Blogging

I’ve been seeing a lot of energy online about bringing the old web back, or bringing the humanity back to the web, or just trying to make some art, dammit. So, here’s my part. This blog is my corner of the World Wide Web. Of the non-corporate, non-monetized, non-advertised, non-user-tracked, human-scale online experience. I haven’t been blogging, partially because I’ve been holding back due to Not Having Anything Profound to Share™....

Holy. 20 years. 2 decades. That’s how long I’ve been blogging, how long this humble website has been around. The first (surviving) post was published on May 2, 2002, shortly after we found out that we were going to be adding a person to our family. That person is now 19 and in post-secondary education. That’s mind-boggling in ways that makes a couple decades of blogging seem a little less impressive....

Ben Werdmuller wrote a post this morning on the value of blogs and regular longer-form writing. I 1000% agree with him. You should start a blog, if you don’t have one already. There’s nothing better for organizing your thoughts and socializing ideas. You don’t have to labor for days over a post; blogs are often better when they’re off the cuff. Writing in an interface away from the hustle of social media often allows you to express yourself more calmly (I certainly find this to be the case)....

Tim Carmody, posting on Kottke.org, about Dan Cohen's "Back to the Blog" post. …blogging either needs its own mechanisms of ambient humanity — which it's had, in the form of links, trackbacks, conversations, even (gulp) comments, all of which replicated at least a fraction of the buzz that social media has — or it needs a kind of escape velocity to break that gravitational pull. Gravity or speed. Or a hybrid of both....

Alec Couros posted a quick throwaway on Facebook (I'd link to it, but Facebook doesn't work that way) It got a lot of likes, and then the comment thread kind of exploded. I posted several comments and replies, and realized that was a silly way to post that particular discussion because it's exactly the kind of thing we are talking about as killing blogging and personal publishing. I've pulled my comments together below....

A great summary of various bits of tech that made the early blogosphere1 so alive and vibrant in ways that hasn’t been captured or reproduced since. How can tools give individuals control over what they create, where they publish, who they follow, what they read, and how they share? These are currently controlled almost exclusively by one of two companies for the majority people on the modern internet. Something amazing, powerful, and enabling was lost in that transition....

Clarke, L, & Kinne, L. (2012). Asynchronous discussions as threaded discussions or blogs. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 29, 4-13. The article looked at students publishing online discussions using Blackboard and WordPress, and their reported sense of community, etc… Kinda perfect for use in my thesis. But the article is embargoed from our library collection, and the ISTE website for the journal locks it behind a broken paywall....

On why he won't be posting stuff to the new Branch semi-private conversation thingy (the one I linked to earlier ) Anyway, I can't just use it, because then I would be breaking a rule, one that keeps me from using services like Quora and Google-Plus. I'm not going to willfully put my writing in spaces that I have no control over. I'm tired of playing the hamster. The business models of these companies, if they become successful, keep them from being part of the web....

Interesting discussion about the nature of blogs, blogging, and where this stuff might be going. Some comments jumped out at me: Paul Bausch: The whole idea of comments is based on the assumption that most people reading won’t have their own platform to respond with. So you need to provide some temporary shanty town for these folks to take up residence for a day or two. And then if you’re like Matt–hanging out in dozens of shanty towns–you need some sort of communication mechanism to tie them together....

O’Donnell, M. (2006). Blogging as pedagogic practice: Artefact and ecology. Asia Pacific Media Educator. A really interesting paper based on a conference presentation. Talks about some of the promise of blogging as an agent of pedagogical change, but actually goes into some of the reasons why the change might happen (as opposed to other articles that leave it up to BECAUSE… MAGIC! BLOGS!) Basically – blogging changes the nature of discourse, making it idiosyncratic and reflective....