I’m cleaning up this blog a bit. Executive summary in bullet form:
- Does anyone use the MiniBlog in the right sidebar?
- Can you suggest a pen-name for me to use on this blog?
- If you are close to me personally, or just generally care about me (as opposed to this blog’s topics of interest), you may want to following me elsewhere instead — this site is no longer used for personal news. Please ask me so that I can point you in the right direction.
MiniBlog
I’m considering removing the MiniBlog, it wastes space and causes clutter. The MiniBlog is no longer being updated regularly in any case. The original idea behind the MiniBlog was to provide new or interesting content for people visiting thinktoomuch.net more often than new blog posts are written, i.e. a bit of a gimmick to encourage repeated visits. I have no idea if it worked, and dreams of trying to measure click-through never became reality.
Apart from its staleness, I think it’s also obsolete with regards to its original purpose: the correct solution for dealing with irregular blogs is to subscribe via RSS feed, follow on twitter or Like on Facebook, and possibly some day follow on Google+? I’m watching that one with bated breath.
So – do you use the MiniBlog?
Author’s Name
I’ve been trying to increase this blog’s “pseudonymity”. This is a hard thing to do in a socially networked world wide web – consider what you can learn from who comments, or much more explicitly: who follows on Facebook or twitter. My desire is to provide some casual isolation between three spheres of my life: my personal/private life, my working life, and this blog. My Facebook and Google+ profiles don’t contain work information for example, casual separation.
For the blog I went first-name only quite some time ago. Now I’m contemplating swapping out my name too. The question: what could I use for an alternative pen-name on this blog? I had raised this question to myself once before, but didn’t search far for an answer and simply gave up. I’m feeling more persistent today.
Followers
This blog started out very much as a personal thought stream, and I used to even point at it in my email signature. This predated South Africa hopping on the Facebook bandwagon. Since then much has changed: I now share personal things on Facebook, twitter and Google+, and this blog became focused on a particular dream (that it isn’t living out yet). While this blog certainly does take some inspiration from my life, posts here can be very tangential to their original inspiration. That, or sometimes very, very delayed: I start a post based on something
current, something relevant today, but may only finish it months or even years later. Unfortunately.
Thus if it’s me you’re interested in, me as a whole, rather than the particular genre of contemplation and over-thinking I like indulging in here, you should maybe be following me elsewhere instead. Please let me know so I can point you in the right direction, and don’t read too much into the things I post here.
There may be an additional benefit of keeping general personal interactions elsewhere: if it were possible for me to have my way, I would very much like to grow this blog’s “community” in directions that don’t overlap with my real-life friends. By keeping this blog focused on its topics of interest and general goals and dreams, I’m still hoping to nurture more conversations with new and diverse people from all over, that might feel like they are intruding if they were for example stepping into what looks to be highly personal conversations between friends-for-life…
Something like that. With sufficient doubt, as I’m all too aware of counter arguments.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Wim Conradie // Oct 7, 2011 at 2:52 pm
Miniblog:
Nah don’t use.
Name:
Something related to ‘critical thinking’ I would suggest.
2 thinker // Oct 17, 2011 at 10:51 am
Miniblog: gone.
Name: my name already has something to do with thinking, according to some.
Not sure how to deal with this, can’t come up with a good one. (Note, not blog name, just the “author name” I go by.)
3 Wim Conradie // Oct 25, 2011 at 11:55 am
Well then, why not making your name the same as the blog name? It suits you and also would immediately identify you to newcomers as the blog owner. Just an idea though…
4 thinker // Oct 27, 2011 at 10:39 am
In terms of blog name, I could e.g. go by the pen name “thinker”. My resistance to the idea is based on the feeling that one can feel a more personal connection in a conversation if you know the other person’s name – thus a feeling that a pseudonym that’s more name-like than “thinker” could be better / more personal.
And it keeps me wondering if I shouldn’t just stick with my real name, and how it is actually unfortunate that I want a separate identity here…
5 Wim Conradie // Nov 8, 2011 at 12:14 am
I like the transparency thing of keeping your real name, but I agree that a well chosen pseudo name will easier serve the purpose of your blog in particular.
I think “thinker” is fine. I don’t think a name will make a significant change in getting personal. This is after all the WWW and open to all.
Just watch out that it don’t come over as egoistic (e.g. “the thinker”), as strangely it turns people off.
Just my hunch… could be completely wrong
6 thinker // Nov 19, 2011 at 11:46 pm
I’ll try “thinker” for now. Shouldn’t come across as too egoistic considering the blog title implies the thinker might not quite be balanced with regards to how much thinking is done?
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