About (from 2003)
Who & where am I?
Disclaimer: The location of this blog may lead visitors to think I work at Harvard (I don’t), am being paid by Harvard (I’m not), went to Harvard (nope), or that I could afford Harvard tuition. (I might be able to now, but I’d have to commute from Knoxville.)
Content: For the most part, this blog still touches on issues raised by the Harvard weblog group, its Bloggercon conferences, or related weblog techniques, some as simple as summarizing longer items from my main blog for the convenience of readers who prefer reading short takes in their RSS aggregators.
This crimson blog is secondary to my Other Journalism Weblog, which began with a blue theme and turned green for spring 2004. I was tempted to turn it orange in the fall of 2004, when I joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism & Electronic Media. Instead, it’s become a supplement to a simpler home page there.
Why two blogs? To learn, mostly. For the other one, I use Userland Radio; for this one, I use Harvard’s Userland Manila server. Giving me access to this site reduced my off-topic questions about Radio at Harvard community weblog meetings, and allowed me to manage comments on both sites. (Thanks, Dave.) Now, becasue I can edit this Manila blog from home, office or classroom, I sometimes use it as a parking space for “may come in handy in class” links, whether they are breaking news or several months old.
Mea culpa: The game of the name… Harvard’s default blog template’s school-color motif inspired my sophomoric puns on red/read and, along with the Harvard Square stop on the T’s Red Line, prompted the blog’s name. Perhaps punning reflects the non-linearity of my train of thought, as well as the other-linearity of hypertext associations; I also enjoy the assonance in “linear,” “liner,” “Winer” and “Lydon.” It is NOT true that proximity to Harvard or the erudite Chris Lydon required me to start a paragraph with a couple of Latin words, then use others like “sophomoric,” “linearity,” “motif,” “assonance” and “erudite” despite years of newspaper training. It just happened.
Who am I? I used to be a mild-mannered reporter. (Probably too mild-mannered.) After 11 years, I drifted into graduate school, computers, graduate school again, hyptertext, magazines, boats, graduate school, an online newspaper, a dissertation and teaching. To celebrate graduation day, Dec. 21, 2003, I pasted my face onto a picture of a model wearing a $900 University of North Carolina doctoral robe and started looking for work again.
