I've been out of the Swarming Media blogging game for a few weeks now. Vacationing, side projects, and summer laziness I suppose. I've also reassessed blogging on this site in general.

I started this back in late 2005 and much has changed, both on this blog and the routines that surround it. Back then, "Web 2.0" was still a term folks liked to use in a hopeful, unironic way; I had never used the term "autonomism"; and blogging seemed to be at the rare cultural convergence of newness, edginess, and broad familiarity.

Going through my feed reader today - the core of which I constructed six or so months before I created this blog - I noticed that a good 13 blogs have died in the past two months since I last went through it. Either they have shifted over to posting entirely automatic del.icio.us links or they've ceased to post anything at all; that's dead enough to call it such I'd say. Swarming Media was close to joining these ranks.

What got to me in the moments of writing the blog's obituary in my mind was straying from what Fred points to in his post closing out his chimprawk.blogspot.com URL (moving to fstutzman.com):

"I had no idea of what the blog would become, and if I knew the blog would be part of my professional identity I might have chose a different name [than chimprawk]. But I'm glad I didn't, and I think my blog's name was a reminder not to take any of this too seriously. This is all an experiment."

I started this blog as a way to look deeper into subjects that I was interested in but relatively new to - tech, new media, cultural/critical theory. The blog helped me articulate my thoughts and questions in a public forum, but in the last few months I've been guilty of taking it all too seriously and forgetting why I started blogging here in the first place.

Blogs are a good way to maintain disassociated web-based and meat-space subject positions. Perhaps I've been letting my idea of Swarming Media get in the way of its purpose.

As of tonight, I resolve to make sure that - as Fred put it - I don't take any of it too seriously and most importantly, that this is all an experiment.