Blogging: Part the First :)

Reflections on Blog Culture:
It was quite interesting to select and follow various blogs this week. I did a little searching for blogs with similar interests / backgrounds to my own, blogs posted by people I know personally, and blogs I remember from past explorations. I specifically remembered reading a blog, Culture Cat, about a year ago: The writer is a fellow PhD student with interests in blogging and enjoys Diana Krall’s music. Seems like a stellar individual, right? So, I spent time delving into her blog. I also spent some time looking at Trey Martindale’s blog as well as Brian Lamb’s blog (both guys presented at the IT Institute). I found a couple of random blogs by just poking around… College Student and Marine’s Wife.

I enjoyed the posting by Megnut and her descriptions of blogs, that blogs range from being a “personal diary, concerned with boyfriend problems” to the more traditional “weblogs-are-links-plus-commentary” definition. The blogs I followed were at both extremes and in the middle. College Student rambled about her crushes on her TA and scholastic challenges, i.e., "Calculus is going to kill me.” At the other extreme, Brian Lamb links to a lot of outside resources and shares scholastic implications.

Social Interactions:
It was interesting to follow the social interactions that occur and analyze the differences based on blogging environments. For instance, LiveJournal provides a seamless option to add friends and join / form communities with similar interests. By looking at a user’s profile in the LiveJournal's blogland, you can quickly see that Marine’s Wife has 22 interests groups, 11 friends, and belongs to 3 communities. By clicking on any of these links, you can find others who share interests with Marine's Wife, details about her friends, and see conversations within her communities of practice.

Social interactions also happen in blogs outside of LiveJournal. Brian Lamb has done a great job including links to other blogs and often this is reciprocated. If I had ten hours to spare, I’d probably spend it looking around Brian’s blog – WOW! He has amazing and timely postings. For instance, Following the Man of the Crowd begins tomorrow in downtown Manhattan. For detailed information, you’ll have to follow this link. It sounds like such a, to borrow Brian’s term, “groovy” experiment. Also on Brian’s blog, I saw great way to visualize metadata in flickr. The bigger the link, the more popular the tag.

And here is a ingenious use of flickr tags. Click through the image to see potential implications. :)

Organization:
I really enjoyed Culture Cat and her blog. The inclusion of categories made it easy to find similar entries within her blog. For instance, if I enjoyed her political commentary, I simply click on Politics, and I find every entry she has coded with this tag. Brian’s blog also included categories which is a common practice of advanced bloggers.

Another interesting thing about advanced bloggers is their ability to incorporate three dimensional effects to their entries. For example, in one of Culture Cat’s entries, she shares details about a "Prom" party she attended last Saturday. So, she uploads a picture of her in the dress from 1994 and another picture of her in the same dress last week. Culture Cat also uploaded a picture of note her friend left her ... . This was a great way to bring a artistic flaire to her blog.

In conclusion, I think novice bloggers may use blogs as an online journal and perhaps begin to establish social connections with other bloggers. Advanced bloggers establish categories or their postings, provide links to other urls, upload pictures, and establish communities of practice with bloggers with similar interests.

Logged hours: 6 hours total, 1 hour each day for 6 days this week (Sun-Fri) reading blogs.