Fifteen years of Musings

The Musings has been very quiet the last few years. I’ve obviously been busy at work and a lot of my outreach has shifted with the podcast (now more than 50 episodes done), various books (2 out, another nearly ready to got to the publisher), having the Guardian column for a few years, and being based in the UK again, I’m able to go and do more things in person, and then there’s Twitter of course which is so much better for dropping in a photo and comment than WordPress ever was.

Inevitably therefore, my output here has dropped and while it has typically been only a few posts a year and usually based around new papers. It still works very well for this, I can go into far more detail than on Twitter or similar platforms, cover all the ground I want to, link back to things, show photos or figures, and have control over it all (unlike media coverage). In short, I still like the format of blogs and I think they still have a place and I’m loathe to give up this one even if it has moved to being much more infrequent and most of the time is now only really about my research. So, it is likely to trundle on for now and fans and readers (assuming they still exist) can expect a few more posts to come and I’ve no immediate plans to wind this up.

That said, while it might be on a long and slow decline, I can take some solace in that it’s still going for now and by my count it’s now some 15 years of blogging (the vast majority on here and then a brief forerunner in a previous and now I think lost website). Compared to the palaeo-centric blogs out there (for example my hopelessly out of date and not at all curated list in the sidebar) I think this means that I’m one of the very longest out there and certainly one of fairly few survivors of the great burst of new palaeo blogs from the 2005-2010 era. I’d like to think that’s in part because this has remained a useful resource and while the posts and comments are less frequent than they used to be, plenty of old posts are still getting plenty of hits daily with some occasional big spikes when new stories break (the Fighting Dinosaurs post is going to be racking up hits forever).

So, Happy Anniversary to the Musings (even if that’s coming from its author) and I do hope there will be at least a few more years of posts to come.