{"id":3019,"date":"2014-11-16T23:40:41","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T04:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/?p=3019"},"modified":"2014-11-16T23:40:41","modified_gmt":"2014-11-17T04:40:41","slug":"a-decade-of-blogging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/2014\/11\/16\/a-decade-of-blogging\/","title":{"rendered":"A decade of blogging"},"content":{"rendered":"

It has been exactly 10 years today since I started Information Wants to be Free<\/em>. My life has changed in so many\u00a0ways since then. I’m not sure I really had a vision of where I’d be at 37, but I don’t think\u00a0it\u00a0looked quite like this (I certainly never guessed I’d be living on the West Coast!).\u00a0Back then, I thought climbing the professional ladder was important. I wanted to be in charge. I was impatient to change everything<\/em>. Now, I just want a job I enjoy that challenges me and\u00a0to work with people I like.\u00a0I have that now and I’ve achieved more professionally than I could ever have thought possible back when I was an unemployed new librarian. I feel very lucky.<\/p>\n

I started this blog as a newlywed in my mid-20s, about to graduate library school. I initially wrote about my frustrations with\u00a0the job market, my experiences job-hunting, emerging social technologies I found interesting, and other professional trends. I wrote\u00a0300<\/em> posts in that first year; a number which I now find staggering (then again, I was unemployed\u00a0and didn’t have a child, so I did have more time on my hands). From all that writing and commenting on other blogs, I became part of\u00a0this incredible community of other bloggers and commenters. I found kindred spirits at a time when I needed them most. And while many of those people have left\u00a0blogging for things like Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed, I\u00a0still value this medium far more than any other and am glad for the bloggers who still challenge me and make me think (I’m also still glad to call many of those lapsed\u00a0bloggers friends).<\/p>\n

My views on many things have changed over the years. Reading some of my old posts makes me cringe. I’ve made mistakes. I written\u00a0dumb things. But I’m kind of glad all of my mistakes are up there in black-and-white; it reminds me of how far I’ve come. What has been constant is that\u00a0I’ve been a voice against groupthink, against labels, and\u00a0in favor of charitable reading, even when my opinions have set me in opposition to\u00a0people I respect and admire. And that will never change.<\/p>\n

Why do I still blog? First of all, I’m a very\u00a0slow thinker. I’m not good at the witty comeback, especially not in 140 characters. I use blogging to work out ideas and make sense of things, and\u00a0I frequently find that I understand my own feelings\u00a0on a topic better after I’ve written about them. I also love writing (couldn’t you guess?). I have been writing songs, poetry, short stories, and non-fiction since I could hold a pen\u00a0and have found this medium to be a perfect fit for me. Finally, people still tell me that the things I write are useful; that my blog posts have helped them work out their own thoughts on things or that they felt good to find that someone else shared their opinion.\u00a0When you can find something you enjoy doing that other people value… well, it’s a match made in heaven.<\/p>\n

So, while you’re never going to find me writing 300 posts a year, I plan to keep this blog going as long as I have readers. And heck, maybe longer than that, since I find value in it for myself.<\/p>\n

Thank you for reading, especially those of you\u00a0who really made this feel like a\u00a0community over the years. I know some of you have been reading this blog for pretty close to a decade and that stuns\u00a0me. I’m not a particularly interesting or charismatic\u00a0person. I’m an introvert who leads a pretty unexceptional life\u00a0and\u00a0just happens to share her\u00a0opinions online. I’m always startled when someone tells me how excited they are to meet me at a conference or when someone I just met acts like they know me simply\u00a0because they read my blog. I’m so much more and<\/em> so much less than what you might\u00a0think I am based on what you read here.<\/p>\n

I’m not a rock star, though at one point, I mostly (or completely, I was probably a jerk at some point) fit\u00a0the description of one<\/a>.\u00a0I had some lucky breaks and also worked very hard for what I’ve achieved. I think the bulk of my success can be attributed to one thing: chutzpah. I suffer from horrible, almost crippling impostor syndrome, but I have\u00a0always been the sort of person who’d rather try and fail than not try at all. I was always the girl who would tell the guy I liked him, even if I thought I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. The worst case scenario in that situation\u00a0never seemed all that bad. And that’s how I’ve approached my career. At a lunch at ALA when I was teaching the staff about wikis in 2006, I told the head of ALA Publishing<\/a> “you know\u2026 y\u2019all should really give me a column in American Libraries<\/em>. I could help spice up the magazine.” Next thing you know, I had a column. I thought the idea I had for Library DIY<\/a> was probably\u00a0stupid, but I figured it’s better to put it out there and get rejected than to let a potentially awesome idea sit. I and the team that helped make it happen\u00a0ended up winning an award for it and it has been replicated by some major academic\u00a0libraries and other institutions (like NPR!).<\/p>\n

I guess what I’m saying is that, frequently, you have to make your own opportunities. Things rarely fall into anyone’s lap, so if you’re frustrated that you’re not getting x<\/em> and other people are, you may have to go out there and get it. But also,\u00a0many of those things really aren’t as wonderful and shiny as you think. They don’t guarantee a life of happiness nor are they a worthwhile stick for which to measure your worth.\u00a0Life sans banana slicer<\/a> (and for the record, I wasn’t cool or shiny enough to\u00a0receive one) is just fine. As Karen said “The odds are you\u2019re amazing anyway.”<\/span><\/p>\n

So here’s to another decade of blogging, if I still have anything useful to say\u00a0by then, and thanks for sticking around. It’s been a true pleasure to share myself with you (and get to know many of you) these 10 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It has been exactly 10 years today since I started Information Wants to be Free. My life has changed in so many\u00a0ways since then. I’m not sure I really had…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3021,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,12,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-about-me","category-blogging","category-social-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3019"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3019"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3024,"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3019\/revisions\/3024"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}