It would have been impossible to predict the lifespan of a blog several years ago. There just wasn’t enough history. Perhaps we’re just about reaching a point where we can comment on some trends as try-it-for-a-bit bloggers fall by the wayside and yesterday’s online sodalities come untethered. Seasoned bloggers seem to find their own rhythms and frequencies whereas project and student blogs grind to a halt in this vaporous space of self-publishing. At the same time mainstream blogs, and often those associated with media or business interest, thrive and even seem to have become absorbed into the public imagination to such an extent that a mention of the word ‘blog’ does not evoke the same glazed expressions and eye-rolling that it once did - these paralinguistics now refocus on the word ‘wiki’ instead. And so it can be said that blogging has reached a rather early maturity, as those day-to-day postings aggregate and the trendy sparkle begins to tarnish. Why aren’t you blogging is now not as interesting a question as what keeps you blogging. Why keep up this purpose-built blog that once served as a repository of our autoethnography of academic blogging?

Well there are several good reasons, or so it seems to me. The first is entirely personal and perhaps may seem strange to some. I just like the look and feel of Blogtrax. It somehow invites longer posts than my personal blog, it feels more private (ie less visited) and it just looks great on the screen. Secondly, I like the idea of the autoethnographic postscript. The piece is finished, published and probably largely unnoticed but it still stands as a record of the sense that two academics made of the world of blogging and the kinds of meanings they read into their own blogging practices - and, yes, let’s pluralise that. In that sense it’s a frozen record, but I’m rather attracted to the idea that Blogtrax itself could map the contours of ongoing practice. Dr Joolz and I have now co-written two book chapters on blogging and a further chapter in our forthcoming book. That’s a lot of words about a practice which I still believe is developing. Thirdly, there is something about the accretion of meanings, the building of knowledges and the forging of new understanding and this builds on the previous idea of forward momentum that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts.

So, is there a sense in which a blog can really lead to development and to the creation of something new? Can we write ourselves into a new frame of mind? For some reason, that I haven’t quite yet fathomed, I get the sense that this is a distinct possibility. I wonder if I have developed my ideas through successive outpourings, whether I have become more skilled at appropriating the voice of others, whether I have written a new script for myself. Under what conditions do the stories we tell about ourselves become emancipatory, I wonder? This is not to suggest that I am subscribing to the romantic view that imbues writing with magical properties, but merely to inquire into whether a process of regular reflection - regular and relatively short-burst reflection has its own strengths.

The difficulty is one of how to unscramble such a chaos of conditions. The regular conversations, the reading, the other writing all appear to contribute to a sort of onward march of ideas. Certainly that’s the way it feels. And four years ago, when we started up this blog I don’t think I would have thought about it those terms at all. But that was then, and as I scroll down the tags, to find something appropriate for this, they all seem like postcards from another place. Oh, I suppose I’ll go for Blogging, Learning and Identity - they seem more or less OK.