What a caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly

Glasswing Butterfly Greta Oto. Photo (cc) Eco Heathen.

Every so often someone comes up with a ‘Why Blog?’ post. It’s a question I’ve been asking for a while. I don’t have a compelling answer so I’m taking a break from blogging. If and when I do return it may or may not be to this blog. I plan to leave it online; links won’t break overnight. One reason I started blogging was to practice writing. I’ve improved, though not as much as I’d like. It was also to link to other good things that I saw. I’m more sceptical about the value of this. I’m happy to link to other sites to help boost their PageRank and visibilty etc. However, looking at the click through stats, I’m not sure if it really sends many visitors to the site. It’s a shame because reading something like The Sheerness Incident on Airminded makes think it really should be read widely. It is good writing. Linking to it though probably isn’t going to have a huge effect.

Another reason to blog is to bounce ideas around. This is getting harder for me right now as there’s a tension in putting things on a blog. Putting up a half-formed idea on a blog can count as prior publication. At the same time from an academic perspective it doesn’t count as publication. It turns out the interests of publishers aren’t the same as academics, but that’s hardly news. Unfortunately I need to be an established academic before I can break the rules, so I need to think about what I blog.

There is the element of public service, which sounds very pretentious. It’s one of the things I’d disagree with the Bad Archaeology site (not the weblog) about. It’s all very well being an angry archaeologist because pseudoscience is taken seriously, but if archaeologists don’t put information out to the public then they deserve all they get. There is no public presentation aspect to the PhD in the UK, and no formal recognition of Public Archaeology in the funding of UK Universities. Some individual universities are taking a lead, but it is still a frequently ignored facet. This is a problem if academics would like to justify archaeology as a worthwhile subject for public spending.

I’d also recommend it for networking. I have found some interesting sites after they linked to mine. Archaeozoology is a recent example. It’s particularly good for linking to people with similar interests out side your field. Comments from biologists, sociologists and mathematicians have all been helpful here.

But what makes a blog successful?

It’s not visitor numbers. To an extent it’s a classic example of ‘if something can be measured then it can be used a metric’. The posts that get the most views on this site are not always the best. Experiments with Britney prove this.

I’m not sure that Technorati links are a good measurement either. Technorati measures links coming into a weblog from different sites and calls the result ‘authority’, This ignores the fact that some websites are more authoritative than others and what links mean. For instance imagine what happens if I come out with some anti-semitic rubbish based on a misreading of a pot sherd. Someone like Duane Smith can debunk me, and another dozen neo-nazi sites link to me with approval. The net result would be +13 links but hardly a rise in authority.

The only really useful measurement I can think of is ‘Are you happy with what you’re doing?’ More often recently the answer has been no. There’s all sorts of reasons. There’s reviews I’d like to finish, and plenty of good posts by other bloggers that I haven’t had time to comment on. At the same time there’s an element of wanting to keep the site current. It’s the nature of blogging that blogs are expected to be current. I’m not interested in putting something up simply for the sake of putting something up. I can see that happening in the near future as both work and home life are taking up more of my time.

That doesn’t mean I’m going offline, but changing what I do. I’ve got part written entries on subjects like the New Seven Wonders thing, colonisation in Tanzania and Easter Island. There’s also reviews of books to finish like Darwin’s Cathedral and Bettany Hughes’ Helen of Troy book. I thought to offer those to other blogs if and when they’re done. There’s one or two programs I want to finish that would be of use. There’s also the comment boxes on other sites. I’ll have to work out how to log back into Blogger to leave comments.