Assuming you ignore the comment from me checking that the comment machinery works, Steven Gallaher supplied the first proper comment on this blog yesterday. Thanks Steven. After saying nice things about it, he asked if perhaps the posting immediately below this one might more appropriately have been placed on my Education Blog, or even on Samizdata. And maybe that would have have made sense.

And now I've just done a posting about music teaching over at my education blog which might just as appropriately have been put here.

So the question does arise: if the boundaries between my two little blogs are so blurred – and they are blurred – why not just lump them together? Or, why not just fling everything onto Samizdata?

As to combining the education and culture blogs, pointing out the existence of the colour orange does not prove that there is no valid distinction to be made between red and yellow. There's a big overlap, but culture and education are nevertheless distinct concepts, each worthy of their own distinct attention.

I strongly believe in specialist blogs. Someone interested in education may be sufficiently diverted by the views of me and my friends on that topic to find a regular visit to my education blog worth the trouble, if only to find ammunition concerning what these wacky libertarians are saying about it. "Culture" is probably a looser term than education (and in future postings I intend to loosen it a lot more than I have so far), but nevertheless, similar considerations apply to that. Stir it all together, and I risk annoying educationists with my views on the movies, classical CDs, TV, paintings and architecture, and culture vultures with annoying references to British state schools and their travails and constant dronings-on about the glories of home-education.

As for those who want all these things stirred up, because they'll read anything I write, well, let them stir. Each blog is only a click away from the other (or it will be once I've got all that linking business sorted out), and I have no problem, as this posting shows, about cross-referring when it makes sense to do that. But to assume such devotion regardless of subject matter, from all my readers, would be excessive egotism such as even I shrink from.

There is an implied rebuke here, of all those political-personal blogs which have – or at any rate which promise – several more or less unrelated but nevertheless continuing threads of comment: heavy metal rock, Linux, and the infinitely fascinating behaviour of my dog, Goldwater – the denunciation of all enemies everywhere of the State of Israel, libertarian philosophy, and chocolate cakes – the goodness of guns, the badness of New Labour, Scrabble. These thread clutches often come in threes, with number three being an oh-so-artful and self-mocking descent from twin peaks of profundity to one shallow duck pond of (still quite profound – oh yes!) trivia. On old gag. Sometimes a mixture of themes of this sort is present, but not advertised at the top. The idea is that cake-persons will be dosed constantly with the truth about the Middle East, or some such propaganda coup combination. And indeed, if you happen to love the writer then you will want to read it all, the philosophy, the Middle East, the computer programmes, the dog, the cakes, everything. (In the case of the blogger I've just linked to it's more like: the philosophy, the Middle East, and nail varnish.) But the danger is that you may say to hell with it.

Blogs are not newspapers. Newspapers can be glanced over, and unwanted material can easily be navigated around. The headlines and the pictures draw you quickly to where you want to be. A newspaper is itself, and it is also a map of itself.

Blogs are not like that. Blogs are linear. They are not maps. Something you don't want to read gets in the way of what you do want to read. So if you have distinct kinds of things you want to say, keep the linear streams distinct also.

That's my hunch anyway.

Next question: going back to the idea of putting everything on Samizdata, do I not want very many readers? Do I not want to tell the Samizdata crowd (and it's quite a crowd compared to any trickle that materialises here) about the wonderfulness of string quartets? Well, I do, and I don't. It's complicated. And it will have to keep for later.

There have now been two consecutive bits of navel gazing here, so I promise to give that a rest for the next few postings.