mamamusings

elizabeth lane lawley's thoughts on technology, academia, family, and tangential topics

Tuesday, 22 October 2002

...is this thing on?

So I'm jumping on the blog bandwagon, along with a surprisingly large number of technologically forward-thinking netizens. I feel a little behind (under? swamped by?) the wave on this--usually I'm an early adopter of new communication technologies, and this time I'm coming in well after the technology has mainstreamed. But hurt pride aside, I'm fascinated by the potential of this medium. Not so much the personal publishing per se, but the interconnections among blogs, and the nonlinear concept-based path you can take through content once those interconnections are well-established. And the reputation/value issue--as more people link to your thoughts and comments, the more people who want to read them, and in turn want to read the blogs of the people you link to. Distributed processing at its very best. The "TrackBack" concept of cross-linking sites is really intriguing.

So the questions I'm pondering right now have to do with establishment, expansion, and gatekeeping of these interconnected webs of opinion and personal thoughts. One blog alone doesn't mean a whole lot...but a set of intertwined ideas that leads you to broaden your thinking means a great deal.

Posted at 1:15 PM in: idle thoughts
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microphone tapping from Many-to-Many on October 10, 2003 10:26 AM
Excerpt: It’s interesting to me to see how people approach blogging. The disjoint between the public and the private. The wondering about the audience. The exploration of a new space for writing. The acknowledgement of its social context. My first post,...
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Comment from MatthewM on December 19, 2002 4:30 PM (Permalink to Comment)

http://www.rit.edu/~mdm0173/blog


Liz sipping melange at Cafe Central in Vienna