It occurred to me that some of the terms in discussions of blogging might be unfamiliar, so I thought I’d post a few definition links here in case anybody needs them.
Social Software
Folksonomy
Vlogging
Audio Blogging
Podcasting
RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
Also, a few relevant not-blogging social software applications:
Flickr
del.icio.us
And for people like us: CiteULike
Several things happened in the past few weeks that point to the fact that blogging is becoming a normal, and even corporate, activity:
Longtime academic blogger Jill Walker won a 100,000 kroner award from the University of Bergen, Norway for excellence in research dissemination through her blog. (That’s the equivalient of US$16,000.) This story was picked up on many, many academic blogs and is generally viewed as a justification of research blogging. Jill’s blogged her way through a doctoral disseratation and a number of publications and presentations.
Her blog is also of interest as a model of how one might rhetorically structure an academic blog for maximum professional benefit. Go and look at the way she’s constructed her sidebars and selected a very specific tone for the whole thing — light and friendly but also knowledgeable and confident in announcing accomplishments. She’s also got some current thoughts on WOW up, for those of you who are interested in that area.
Steven Krause, a digital rhetorician over at EMU, points out that the Department of Labor now lists blogging as an occupation. It appears under the heading of “writers and editors”:
Bloggers write for the Internet. Most bloggers write personal reflections on a subject of close personal or professional interest. Some blogs take the form of a personal diary; others read like reports from the field—first-hand, subjective accounts of an event or an activity. Most blogs are written for recreational reasons with little expectation of earning a fee; however, some blogs promote a business or support a cause and may generate interest or income through other activities.Steve also points out that there are a surprising number of hits for "blogger" on Monster.com.
Finally, when my husband was driving through Fort Smith, Arkansas, this past week, he noticed a big billboard for AT&T that referenced blogging. The concept of blogging wasn’t peripheral to the message — it filled the board, and the AT&T logo was the “o” in the word. And this was in an ad way over on the western side of Arkansas.
Blogs haven’t been an underground phenomena in some time, but neither have they been this much a part of the mainstream and corporate cultures.
This is my first blog experience, which seems strange since my research is almost all on the internet. So, this will be a new learning experience for me. I had a couple thoughts as I read the articles - I'll share one of them. It seems like in the early articles there's a lot of discussion about how there aren't set norms for online communities. I wonder if and how that's changed as the Internet has become incorporated into the lives of Americans. In particular, kids in school are using e-mail and the Internet at an early age, where they might develop norms about electronic communication in a different way than those of us who started using e-mail at a much later age.