This blogging thing Looks like that's one more semester under the bridge. This particular blog will probably be even more dormant than usual until early January, after that point I'll be posting here regulary to support my blogging based assignments. (That is, I'll be encouraging students to keep blogs and using this one to encourage them and explain "how to blog" while also posting about materially generally related to my classes.) I'll continue posting on my more general purpose blog at the same pace, perhaps even moving up to 2-3 posts/week.

I continue to be fascinated by this blog phenomena. On the one hand, its a loosely associated set of publishing technologies (automatic archiving, RSS, some CSS conventions etc.), on the other hand, its a somewhat isolated community of posters.

There are some good reasons why the blogosphere (note: I didn't invent this term) is relatively self-contained. The barrier to entry is low, really low, automated tools, such as Blogger, make keeping a blog easier and cheaper than keeping a traditional web page. It can't get much cheaper than that. The investments of time and understanding necessary to keep a blog aren't that much lower than the investments need to regularly read blogs. Anyone who's a dedicated blog reader will already have an understanding of the general conventions and technologies, so why not keep a blog yourself. In this sense its completely different from traditional journalism where there's a significant gap between reading a newspaper, say, and being a reporter.

Why does this community form around this particular set of technologies? There were on-line journals and self-publishing before there were blogs, and the number of ways private individuals can communicate on-line greatly exceeds the range of the bloging community. The blogosphere is a subset of the world wide web in the same way that web is, or was, a subset of the internet. (Should it be a point of pride that Gopher was once my primary way of accessing the internet? This fact shows both that I've doing this for awhile, and that I've been pretty clueless on occasion. At the very least, this experience enhanced my appreciation for Mosaic and its successors. If you haven't seen the internet without pictures, the illustrated version isn't as much of an immediate shock.)

The blogger community seems to be an integrated community. At least, its a more integrated community that the one that's grown up around other community building technologies, such as bulletin board style forums or even wiki. Each of those sets of technologies are designed to build communities and they have been successful in doing that, creating indepent communities using the same technologies, but otherwise independent of each other. That's a good thing, if a persons looking for discussion about strategies or back story to their favorite games, they don't want to wade through someone's reflections on a random news story of the day.

Blogging, on the otherhand, provides tools for the construction of individual voices. My blog is distinct from yours, but together, they make up a beautifully cacophonous community. (And so far, it seems to be much more diverse then many seem to believe. Maybe the recent elections helped to blanche the colors out of this community as it did out of all the others.)

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