There Are Two Types...

...of people in the world: those that group people into categories and those that don't.

I'm a grouper, always have been. I group more than people of course. I've been known to categorize objects and issues and statements and food, to name a few. I enjoy figuring out what goes with what. Grouping is one of the things that I enjoy about qualitative data analysis--the ability to take snippets people have said, assign categories and then see what themes emerge when the statements are place together (or next to each other).

So my blogroll was getting out of hand and I realized I had still more blogs to add. I decided it had grown large enough that it was time for some grouping. The initial attempt can be seen on the right.

Of course grouping is both an entertaining and a frustrating endeavor and this was no exception. It brought up the question: how do you define a blog? Many blogs may have started out for a specific purpose but that purpose changes as the voice of the blogger grows and as his/her life changes. For instance there are several academic bloggers that I follow that have recently become mothers and now blog about both academia and mothering. In fact many academic blogs I follow touch upon both issues with regularity. In looking over my post labels, I found that I have blogged an equal number of times on "research" and "Angel" myself. So am I an academic blogger? a mother blogger? an academic mother blogger?

In short there is no perfect answer and the beauty of the blogosphere is that there is flexibility and that adaptation is the norm. Of course that doesn't stop my grouping tendencies, so I will continue to fuss over the blogroll and ponder the themes that emerge. However please let me know if you would like your category changed or if I inadvertently dropped you from the list.