Blogging in February

I’m hearing some complaints about the “February Blues” and bloggers block which made me wonder whether there’s any truth in the idea that this month is more difficult for bloggers get inspiration than the rest of the year.

Well a blog is by definition time-orientated so it’s easy to go back and look at previous posts all from the month of February, over the years. I was quite surprised at the result of this excercise, which is summarised below :

Wow, more than one post per day last year in February, but what was it all about?

• The novelty of blogs is wearing off … but not entirely, it seems
• Action Research to develop Wikiversity I wonder how Cormac’s research project is coming along, one year later.
• Wiki Patterns Hmm, the thinking behind this one is much clearer now. Why did they insist on ignoring contexts and promote a simplistic prevalence of already established enterprise wiki patterns? It was to make a book – Wikipatterns
• The Art of Threading Apparently this post gets traffic from the search engines because the title misleads people into thinking it’s going to be about a popular technique for hair removal! But it’s actually a useful story about online discussion group threads, well I think so. Why can’t they just use electrolysis, wax or chemicals like everyone else?
• What is turkey ham? The Bernard Matthews Bird Flu episode took place in February last year, which added to my epidemiology category.
• How I would like to use SecondLife – not at all, these days.
• Homemade Mayonnaise I try to avoid too much food blogging here, (I do some of that on the uk cider blog) but this was related to the bird flu story.

But maybe February 2007 just happened to be an eventful month, so how about previous years?

Half the volume, but double the intensity?

• EXHIBITION DATE March 8th This is a clue that I probably spent most of February franticly making preparations for the climax of my 3 year online BA Honours degree
• Significant learning from the cp2 web2.0 workshop Reflections after the event which took place in January 2006

For February 2005 we have to go back to a seperate blog to which were imported archives from my ultralab blog “have envelope, will push” which was taken offline. Then for the month of February we find a series of posts:

• Communities of Practice Parts 1 2 3 and 4 ( Have you seen that beautiful scanned squash before somewhere? )
• Expert Ants in Wiki World a bit of a breakthrough, that one.

For February 2004 I can only find one post, so I’m not sure what happened there. It’s on an old blogger blog, and concerns Gordon Pask, the cybernetician who developed ideas about learning called “conversational theory”.

In February 2003 I didn’t have a blog, well not one that would be recognised as such nowadays, and you might have found me discussing LOGO in uk.schools.education-it

So there we have a round up of posts from previous Februaries, a month renowned for winter blues, longing for springtime and having to put up with the second or third sesonal headcold. Atishoo.