State of the Blog

So I have been blogging for almost 7 months now. I would be lying if I claimed that I was thoroughly content with every aspect of this blog, but I do think I have made major headway in some departments.

First I think we should review the purpose I set out for this blog and compare that with what I have done. I entered the blogosphere mostly as a reaction to a miserable blog that I came into contact with. I started by just mercilessly posting comments in response to inane posts but after awhile I felt rather hypocritical. It is very easy to prove someone wrong but difficult to actually contribute something. With that in mind I set out establishing this blog.

I believe that my Mission Statement still rings true:

Primarily I want to comment of political issues of interest and to establish common grounding. Let’s hope this blog ends up being constructive, I will stray as far away as possible from a The Democrat Eat Babies or Bush is the next Hitler blog. So let’s hope this delicate balance produces effectiveness, not crap. Last I will attempt to be as original as possible with my posts. I will shy away from just paraphrasing an article, if I find an article of particular interest, I will just post that. But with that said, no ideas are created in a vacuum, so feel free to call me out on copying, but do not expect me to always care.

But I think I have areas that I need to improve. I need to blog more frequently and with more regularity. Too often I will have periods where I write 5 posts in 3 days and then go a week without writing another thing. I would say that my biggest regret was not posting a single thing in all of June. But I think I have rebounded nicely, in a couple of weeks I will be back at school and perhaps that return of structure in my life will regularize posting, but I would not bet on it. The best I can do is keep trying to read mass media and books and then post the interesting stuff I find.

Some have recommended making my blog more regular, like once a week. But my problem with that is news does not happen once a week. Ideas do not come to me on a once a week basis. If anything I should be writing about 1-2 posts a day given the number of ideas that come to my head but the best I can promise is that I will try harder to write 2 to 3 times a week (and the easy way to keep track is to subscribe to the XML feed with an RSS reader, they are in Firefox, Thunderbird). I think that would be an optimal rate.

Another big move on this blog has been the addition of Kevin Tierney to the writering staff. I think that eventually I will want this to be a multiauthor blog so expect for the number of authors to slowly increase with time. The draw of a multiauthor blog for me is that it provides a diverse range of opinions on similar issues. Also it makes the website more interesting because there is likely to always be a new discussion occurring. This is the direction this blog is probably headed, so watch out.

Now that we have gotten to the future, here is what else to expect. For one, expect a new name for this blog. I have gone through about a dozen and have yet to find one that could accurately yet playfully summarize my goals here (lately I have been thinking about something that would play on radical centrism, but I'm lost). The blog will continue to be named Mr. Alec until I come up with a better and more permanent name.

I think once the name has been established I will migrate the blog out of blogger. The setup sucks and I am stuck with this funky layout (trust me it is the best of the options, it was this or Hello Kitty!).

So hopefully that is an exciting future. We'll see where it takes us.

-Mr. Alec