I didn’t post for the last week for two reasons. Christmas is a lot different when you have a child. The opportunity cost was just too high for me to really blog with gusto, so I didn’t. And in any case I suspect many of my readers were also busy with family or Caribbean vacations (the latter an inference I’m making by extrapolating the somewhat skewed sample of Facebook photos today). Second, the new comment system has to a great extent broken the connection between myself and the readers of this weblog. Frankly, it strikes me as very 2002 in terms of technical implementation, and as someone with finite marginal time I can’t be bothered to keep track of incoming opinion. The old system was simple and elegant. Without the back & forth I honestly feel a lot less motivated. It’s like I’m shouting into an empty room. The good news is that this is going to change soon. I know some of you have gripes about the design, and I’m not too excited about some aspects myself. But my first priority is to get discussion/comment features back to a semblance of genuine utility.
Second, I want to welcome Keith Kloor to the Discover Blogs network. While I’ve gone into somnolence he’s has been quite active. Additionally, I can’t ignore the fact that there have been other changes here. Sean Carroll left the network, going ‘independent’ again. And two of my colleges moved to Phenomena, National Geographic’s writerly collection of blogs. Most readers of this weblog will be familiar with Carl, Ed, and Brian, but I want to give a special shout out to Virginia Hughes’s of Only Human. I know Ginny from ScienceBlogs, where she was ‘community manager’ 2007-2008, and I’m excited to see her voice being amplified. I do have to observe that though National Geographic states that their network is “A science salon,” it seems quite clearly a life science salon. I’m not complaining, just observing.
Finally, what does 2013 have in store for this weblog? Some of more of the same. And also new developments, personally, professionally, and stylistically. I’ve been blogging for nearly 11 years now, and my interests gave shifted and meandered, and it will continue to do so. But I have been toying with the idea of being more ‘experimental’ in the nature of my exposition. We’ll see.