Welcome to stevendkrause.com (or should I say, Krause 2.0?)

Welcome to this, the new and all-in-one Krause blog. Steven D. Krause’s Official Blog readers, meet Steve Krause’s Unofficial Blog; SKUB, this is SDKOB. All one big and happy family/identity.

What is this and why now? Well…

When I started blogging five or so years ago, I set up two different blogs: an “official” one (about stuff having to do with school, scholarship, teaching, etc.) and an “unofficial” one (about family, friends, politics, goofy stuff, etc.). I was initially concerned about saying something that Eastern Michigan University might find inappropriate– some sort of political rant, a sexist comment, a bad joke, whatever. While I have blogged before about these dangers, the fact of the matter is I do have the protection of academic freedom and tenure and the union. So I think I would have post something pretty crazy to even get noticed by some administrator, let alone get fired.

Still, I continued to maintain this “official” blog and an “unofficial” blog split, I suppose because it helped me keep things in perspective. Sometimes, it was (and still is) useful for me to remember that work and life are not the same thing.

But then some kind of interesting things started to happen.

For starters, I realized that family members, parents, in-laws, friends, etc. have been reading my unofficial blog, which means I’ve been sort of been self-censoring myself/watching my Ps and Qs for a while now. Not that I have any big, huge, dark unofficial blog secrets. Really. Honest.

But the break-down between official and unofficial blogs really struck me in early January 2008. I don’t remember exactly when it was, but I do like to think that that all of these things happened on the same day:

• Someone I have known for well-over 20 years was in the midst of an email conversation with me about my book project/sabbatical proposal, which I had posted on my official blog, and offering pretty good advice on my “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” (BAWS) project, too.
• A colleague of mine at EMU in the political science department stopped me in the hall and said he thought it was interesting to read my perspectives as an ex-pat Iowan on the Iowa Caucus process on my unofficial blog.
• My wife, who is also a faculty colleague of mine in the English department at EMU (perhaps you can begin to see why separating my official and unofficial life is all the more challenging) stopped me at almost the exact same time in the same hallway and told me that she had a student right now who read my unofficial blog all the time.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea: this split between the official and the unofficial had become a kind of silly fiction to everyone, including me.

At first, I thought about figuring out how to merge the two different databases that support the unofficial and the official blogs, but a little bit of research revealed that that would have been very difficult to do. So I settled on the next best thing: start over.

And thus, this new blog/portal/web site was born, just simply my domain name, stevendkrause.com

Not a whole lot is going to change around here in terms of the kinds posts I’m going to be making– “officially” speaking, I’ll still post about my field, about my scholarship, about teaching, about EMU, about other things academic. “Unofficially” speaking, I’ll still post about family/friends, about movies, restaurant reviews, goofy things I find on the web, etc. There will probably end up being more posts here, but that’s really more of a function of not posting on two different blogs.

Oh, and a word about the links/blogrolls here: I am using some scripts available via Google Reader to list these. In other words, these are all blogs/web sites that are in my Google Reader. It’s a little buggy because if you can’t access the scripts for some reason (a glitch with Google, some kind of firewall that prevents these scripts, etc.), the blogrolls disappear. But I am going to keep using Google Reader for my own RSS needs, and I thought this was nice way to keep a list of some of my current blog browsing.

Anyway, welcome to the new digs.