In these tough economic times

I've accrued many blog side-projects over the years, most of which I've started and abandoned with little fanfare.  Because I am probably going to merge my "professional" online identity with whatever the hell everything else I do online is, I've decided to merge several of my side projects directly into signifyingnothing.com.  These projects include (right now) "The Silence Project" (that did have submissions from friend Snyder and are suitably noted), my unplugged experiment, "Signifying nothing Uplugged," and "The land of lost notes."  I am leaving "disc-a-rama" as a side-project, since I have hopes that other disc golfers may decide to join in the fun of it.  "eye or orris" will also survive as an independent blog, since it is a useful reference blog for me to find pictures I've found interesting over the years.

I haven't made a decision as to when I will leave signifyingnothing.com in the dust yet, or if I ever will.  I moved my professional site away from a server from the place I work mostly for several technical reasons, but, I will admit, there is also a need to "own" my online professional self, as opposed to it being owned by the place where I work, I suppose.  The same goes for Signifying nothing, ultimately.  I've purposefully used a pseudonym here and will continue to do so in other media simply because, in some ways, my professional online identity is not really "owned" by me.  I know we all wish to believe that we are all free to do what we wish or write what we wish, but that is clearly not the case. My professional identity is owned by various entities out there.  In any case, the whole notion from the very first post of Signifying nothing was to explore online identity.  I guess I'm at a crux right now.

Ultimately I see signifyingnothing.com as an art piece.  I've been slapping away at it for many years now.  Yes, it is mundane, at best, but what I put here is intentional.  In any case, given that I've chosen to have signifyingnothing.com as a sort of pseudonym, it does get in the way of stuff (like my photography) that I want to own with with the Clint Gardner identity.  That's why you will see that I've changed all the flickr stuff over to my real name.

Of course I realize all of this could be seen as a massive exercise in ego management, and that is somewhat why I wish to avoid the aforementioned "professional site" identification. I am very leery of anyone who has the audacity to have their name as a web site.  Perhaps that why signifyingnothign.com will survive.

I am still really fond of what Signifying nothing is supposed to do, after all.  In any case, it has even more bloggity goodness, having been merged with several side projects.

It all just boils down to a rhetorical decision.  How do I want the world to see me, and how the hell can I let what I really want to say sneak out?

There you go.