I had a very earnest proto-journalist from the school paper come and interview me about weblogs today. Naturally, she asked what a weblog is. Unlike Liz & Danah, I don’t find this (or the subsequent question of what types there are) to be especially enthralling. Of course, there is the issue of working definitions for specifying a universe of research, but as for an “accepted” defintion, I don’t think there should be one.
Anyway, my answer to the question was something along those lines: “no one really knows what a blog is, but some know when they are blogging.” (Yes, I dream of becoming a cross between Morpheus and Yoda.) If I had only read The Wonderchicken’s post a bit earlier, I would have had a much better definition: “weblogs are like snorting coke off the bellies of teenage hookers” (an entirely decontextualized and denatured quote, that). Now that would have gotten more students interested in blogging.
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On the virtue of posting half-baked ideas
James McGee posted an article recently called Rational ignorance