The Future For Fernando’s Desk

On the 19th of October, 2004 I posted for the first time on this blog. I’d been blogging on and off since 2001, but I was committing to something more sustained and substantial in ’04. It’s been, in roughly equal measures, frustrating and rewarding these past four and half years. I’ve met some, but not all of my goals and learnt a lot along the way – about myself, about writing and about the myths and realities of “social networking.” I’ve relished the freedom of “self-publishing” but I feel a sense of personal disappointment that maybe I’ve squandered that freedom.

A lot has changed in these years. Back in 2004, I thought of myself as an academic who played a bit of music and wanted to be a better golfer. Now, I’m a musician who does some non-fiction writing and wants to be a better cook. It’s not so much that the metaphor for this blog, the stuff that moves across my desk, is broken. Rather, it’s that my primary space for working and thinking is no longer a desk (by implication in a library), but a workstation in a studio.

So I’m entering a phase of seriously rethinking how I blog, what I blog about and how this blog connects with, well, reality. In fact, to let a little of my thinking out in the wild, reality will be a big theme for the new blog.

And, by new blog I don’t just mean a new look, but a fundamental rethink. New manifesto, new design, new categories, new links, new interface with other feeds (like twitter and flickr) and a new approach to media. My goal is to have this in place for the five year anniversary; October of this year. As always I’m interested to hear what you, the regular reader of this blog would like to see dropped or added, what you have enjoyed from this blog and where you think the whole enterprise of blogging is going.