My 250th blogpost - some reflections on 2 years blogging

This is my 250th blogpost. Wooh! This blog was launched in May 2009 just before me leaving for the first time to Congo for fieldwork (first post here), and I definitely did not expect to write this many posts. I've come to enjoy blogging, though. The benefit of this particular blog (at least for me) is that it is "A not-really academic blog for family, friends and others". In contrast to a "real" blog I therefore do not feel obliged to upload things regularly or keep the posts to a certain high (academic) standard. Moreover, I often give my own, Dutch opinion. As a result this is frequently (and without meaning to) blunt, and over time I have received several upset emails. Several of them, however, have lead to debate - something I (and I hope the other) enjoyed a lot. The approach of this blog also gives me the liberty to post about a large set of different things:

• Experiences during my PhD period at Columbia such as travelling, training and other fieldwork experiences in Africa, but also completely different ones such as visiting the world cup soccer or missing planes when going to conferences;
• Fun things that have little to do with my dissertation but that I happen to come across such as dinosaurs in the DRC, Monthy Python, Dirk Jan or smart moves to ruin a passport;
• Comments on the news (for example this one);
  
• Summaries or comments on books (Purity and Exile) and papers;
  
• But also frustrations. Whether about inequality in the world, doubting the value of academics or politics in the Netherlands, this blog is a great way to write these frustrations away, or at least express them.

The biggest benefit of the blog, though, is that it often forces me to think a bit more about issues and to learn just a bit more about a subject I want to write about. A post often starts by me thinking "I will post X", often followed with me noticing that I know too little about X to write an interesting post. Or that in order for X to come across properly also Y and Z have to be discussed, or X has to be properly worked out. Whether it is about things that strike me as strange or experiences during fieldwork, conferences, etc..

I am very (happily) surprised of the traffic received over the last two years. My expectation was that mom, dad and maybe one or two friends would occasionaly visit the blog to see what I was up to. However - I just checked Blogspot's statistics - the blog has received 14,540 unique visitors! And the Flagcounter that I installed on July 18 2010 indicates that these visitors have been from 123 different countries! I really don't have that many family or friends. :) Moreover, some blogposts were mentioned on several well-established, "real" blogs: Mo'dernity Mo'problems, Wronging Rights, and Texas in Africa. Although I mainly blog for myself, family and friends, knowing that more people read the blogposts really gives a kick.

So, what about the future? I'll keep on blogging. However, when looking back at the first set of posts I am afraid that my posts are becoming less 'nice'. For example, at first every new activity in the Congo was a new experience: visiting villages, sitting in a 4x4, etc. I seem to write differently about that now (if at all) than back then. Things are no longer new; I do not want to upload yet again a Dutch white guy in an African village. I seem to have lost part of the naivity; probably at the expense of the posts being interesting or at least written in an exited and ethousiastic way. But! I'm now starting my fifth year at Columbia University. And this is going to be a very interesting year: with projects in the Congo and Sierra Leone, visiting conferences to present work, a ton of work on the dissertation ahead, and a lot of ideas on migration, cooperation, networks and natural resources to be worked with Macartan Humphreys, Massimo Morelli, and colleagues Raul and Neelan. There are definitely more posts ahead.