What happens to a blog when its creator moves on down the road to Twitter?
In a time of such interesting and important issues — energy policy, overseas reform movements, Project Runway leaving Bravo for Lifetime — this is hardly the most earth-shattering of questions. But as the increasingly scattershot nature of my blog updates suggests, it’s a question I’m still trying to figure out.
When I started Goddess of Clarity five years ago, it was the only manifestation of my “online presence” (and I couldn’t even tell ya what the hell an “online presence” was). Now, in addition to the blog, I have a Twitter account and a Facebook profile. I’m on Flickr, LinkedIn, and Ning. Even “old school” sites like Amazon, eBay, and Netflix have personal or “social” layers that encourage some form of community or communication among their users.
So where does the blog fit it?
If there is a continuum of the purely personal to the purely professional, I have always thought of Goddess of Clarity as purely personal. I made a decision when I started the blog to not write about work-related topics. I think that’s gotta change, and it’s been my use of Twitter that has led me to change my mind.
If we used to say that “the personal is political,” I think we can now say that “the personal is professional” (I first read that on Twitter, of course, but I can’t remember who said it.) In my professional life as the Web editor for the University of Rochester, it’s a good thing to inject a healthy dose of my personality into what I do every day and how I think and talk about what I do with others. That’s what Twitter has taught me, and it’s led me to re-think what I write about here on Goddess of Clarity.
So taking the social media “big three” — Twitter, Facebook, and blogs — here is my new breakdown of the role each plays in my “online presence”:
Twitter (@LoriPA) — mostly professional, with a healthy dose of the personal
Facebook (www.facebook.com/lori.packer) – mostly personal; goofy stuff that would never clutter up my Twitter stream
Goddess of Clarity — the sweet spot in between; my take on events in my personal life, popular culture, and politics; but also professional issues in higher education, Web development, etc.
Of course, the number of people who care about this can be counted on the fingers of one clumsy shop teacher’s hand. But as I wrote in my first-ever blog post:
I’ve created this blog for myself really, as a way of making some sense of the jumble of thoughts that passes as my brain. I may already be overreaching.
By adding some of the professional into what has been purely personal, I hope maybe that Goddess of Clarity can be a little less of a purely navel-gazing exercise and little more of a contribution — however small — to an ongoing conversation.
And don’t worry: I’ll still watch the Oscars so you don’t have to.
–lori
