Long-time lurker

Hello world. I’ve been wanting to start a blog for a long time. I love writing, and I love reading blogs. I’m hoping the combination will be fun.

If I’m being completely honest (and I’ll say naively now that I’ll try), this is not my first blog post. My first blog post (on the blog portion of my MySpace account) was on July 3, 2006, and my first taking down of a blogpost happened a few hours later. The short-lived post (on the Declaration of Independence, just in time for the Fourth of July) was squirreled away on my hard drive (as a .cwk), and I haven’t tried to blog since.

Five years later, as a second-year law student, I set up a WordPress site to host my final project for my advanced legal research class. I thought I would soon expand the site to be more of a homepage, including a blog. The only blog entry read, “Thanks for visiting.  For now, this site is just my pathfinder on Section 108 of the Copyright Act.”

For now. Copyright cases that seemed interminable have been decided since I wrote that “for now.” So, the pathfinder I made the site to support is hopelessly out of date–I hope to update it, but for now it’s accurate as of early December 2011. For now, I’m going to put aside the fact that the pathfinder is out of date and just start this blog. (You’ve been warned.)

Yesterday, I participated in a great discussion of blogging at Fellows Hour at the Berkman Center (where I am, incidentally, a fellow). We heard from several folks about their experiences with blogging, and in the spirit of New Year’s resolutions, we talked about our plans for sharing our thoughts and work with the world (via blog or otherwise) over the coming months.

To me, the defining feature of blogging is the connected communities it can support and create. I count myself very privileged to partake (thus far only as a reader and sometime comment and photo poster) in a vibrant community of sewing bloggers. But even with my trusty RSS reader and the ability to comment, I know I’m missing a lot by not having a blog of my own.

Another reason I’m finally starting this blog is as part of an ongoing effort to reduce my use of and dependence on closed technologies. I have a homepage, but it’s very static. When I want to interact with friends and family on the web, I still turn to Facebook. Many of those friends have blogs, and I hope that by becoming a blogger myself, I’ll be able to participate in that community on my own terms, or at least WordPress.com’s (instead of these).

Last but not least, I’m also lucky to be part of the community at Berkman this year. I could talk to those people for hours. Unfortunately, the academic year is halfway over. There are only so many hours left. I’m hoping that blogging will help me soak up the remainder of my time at Berkman and that this blog will provide me a stronger connection to the community and my time at Berkman once I move on into the rest of the world.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, this won’t be a single-topic blog. I’m hoping to post about copyright law and the Internet (which I think about during the day, most days), sewing projects (which I do on the weekends, most weeks), and perhaps a bit of Latin transcription and medieval legal history (which I did a lot of during college and law school hardly get to think about now). I’ll throw some tags and tag-specific RSS feeds in here for anyone who wants to keep their blog diet Latin- or sewing- or law-free.