18.484 blogging and v(l)ogging

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 484.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
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         Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 07:11:35 +0000
         From: Norman Gray <norman_at_astro.gla.ac.uk>
         Subject: Re: 18.480 blogging and v(l)ogging

Greetings,

> From: Norman Hinton <hinton_at_springnet1.com>
>I find [blogs] self-serving,

True

>unstructured,

True

>and boring.

Frequently.

But this is the nature of people's diaries. A blog is not a
carefully-structured publication, but something much more like a
commonplace book which happens to be generally readable. An interesting
person will at least sometimes have something interesting in their blog,
and I get to look over their shoulder as they note it down for themself;
more one cannot expect.

It follows that it's not worth regularly slogging through a list of
bookmarked blogs. Blogs are hopeless without an aggregator of some type,
which can get the `headlines' from a number of blogs, so you only ever look
at a small number of articles. I'm only a semi-convert to blogs: I've been
using NetNewsWire for a while (for the Mac: <http://www.ranchero.com/>) and
find it makes blogs interesting and occasionally useful, though I'm not
convinced my life would be importantly worse without it.

Norman

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Norman Gray  :  Physics & Astronomy, Glasgow University, UK
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