Blogging about Blogs

Since Hourihan suggests that blog posts are normally short and can be “a short thought that previously would have gone unwritten,” this blog post will reflect that sentiment. I have all sorts of random short little thoughts about blogging.

I sort of “fell” into blogging several months back when I was leaving for co-op and a few of my library friends thought that a group blog would be a great way to stay in touch. At that time I barely knew what a blog was. Although I blogged with them all summer, I never really made efforts to learn more about this new medium that I was using. For that reason, I have found the articles in this week’s reading to be very interesting. Who knew there was so much to be said about blogging? It was neat to learn some of the key blogging terms such as trackback, blogroll, permalink and ping. I’m not sure I’m entirely clear yet on ping and trackback. Would sites like Technorati and applications like RSS be examples of “pinging?”

It was interesting to read about the evolution of blogs in just a short time. They seemed to have originally started as just links to other sites with a bit of commentary attached. From there they’ve gone from personal journal entries about the mundane and the asinine, to present-day blogs that can have a considerable impact on society as they touch on controversial issues in the news, politics and can be written by politicians, experts and journalists. As I was reading the Wikipedia article, I could not help thinking, “Where have I been?” I had not heard of these “professional bloggers” or seen any of them interviewed on television. I’ll certainly keep my senses alert for it now.

I find fascinating all of the different ways that blogs have been used. I certainly had never considered most of them before. Like many applications of web 2.0, blogging is about creating community, and I think it is great how blogs can be an inexpensive and timely platform for members of subcultures and speakers of minority languages to get together in spite of the geographical distance that separates them. It was also interesting to read Blood’s thoughts on how a blog is a forum to amplify “one another’s voices when pointing to other weblogs” since I have been asked in an interview how I had "celebrated the achievements of co-workers or colleagues." If only I had thought of that in the interview!

As a former teacher, I was intrigued by the article Anatomy of a Blog which provides a basic explanation of the complexities of blogs and then gives great examples of their application in the classroom. For the first time in two years I got that really excited feeling I used to get when I was coming up with what I thought was going to be a “brilliant” unit/lesson plan. My students would have loved incorporating blogging into their assignments. Not only would they have thought it was cool (something a teacher always strives for), but blogs would have facilitated activities such as teacher/student conferencing, peer editing and other regular classroom activities that take up so much time. And it would been easier to provide student feedback through a blog. One idea that I had (if I ever go back to teaching) was for a novel study. In a group the students could each take on the role of one of the characters in a novel and that “groupblog” as those characters. How fun is that? Sorry, I’ll reign myself in.

These thoughts also led me to reflect on some of the problems of blogging. One of the constant struggles in my teaching career was educating my students on the difference of formal and informal writing. In an age of email, MSN etc, they honestly did not understand why they could not use abbreviations like BTW, U (for you) in their essays. As the blogging community grows to include politicians, journalists and scholarly writers, I wonder what effect (if any) this will have on the writing style of the masses, particularly in writing arenas that have, until this point, been fairly formal in style. Will we continue to see a deterioration of writing style in society as a whole and is this a problem?

I had also never considered some of the other blogging dilemmas like comment spam and trackback spam that Gardner speaks of in her article.

Two of my favourite things about blogs were discussed in the articles as well. In my opinion, one of the things that make blogs so unique are the comments. Just like we turn to the backpage of an assignment to see our professor’s comments (haven’t we done this since we were in grade school?), we get a certain satisfaction to see others’ responses to our thoughts and words. Susan suggested in an early blog post that perhaps this is indicative of our society’s infatuation with itself, and I think she may be right. But whatever the reason, it doesn’t change the fact that (for me at least) half the fun of blogging is following the comment thread. Secondly, I agreed with Hourihan who emphasizes that the blog conventions are what make them comfortable. It’s nice to know that blogs (for the most part) look and work the same way. There’s no figuring out what has to be done in order for me to do a quick read or make a quick comment.