Merry Christmas

Well I'm off to bury myself under a pile of presents and wrapping paper but wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year before I go!

Hmmm mince pies......




Merry Christmas everyone!

How much is too much?

As you can probably already see from this blog I tend to only blog 2 or 3 times a month. Now this may seem very little but to me it has already been difficult to keep up. Is this simply because I'm a new blogger? I'm not sure. As most other bloggers of this kind will know it is often extremely difficult to find the inspiration to blog in the first place. But once that inspiration has been found and you begin to blog, how much is too much?

I was reading through a blog by Andrew Sullivan and he mentions how at any given week he can have a couple of hundred posts published on his blog. To me this seems excessive but then who am I to try and stiffen anyones inspiration or blogging methods. I would find it hard to find worthwile topics to publish on my blog that not only I found interesting but my readers as well. The last thing I want is to completely bore any readers or potential readers I have out there and have them abandon me entirely. By his own admission he acknowledges that readers would rather a few lines and a weblink than a 9,000 word treatise. So surely blogging a few hundred times in one week is overkill.

Generally blog subscribers have a number of favoured blogs which they might check on a regular basis. Who has the time to check enough to catch that many blogs in a week. At what point, since personal blogs are discursive; self-publishing and often self promoting, does your blog become indulgent and superfluous?

Having a smashing time

Why is it that when you have a lot of work to do something always pops up and takes up all of your time!

Right now the dissertation progress is hitting a standstill. Nearing the end of term now and starting to get excited (perhaps a little prematurely) about Christmas. The next task in the long never-ending list is to prepare a presentation of my progress made so far. Hopefully this can reignite my passion for it and get the ball rolling again. So..... presentation.....eeek! Students are to be grouped together by similar topics so as to get the most out of the presentations as possible yet I still find myself standing out like a sore thumb in my group. Is it a good thing to hope that people don't have a clue what I'm talking about during my presentation? Less questions to answer at the end.... :-) Well fingers crossed all goes well! Wish I'd had more time to prepare. If only those neds hadn't decided on smashing my car windscreen with a brick whilst I was driving...... one thing after another!! :-)

An internet click fest

Does anyone else find it really hard to concentrate on your blog when you are online? I check my blog most days but always end up going on a tangent looking at other blogs, then links in blogs, then random websites, then my emails.... :-) It is just a never ending click fest!! I can now see what other bloggers mean when they say they can spend days on end trailing through site after site after site..... Not that I'm saying I don't enjoy it, just that I now have considerably less time in the day for other things!

Wordle....

I'm making this up as I go....

Well apologies for my recent absence here! Kidney infections are proving to be a recurring nightmare for me at the moment :-( It's amazing how work can be shoved onto the back burner when you feel ill! Anyway enough about me and back to my research! I struck upon an idea the other morning over coffee of a possible issue for my dissertation. I was searching through blogs and came across one (can't remember which sorry!) that talked of the work of someone who had passed away and wanted to keep people's interests in the ideas raised. It made me wonder about the internet in the future. If people have active blogs, bebo/facebook profiles or websites and then pass away what happens to them? Since most of these are password protected it would be impossible for friends or family of that person to delete their profile. Should these profiles be deleted by the company providing the service or is that against people's human rights? These profiles could be used by friends and family as a way to leave messages and help mourn. So how long to these webpages stay online? The internet must already be full of people's online profiles that have now passed away and are not being used anymore. This build up of layers could conceivably become a port of call for future archaeological research in the future. Will it be possible to excavate the internet?

Also the title of this blog for any hardcore Indiana fans is a little quote from Raiders. DVD out this week!

Am I an Internet Impostor???

Since setting up this blog I have started to ask myself some fundamental questions as to why. There are many different types of blogs online such as newfeeds, blogs done by an organisational unit about a particular excavation or simply personal blogs; a reflection on studies or experience or just an area of interest. The reasons for 'It's not just a trowel, it's a way of life' was to gain more of an insight into the world of the blogger. Questions such as why do people blog, what do they want to achieve and what do they discuss are among the huge list I currently have! So if my blog is only active and online to try and claw my way into the 'blogosphere' for research about the bloggers themselves does that make me a fraud? After making contact with a couple of other bloggers (thanks Neko and Cas) who's blog pages are kept up to date with interesting posts that obviously mean something to them, I now feel slightly unnerved at my almost 'fake' blog. The one thing that surprises me most about this whole process is that I have become very attached to 'It's not a trowel...' After noticing I hadn't updated the blog for two weeks (shock horror) I felt incredibly guilty! Maybe that's due to the fact that its for my dissertation..... or maybe I'm being sucked into the 'blogosphere'.........

Blogging....

So my dissertation is on the use of blogging within archaeology. What purpose it has and the effects on the subject as a whole. Right now I have more questions than answers! I guess that's to be expected though. I wonder though what people's perceptions are of bloggers. Before I started this I had images of sad old balding men sitting at their PC's ranting and raving about how young un's were ruining society. Now that I am a blogger (argh!) I can see that is nonsense!! I suppose it can just be an outlet for some people. A way to twitter on without someone telling them to stop moaning and get a life...... I tried to get a life once, but they were sold out.......

First Post

Ok I'm new to this blogging thing but decided to give it a go anyway! The real purpose of my blog is to follow my dissertation progress for my final year at university. I'm hoping this will help me gather my thoughts! I wonder how long I can keep up to date with it though..... :-)