[-empyre-] responses

Brandon Barr <barr@mail.rochester.edu> · Thu Jun 6 02:52:01 2002

Jill, great to have you!  A few responses:
Jill wrote:

What I'd really like to discuss with you is how weblogs can be part
of a *practice* rather than just chatting. I'm a researcher, and so I
blog as part of my research practice. It could just as well be seen
as an artistic practice, as at http://noemata.no.

This is an important shift, because it moves writing-as-practice into 
the public arena.  I had my writing students create Wiki pages 
instead of keeping a journal this last semester, and I saw a marked 
difference in the writing...precisely, I think, because the writing 
was done in the public sphere.  blogging breaks down the line between 
thought and presentation.  My blog server went down for over a week, 
and I felt completely unproductive, because my blog is my 
thinking--be it creative improvs, or sites that intrigue me and that 
I'm archiving for myself and others.
Jill wrote:

When you blog, anyone can read it. Really, of course, your audience
is quite limited. People self-select really fast - I certainly don't
stick around a blog I find boring. Over time, clusters of blogs grow
as people link to each other. I find this kind of emergent audience
fascinating, especially because of the way that readers - and writers
- find each other rather than signing up for something or being
brought into something from the start. You might want to have a look
at Mark Bernstein's a-life experiments of how blog clusters grow -
this is with simulated blogs. http://markBernstein.org/alife2.html I
love this stuff.

I've suggested elsewhere that blogs could offer a different sort of 
paradigm of measurement of the effectiveness of research--instead of 
peer-review, for instance.  Jill, I'd like to know whether you think 
blogging is as subversive as all that, or simply supplements the 
current research process.
Do any of you read or write blogs?

my blog is at http://brandonbarr.com/texturl/ and I'd LOVE to 
discover new academic blogs
--
Brandon Barr
University of Rochester
http://brandonbarr.com