Blogging seems to be my way of working. I had no desire at all to blog our wonderful trip through Arizona, or the camping (I’ve visited 13 US states in the last few weeks!) or the beach, but today I’m back to trying to think about writing and research and for the first time in weeks I actually wanted to blog.

I read about that nanny who blogged and her employer didn’t like it and fired her and then wrote an embarrassingly personal account of it in the New York Times. Strange, don’t you think, that writing revealing personal accounts of yourself and others in the New York Times is journalism and socially acceptable whereas writing similar things in a blog isn’t. The nanny — who’s starting grad school this autumn (nineteenth century English literature) and who reads Profgrrrl, just like me — has decided to blog pseudonymously henceforth. Reading that I toyed with the idea of making my blog pseudonymous, but you know, it’s really rather late. I mean, I like blogging as myself. I just don’t want to blog my holidays or my love life.

Mind you, they’re both entirely wonderful. Not that I’m blogging them or anything.

I’m going to spend the next week writing a paper for Digital Arts and Culture ’05 (in Copenhagen this year, deadline is August 8 and they want full papers not just abstracts) and a synopsis for a Norwegian book I’ve been asked to contribute an essay to, on networking and blogs.

Now if I hadn’t just read about that nanny and oh, that column in the Chronicle where the pre-digital professor says they’d never hire someone who had a blog, I might have admitted that actually I’d prefer to prolong my holidays, which were exceptionally pleasant. Instead, I’ll simply nod to Matt’s post about how blogging is networking (that article by Phil Agre is really good for would-be and new academics, by the way) and note that I wouldn’t have been asked to write that article about blogging as a way of networking if I hadn’t been using my blog to network professionally for a while. Quite a few juicy, professional opportunities that wouldn’t have appeared without this blog, really.

Of course I’m preaching to the converted, aren’t I? And I’m more likely to be hiring people than being hired in the next few years. Obviously, as a post-digital academic, I’d be worried about hiring someone who didn’t have a web presence.