Some quick thoughts on blogging

I haven't posted here for awhile, and for a variety of reasons, but in the interim I've been thinking about the role of academic blogs and my original ideas for starting this one. Part of the justification was to start a repository for miscellaneous observations and short written work from here and there, and this still seems an appropriate use of the space even if it hasn't much been given over to that purpose (though perhaps it might be more so in the future). The rest was supposed to be for observations about "life on the political theory tenure track," or a kind of first-person log of my experiences in this corner of professional academia, to be shared with others that may have similar interests. Though I've had many such experiences - some of them of possible interest to others in similar positions - the non-anonymous blog has proven an ill fit for most of them. Having thought about posting a number of observations about the internal workings of my departments (I'm in both Philosophy & Political Science - two very different collectivities), college, and university, or of the academic search process (I've been on a number of search committees for both of my departments and have seen both successful and less-than-succesful searches in recent years), or of developments within the discipline that I like or dislike, each time I opted against posting such comments for fear of either violating privacy issues or (more commonly) because having to worry about whether my frank assessments (and I tend to be frank) might someday be held against me. I have, in other words, come to realize why most of the really good and useful posts on the The Chronicle's website are made anonymously. In time, perhaps, those worries may diminish (they are stronger since I am as yet untenured), but for now my focus shall be slightly different, if similarly therapeutic for me.