Back in late November, I brought IDblog back from Google Siberia (read: blacklist) and announced that my focus going forward was going to change.
My blog posts, like my tweets, were going to be less about information design (IDblog’s original focus) and politics (a recent focus) and more about my upcoming studies in public health and the question of the obesity “epidemic.”
Well, it’s now 6 weeks later, and I’m pretty happy with the transition. But one thing has been bothering me.
The name IDblog just doesn’t fit anymore. I had gotten around this during my political period by saying it stood for “I Do blog” — not great, but not a huge problem either.
But now, “I Diet blog” doesn’t do it for me. For one, my focus here isn’t on diets per se. For another, while the term blog worked in 2001 when I started this, now in 2010, it feels like an old term.
Alas, a name I really liked — Weighty Matters — was already taken!
After crunching a few possibilities (I kinda liked “Weighty Bytes”), I decided that I really, really liked the meaning in this quote from my about page:
A Maven is someone who wants to solve other people’s problems, generally by solving his own. — Mark Alpert, The Tipping Point
According to Gladwell, mavens are:
“information specialists”, or “people we rely upon to connect us with new information.”
That’s what I expect to be doing with this blog going forward: sharing information I come across on the subject of weight. So, weight maven!
Courtesy of the wonders of modern technology (and wordpress.com’s setup), all the older idblog.org links will still work fine once the new domain is in place later this weekend.
My apologies for any confusion this causes! And as a person of the female persuasion, I do retain the prerogative to change my mind again in the future :).
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our Western diet -- especially sugar, refined grains, and industrial oils. Beth writes about nutrition, ancestral health, & food policy. And cats! 
Tackling the first person discussion of stuff people tend to wrap in layers of anxiety and distance . . . now that’s an interesting evolution of the medium.
That’s a great name Beth — and I’ve loved the transition.