Changes to Personal Reflections

To avoid bogging down while not boring people too much with my musings about blogging, I decided that I should follow up Belshaw's blogging restructure 1 by summarising the changes I propose to make to my approach on this blog.

I had a longer post prepared covering all the blogs, but I decided that that was just much detail. 

There is nothing especially profound about the changes. To a degree, they are are recognition of things that have already happened.

In Concerts, comments and content management I spoke of the problems that I have been facing in managing ever increasing content across my blogs. This wouldn't be a problem if I could afford a research assistant. I can't, so it is.

To resolve this, I have allocated a block of blogging time just to content management. This includes time for up-dating and cross-linking posts. It also included time for copying, rechecking and editing previous subject linked posts. While this will of itself generate some new posts, it also reduces the time available for new writing.

I am merging Belshaw sans Words into Personal Reflections. Originally, BsW was intended as an entry point into all my blogs plus photos with very short comments. It has fallen by the wayside, so the merger is really a recognition of an existing position. However, I also plan to increase the number of BsW style short posts on PR.

Other proposed changes on PR are:

• I propose to retain Saturday Morning Musings and Sunday Essay as pretty regular long features. I will also retain the irregular train reading series. However, I am going to adopt a suggestion by Winton Bates and add a Friday That was the Week that Was feature focused on other blogs and blog stories. This should give a better structure to the monitoring already done and should not be too time consuming since I can write it up as I go along. I am not going to try to cover the whole field, just those blogs that I follow.
• I plan to reduce the volume of New England material on this blog, shifting it to the New England blogs. At present, I run a risk of being typed as just a New England blogger.
• I plan to shift some of the purely professional economics, management and public policy material to Management Perspectives. You will still see some here, but this change will give me greater freedom to express personal opinions.
• Coming from the content management exercise, from time to time I plan to run longer pieces consolidating & updating my thinking on particular issues.
• Once a week, probably on Wednesday, I will run a post listing other posts I have written.

The net effect of these changes should be a similar number of posts, more short posts, along with a better focused and hopefully more interesting blog. As happens now, I will use comments and feedback to guide posts and also reserve the right - this is my purely personal blog after all - to go in any other direction my fancy might take me.