I use this page primarily as a placeholder link for comments in other people’s Weblogs. The Weblog that I currently maintain is fawny.blog.
I write a few active Weblogs. In case you are new to the genre, Weblogs take two canonical forms:
It is quite possible to combine the forms: You can write about your life, which itself includes the Web-surfing you do.
My Weblogs can be categorized as follows:
joeclark.org in August 2010
If you’re new to the whole concept, Rebecca Blood’s “Weblogs: A History and Perspective” is definitive. Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker article “You’ve Got Blog,” which I later deconstructed, describes the cultural phenomenon. (An updated rewrite of that same deconstruction appears in a chapter in the book We’ve Got Blog.)
You cannot understand Weblogs without understanding the nature of the Web. Items posted to Web sites are meant to be read. There are clear exceptions – company intranets, password-protected sites, subscriber-only areas – but the entire point of publishing online is to allow others to read and experience your work.
The Weblog format engages a quasi-dialogue in which the logger posts a link to and likely comments on a public Web posting elsewhere. The source can and very often does counterblog in return, and indeed it is possible for a handful of Weblogs to do nothing but react to and write to each other in public for days on end.
If you need an old-media example, think of newspaper columnists and letters-to-the-editor. But really, Weblogs constitute a new discursive form altogether, one of talking at.
Openness of this sort unnerves people; we’ve been brainwashed for generations to understand media as something rarefied and elitist. It is shocking to find that average people (even an actual journalist–author like me) can publish their own work. When part of what they publish is commentary on what someone else published, suddenly the true meaning of “free press” comes into play. What kind of press did we really have before?
Consequently, the most important thing to understand about Weblogs is: If you don’t want to get blogged, don’t post.
See also: Resources for Webloggers.
Updated 2010.08.29 13:33
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