Blogging in the age of Facebook, Twitter

It has been almost 2 1/2 years since I last updated this blog, in October 2008. I started graduate school in fall 2007, and I set up a Facebook account in November of that year. As I added more friends from my program at a large university, I spent more and more time interacting with friends on Facebook, sharing the common experience of being a graduate student and preparing for professional life after graduation.

I suppose it would have made sense to start blogging about the experience of graduate school and the profession I was starting to work in-- there is no shortage of blogs in the field. And yet I never wanted this blog to be about my work. I didn't feel comfortable writing about what we covered in the news organization, and thus I wrote about my personal observations about what was in the news (but were not covering for work), along with events going on around greater Los Angeles, and trips we took around Southern and Northern California. After my work with the news organization ended in summer 2006, I wrote increasingly about the planned re-opening of the Griffith Observatory, within walking distance of where we lived at the time, and other news about Griffith Park.

I didn't completely give up blogging after starting graduate school (I count about 30 entries during that time), but it became harder and harder to find something interesting to write about. Eventually, I gave up trying.

In the last month, I re-discovered a blog written by one of my professors from graduate school, and thought, I missed being able to write at length and describe activities or observations. Facebook is a very useful social tool, but a long paragraph seems out of place. On Twitter, one is limited to 140 characters, and the brevity required for tweets is one thing that makes it different from Facebook.

For the last two or three weeks, I have been thinking about a good topic to jump back into the blog. And with a recent trip to Disneyland, I found it. I'm excited about the chance to be blogging here again. I hope the ideas continue to come.