TITLE: Is There a Statute of Limitations for Blogging?
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 25, 2009  9:48 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
I had a few free minutes tonight with no big project
at the front of my mind, so I decided to clean up my
<TT>blog-ideas</TT> folder.  Maybe one of the ideas
would grab my imagination and I would write.  But
this is what grabbed my attention instead, a line
in my main <TT>ideas.txt</TT> file:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
(leftovers from last year's SIGCSE -- do them!?)
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

You have heard of code smells.  This is a blog smell.

I have two entries still in the hopper from SIGCSE
<B>2008</B> listed in my
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2008-03.html#e2008-03-13T19_22_31.htm">
   conference report table of contents</A>:
"Rediscovering the Passion and Beauty", on ways to
share our passion and awe with others, and "Recreating
the Passion and Beauty", because maybe it's just
not that much fun any more.  Both come from a panel
discussion on the afternoon of Day 2, and both still
seem worth writing, even after fourteenth months.

The question in the note to myself in the ideas file
lets a little reality under the curtain...  Will I
ever write them?  As conference report, they probably
don't offer much, and the second entry has been
preempted a bit by Eric Roberts giving a similar
talk in other venues, and posting his slides on the
web.  But timeliness of the conference report isn't
the only reason I write; the primary reason is to
think about the ideas.  The writing both creates the
thinking and records it for later consideration.  In
this regard, they still hold my interest.  Not all
old ideas do.

When I first started this blog, I never realized how
much my blogging would exhibit the phenomenon  I call
the Stack of Ideas.  Sometimes an entry is a planned
work, but more often I write what needs to be written
based on where I am in my work.  Hot ideas will push
ideas that recently seemed hot onto the back burner.
Going to a conference only makes the problem worse.
The sessions follow one after another, and each one
tends to stir me up so much as to push even the
previous session way back in my mind.  I have
subfolders for hot ideas and merely recent ideas, and
I do pull topics from them -- "hot" serving up ideas
more reliably than "recent".

This is one risk of having more ideas than time.  Of
course, ideas are like most everything else: a lot
of them are bunk.  I suspect that many of my ideas
are bunk and that the Stack of Ideas does me and my
readers the Darwinian service of pushing the worst
down, down, down out of consciousness.  When I look
back at most of the ideas that haven't made the cut
yet, they feel stale.  Are they just old, or were
they not good enough?  It's hard to say.  Like other
Darwinian processes, this one probably isn't optimal.
Occasionally a good idea may lose out only because
it wasn't fit for the particular mental environment
in which it found itself.  But all in all, the process
seems to get things mostly right.  I just hope the
good ideas come back around sometime later.  I think
the best ones do.

This is one of the reasons that academics can benefit
from keeping a blog.  A lot of ideas <EM>are</EM>
bunk.  Maybe the ones that don't get written shouldn't
be written.  For the ideas that make the cut, writing
this sort of short essay is a great way to think them
through, make them come to life in words that anyone
can read, and then let them loose into the world.
Blog readers are great reviewers, and they help with
the good and bad ideas in equal measure.  What a
wonderful opportunity blogging offers: an anytime,
anyplace community of ideas.  Most of us had little
access to such a community even ten years ago.

I must say this, though.  Blogging is of more value
to me than just as a technical device.  It can also
offer an ego boost.  There is nothing quite like
having someone I met several years ago at SIGCSE or
OOPSLA tell me how much they enjoy reading my blog.
Or to have someone I've never met come up to me and
say that they stumbled across my blog and find it
useful.  Or to receive e-mail saying, "I am a
regular reader and thought you might enjoy this..."
What a joy!

Will those old SIGCSE 2008 entries ever see the light
of day?  I think so, but the Stack of Ideas will have
its say.
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