Zen and the geek of photography.

2009 was a rough year for the mediageek blog. I haven’t done an official count or anything, but I reckon that this year had fewer posts than any previous. I mean, I didn’t post anything new from Oct. 4 through Dec. 28, for Pete’s sake!

2010 brings changes for the mediageek world. The most significant is the end of the mediageek radioshow. The last episode aired live on New Year’s Eve and is online now. The final program was actually more than an hour long as it went to air, assisted with my great friend and frequent guest, John Anderson of DIYmedia.net. A (mostly) unedited version of the whole broadcast will go up on the radioshow website this coming Sunday. Tonight is my first Thursday evening without a radioshow to do (since Sept. 2008 the show was produced live on Thursdays at 9 pm on WNUR-FM).

Ending the radioshow was a difficult decision to make, but one that I feel good in making. After seven years in production I am proud of the shows I was able to produce, the topics I was able to cover and, especially, the fantastically interesting people I has the pleasure to interview. For as long as I am able I will keep the archives online for posterity, history and the benefit of the random googler.

I ended the show for many reasons, as I’ve explained on the program, with the primary one being that the weekly time commitment of 10 – 20 hours has really started to wear me down. On top of that, I feel like I can not keep up on the media policy and reform beat like I once did. Too many other things–including work–compete for my attention, and there is so much more information to keep track of. When I started the blog in 2000 and the radioshow in 2002 there was much less awareness of media policy, in general, and many fewer website, blogs and other outlets covering. I’m quite glad to say that the situation is very different today, even if the amount of radio coverage has grown only a little bit.

With the nearly 20 hours a week I’m reclaiming I want to do more writing. I want to kick things up here at the mediageek blog, and, especially over at the Radio Survivor blog. Radio Survivor was the idea of my co-blogger Matthew Lasar, and it’s dedicated to the passion and tough love for the medium of radio, on the air, on satellite and online. I am so lucky to be in his company along with our third co-blogger, Jennifer Waits, who is the foremost chronicler of college radio at the Spinning Indie blog. Writing for RadioSurvivor this year reminded me how powerful and enjoyable blogging can be. As I enter my second decade of blogging, I needed the kind of kick in the pants that comes from working alongside other super-talented bloggers.

Although I don’t mention it here very much, I also do some freelance writing for Streaming Media magazine. I write there about educational video online. This is a topic I’m quite passionate about, on top of it being my day job. I’m planning to write more about the use of video to enhance, democratize and improve education at Streaming Media and here at mediageek.

But don’t expect mediageek to become all about educational media. I’m still very passionate about media justice and democracy, along with the democratization of media production and access. These interests coincide with education quite well, I think. So the mediageek blog will continue to be a venue for me to write about these aspects of media. That includes posts about gear–like cameras and camcorders–along with posts about our media environment.

So, off we go into a new decade of blogging. Hope you’ll come along for the ride.

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