Metadiscourse

I realized about two weeks ago that I haven’t done a monthly reading wrap-up since May — a combination of vacations and other commitments, I think. I love doing these because I like taking at least a few minutes to look back on what I’ve been reading. It’s easy to forget sometimes! I’ve read so [...]

Today this blog turns five years old. Five years old! That’s practically ancient in Internet time.

Despite the feeling that everything has been said before, I think can be useful to revisit where we’ve been once in awhile. The book blogging community is growing so big so quickly that it’s impossible to know or remember where we’ve all come from. It’s nice to be reminded of our “origin stories” once in awhile. But part of surviving online for five years is to not get bogged down in what we were, to constantly be evolving to fit better into the virtual and real life landscapes we exist in.

I’ll be honest, I’m never sure if sharing a post of reading statistics is interesting to anyone but me. But since I find them endlessly fascinating, and this is my blog, you’ll have to indulge me for this post! One of the reasons I like doing statistics posts like this one is that I often [...]

October was a little bit slower reading and blogging month for me. I spent a lot of my evenings covering local candidate debates and forums, so didn’t get to read or blog as much as I would have liked. In fact, I didn’t finish a single book for the first two weeks of the month! That’s crazy!

When I think about nonfiction reads for the summer, I always return to books that are both a lot of fun to read and that don’t take a lot of brainpower to parse through. The authors with books on this list are definitely smart, but they’ve also found a way to make their topics — everything from the birth of forensic toxicology to the history of a favorite summer toy — easily digestible even after a margarita or two.

In all of the excitement of getting ready for Book Expo America last month, I totally missed doing a wrap-up for May and book list for June. But oh well, that time has passed, and we’re already on the way for July (seriously, July?).

I had another really good reading month in June. My goal most of the year has been between eight and 10 books, each month, and I managed to accomplish that this month thanks to finishing two audiobooks — Catherine the Great and Let’s Pretend This Never Happened.

One of the conscious decisions I’ve made as a blogger is to minimize the time I spend on background projects — messing with my blog theme, redesigning my headers, updating my sidebars, whatever. I just so sucked into those projects that I run out of time for the things I think are important — writing good content and interacting with other bloggers. As a result, I’m way behind on new blogging technology, tools, and plugins. So here’s my question to you, blogging experts: What are some technology tools you use to make blogging easier? What are some of your favorite plugins? Mobile apps?

Because I was both frustrated and concerned by the issues the revised FTC Guides raised, I did a couple of papers for this ethics class looking at the intersection of blogging and journalism ethics, specifically the issues of objectivity and transparency. (I even wrote about the project here on the blog, and solicited some feedback on the FTC Guides for my final paper).

Anyway, that’s a long-ish way of getting around to introducing the topic I’m writing about for the blog tour — objectivity versus transparency, and what guidance those two ethics might be able to offer book bloggers as we go about our day-to-day blogging habits or face bigger ethical questions. I know it’s a little more abstract than some of the other topics on the tour, but I hope you’ll stick with me!

Wow. I can’t believe that as of today I’ve been blogging for four years. I’m late getting this up, but I think that’s probably apt given how my reading and blogging life has been for the last nine months — always a little behind what I want to be doing. But I’m here, still trucking on as best I can.

I haven’t talked about my job much on the blog, so for those who don’t know, here are the basics: last August I took a job as the editor of a small, weekly newspaper in rural Minnesota. It’s exactly the job that I hoped to get when I finished grad school, which I love, but it’s also a lot of work. I spend most of my day out covering events, doing interviews, or writing stories for our print edition and website. It’s a challenging, awesome job, but it also takes a lot out of me. Blogging, and all the things that go with it, have taken a back seat more often than I care to admit.