It’s always people beginning with M who tag me in memes, it seems; this time Michelle of Heavenfield has enwrapped me in a question about blogging. She asks, basically, why do I blog? and wants three reasons. My About page has some stuff around one, and I’ve given some account of the origins of the blog elsewhere, which is two, but she wants three and I can perhaps collect them all together like this, so I guess I’ll bite.

Graph of the Blogosphere

The real genesis of this blog was a party I was at, where the host and a friend of his were both ‘early adopters’ of work blogging. They had blogs as part of their jobs, and one of them was convinced that this was the absolute cutting-edge and that soon everyone, everyone, would need to be doing this to be taken seriously as someone who was trying to get what they had to say to the rest of the world. I’d been talking about my field, saying I did medieval history focussing mainly on the tenth century and he said, “I mean, when I stick `tenth medieval’ into a search engine, I should get you back”. And as you can see that stuck with me. But it was a while before I actually did it (and even now it’s still 24 hits before you get to me if you try that on Google UK). So the reasons were, in something like order as this has developed:

  1. to try and exit the doldrums of job-hunting by giving myself a dynamic-looking web presence that indicated research ongoing even while publications might not. In this I haven’t really stayed the course; I do a lot more talking about what other people are doing than I do about my own stuff here and I have been a lot less mercenarily close than I think I originally intended, because of my enjoyment of just talking about this stuff with some kind of audience and interaction without paying a conference registration fee. So instead it became more of an answer to another wish…

  2. to answer the old nagging sense that we have to atone for living off others’ taxes and Lottery money by being ready to offer answers to the public, to reach out and be popular medievalists as well as professional ones, with my own personal outreach space. To be honest, I don’t do half as much of that here as that might suggest. If someone’s after knowing what I’m doing, they can come here, and they can also do that if, as is frequent, they want to know why Crusaders went to the Holy Land in 1095, but otherwise, if instead they want to know whether King Arthur really existed or what the Vikings did, they’re better off going to my actual static webpages, which are really doing both this (2) and (1) and since longer ago too. So that only leaves…

  3. that this place has become an ideas bank. I put stuff here when I read something and react to it, and now I can find it in a websearch. It’s essentially a publically-readable version of Google Desktop for my medieval reading notes, with the advantage of feedback and connections that that gives me.

So I don’t object at all if someone finds this and goes, “this man has ideas and wants to get them out there, we like that” or is just interested in learning something that I can help with, that’s great, but I’m afraid that really you’re all just helping me organise my thoughts and encouraging me till the first two purposes become less relevant…

I normally object to tagging in memes, even though I realise that’s the point; all the same, it smacks of chain letters. But in this instance, I’d be genuinely interested in knowing what led some people to pick up the keyboard and put themselves before the world, and three of these people are Magistra, to whom I owe a tag anyway, Jennifer Lynn Jordan, whom Michelle also tagged but hasn’t yet responded—your public dahling! consider your public!—and last of all the Emperor Antoninus Pius, because you know, that should be worth reading. So I have been over to these places and asked and we’ll see what forthcomes.