Why the merge of the weblogs? Particularly since the two topics, Practical RDF and the rest of my life seem to have no common ground?
Contrary to what you might expect, it wasn’t my disappointment about the ETech conference. If that was it, I would have left the weblog and put, “Reading O’Reilly books kills kittens!” scrolled across the top.
I am joking, of course. Reading O’Reilly books other than my own kills kittens.
My previous posts related to Etech resulted from a combination of many feelings–some deep, some shallow (probably most shallow)– but I’m not mad at O’Reilly. Nor do I think they were sexist in not picking my proposal. Short sighted, yes. Possessing dubious taste, no doubt. Unimaginative, maybe–but not sexist. No, as odd as this may seem, it was new Feminist Weblog public aggregator that gave me this impetus.
This aggregator is for weblogs that …discuss feminist issues on a more-or-less regular, on-going basis. My first thought was to submit my weblog, as I write on feminist issues more or less on a regular basis. But then, if you compare my writings to those others on the list, I probably don’t seem like I write on feminism.
I do, though. Every time I write on technology, I am writing as a feminist. Every time I write on photography, the same. However, the times when I specifically address feminism aren’t that frequent, not when mixed in with the other posts.
Should I then split my feminist posts off? I thought about doing this a couple of times, and even started at one point. But if I follow that path, then I’m looking at splitting tiny chunks of me off every which way until there’s little left of me that’s “Burningbird”, which is supposed to be–me.
I did this with Practical RDF. I created this site to support the book, but extended it to include other RDF issues, and eventually most of my semantic web and technology interests other than weblogging technology. And Practical RDF did appear in yet another aggregator, this one related to all things RDF and semantic web.
But as I wrote at the Practical RDF site earlier today, I think splitting off discussions of the semantic web from other discussions is to lose a key piece of understanding necessary for this effort:
However, in my opinion, a key to the semantic web–the plain folks version, not that big ‘S’ big ‘W’ one–is to find a way to merge our humantistic and digital impulses to good effect. To disregard my, and others, non-technical writing and interests is to disregard important clues to making the semantic web work outside of academic and marketing interests.
Still, there’s no gainsaying that if one were to want to read almost exclusively about issues related to the semantic web, one is not going to be happy when my essays on feminism pop up; and if one were interested in promoting or being promoted within a feminist world, one may not be thrilled to see a sequence of me writing about photography.
I can understand this, and sympathize, and respect this selectivity — it makes a great deal of sense. Just not for me.
(I found out about the Feminist aggregator through Feministe who is taking a break from weblogging — ha!)