range of normal really?). Blogging is a bit of an odd beast: partly normal conversation, partly popular science writing. And it is a skill to find the balance, particularly if you usually tend to write more formally academic things. Too much jargon shuts others out, no jargon and you have to explain in long paragraphs instead of using a single word. I hope blogging will be a fully accepted way of sharing knowledge - too often much more status is put on academic articles than popular science writing, even if the latter probably will be more influential in the long run. After all, if the public don't find us useful and interesting, they won't raise an eyebrow if budgets towards humanities or museums get cut - perhaps even be the ones to suggest the cuts.

I hope I can find more time* to write longer posts, to inform my readers of things I've learnt, perhaps things that are practical knowledge (how do you lay out a skeleton quickly to see which bits you have?), interesting new books or articles, weird bones and gross pathologies. Is there anything in particular you'd like to know or see?


*: and everyone who knows me are laughing their faces off. I really have too many things** on my plate already....
**: of course there is no such thing as too many interesting things to do, although there is such a thing as too few hours in the day.

And now December's topic: The good, the bad and the ugly

The good: The comments! People who say my post was interesting (don't we all want to hear that :-) ), or where the comments spark a conversation. I think comments are highly important, particularly for enabling of conversations. Sometimes I learn things from my readers, other times comments can make me realize I expressed myself less clearly than I thought, and I have then the opportunity to make the post clearer.

The bad: I guess general lack of comments/discussions would be my main thing. It takes a fair bit of time to write a post – not just the writing, but taking and editing photographs as well. But I know I rarely comment myself on blogs, so I assume my posts are read far more than what any comments would indicate. But at least Dreamwidth allows for discussions, as opposed to Tumblr. Twitter conversations are possible, but you have to keep them brief.

The ugly: Luckily I’ve never had any nasty experiences. Perhaps it’s because my blog is very low-profile. Once you reach a high enough number of readers, you tend to also get the assholes. (see BrainScoop etc etc)