Blog Post #1 - The Nature of Blog

The word "blog" is quite new to our language and serves as both a noun and a verb. Already it has other forms--blogginess, blogosphere. I attribute the word's vast use and evolution to the quick proliferation of blogs. As you will/have read, a new blog is created every minute. Astounding.


After reading Sullivan, watching "Your Brain on Blog," and reading "It's the links, stupid," you'll write your first blog post. You may feel like you're flying a little blind and this makes sense. For most of you, this is a new form of writing, a new genre. While you may have read blogs, you have not written one. It's a bit like me asking you to try your hand at writing a sonnet when you've only recently been introduced to that poetic form. So view this first post as an experiment. You're going to be thinking about what tone you want to strike, what your blogging persona is, how much depth you want to go into, how you'll convey your ideas -- text, image, hypertext, video etc. Blogging is inherently experimental because, as Sullivan points out, it's like writing out loud. The form is an incomplete one that I would equte to early stage drafting. Hopefully, your blog and your presentation of yourself as an academic thinker on it will evolve the more you blog. And now, time to be brave and jump off the blogging precipice.

Before writing your first blog, be sure to thoroughly read the blog post guidelines on Ctools in the Resources/The Blogosphere and Your Place in it folder.

Below are some questions to get you started on post #1. You may choose to use one or several of these questions to shape your first entry, but also feel free to take your own approach to discussing how you're thinking about academic blogging (as opposed to journalistic or personal blogging) and responding to Sullivan and the Economist article. You've got great latitude in this form. Don't hesistate to use it.

What assumptions about blogging did you bring to this course?

How are you currently thinking about your blog for this class in terms of purpose?

What concerns do you have about blogging?

How are you thinking about your academic blogging persona?

What idea or ideas from Sullivan were most illuminating? How and why? Anything you'd like to take issue with or expand on?

How is a blog a visual text? If we call it that, what does that term do to the way we as bloggers conceive of our text? (Think about the Sheehan reading--"Being Visual, Visual Beings.")

What questions do you have about the form, specifically as it pertains to academic blogging?

Image from: http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/