June 20, 2025, by Brigitte Nerlich
My blog: End of an era or new beginning?
This week I got an email from the University of Nottingham which made me quite sad: “I am contacting you as you are listed as a user on a blog on the blogs.nottingham.ac.uk site. The university will stop hosting the site from the end of December 2025. It is now home to a very small number of active blogs. […] This is not a cost-effective way of sharing current content and information with our internal and external audiences.”
Since 2012, at the end of December each year, I have written an ‘end of year’ report of my blogging activity over the year. This year, I’ll have to do that somewhere else or not at all. We have to see. I first have to become less sad.
It is such a shame that blogging is becoming another victim of universities’ cost-cutting exercises. At the time, we were told blogging and micro-blogging would be a great contribution to the university’s outreach and engagement activities and I took to it like a duck to water. Of course, all the posts I have written have been written in my own time, especially after my retirement in 2016, at no cost to the university. (Put together they’d probably span five to seven academic books. Would that have been a better use of my time? No!)
It was a blast. I loved, as I call it, ‘knitting with hyperlinks‘! It gave me the freedom to write in ways that the writing of academic articles and books forbids. I got the opportunity to develop a whole new ‘voice’. So much so that when I submit academic articles nowadays, I am accused of writing them in the style of a popular science article. Success! So, thank you for giving me that opportunity especially Adrian Mateo who got me into it all.
For now, I’ll continue blogging here, although my inspiration and enthusiasm has been dented. Alongside the sadness that comes from seeing this platform disappear, there is another sadness. The work I put into a Wakelet, where I sorted all the posts into thematic categories will have been for nothing, as the links will be broken. If you want to have an (almost) last look, here is my little cabinet of curiosities! Enjoy it while you can.
At the moment, I am a bit in a state of mourning about losing the freedom and joy of writing on the University’s blog site, but I hope that some topic will grab my fancy and off I go again in the future. Over the next few months, I’ll explore alternative ‘homes’ and I’ll let you know whether I found one and whether I actually want to move in and start knitting with hyperlinks again……..
Image: Monument Valley 2007
This is a comment by Joe Jordan. I am posting it, as the comment function no longer works for outside comments.
“I have worked at the university since March, and found your blog after being introduced to the blog run by my own department, libraries. I had a look through the others, and chanced to have a read of yours. I am by no means a science-y minded person, so I am very grateful that you write in a very clear and straightforward fashion. I have been following along with your posts on quiet evening shifts where I can. I particularly enjoyed your recent article on AI which speaks to my general bafflement at the jargon experts use.”