Recently Amanda and I started a blog to talk about our move to Australia, to document the process involved in getting there as well as our day to day activities leading up to the big move and beyond. It is very much a co-authored personal blog. It's one of those blogs that let us keep our friend informed of our progress, it will help us keep in touch with them when we head off, and if anyone else wants to read it that is fine.

It's made me think of a few things though. Firstly, we don't put absolutely everything in the blog, but at least all the more significant occurrences go in. Turns out when all your friends read your blog you have very little news left to tell them. Makes for quite one-sided catch up chats. Secondly, I am still not used to the fact that people make comments about or refer to things in the blog, when I haven't told them personally. It takes a second of thinking "how do they know that?" before realising that we put it in the blog.

My third thought concerns the boundaries and crossover between the two blogs - between the personal and the work blog. First the crossover. For the most part, the distinction between the two blogs is clear: I wrote a paper, here; I saw some friends, there. However, when it comes to talking about the recent work on the rejoinder for my postdoc funding while it's technically about my research, it's also about getting us to Australia, so where do I talk about it. I guess the answer is talk about things like that in both places, but talk about them in different ways. More technical academic details here, less there. Of course, there is also more to say over there, as there may be work things I can't talk about, or am not ready to publish, so I update here less frequently.

Secondly, boundaries. There are concerns I guess for anyone trying to maintain distinct personal and professional blogs. You want colleagues/collaborators to be able to read about your work, your ideas etc, but you don't necessarily want them to read that story about the time you embarrassed yourself highly in a public place...or something. I guess I'm lucky that my personal blog doesn't say anything I wouldn't want anyone to read, and this blog isn't strictly professional. I'm not trying to hide who I am by having two distinct blogs, there is still a good deal of my personality in here (I can say that because I'm the expert :D) and I don't mind if people interested in me professionally want to learn more about me.

And finally, it occurs to me that post tags would have been really helpful in this blog. We have included them over yonder, but I guess that is because we could. I don't know if it is because this blog is old, but I don't even have a separate title box as I write a post, let alone tag boxes. Tags would be good because it would make it clear when I was talking about PhD progress, publications, or thoughts on blogging such as this post. Oh well.