I’ve been thinking back over my blogging history. I think my blog has evolved - perhaps, it’s changing all the time. My first postings (just over a year ago) were quite tentative. I didn’t have any idea what I was trying to do. I learnt about blogging from Colin, and I was just trying out really. I tried to keep it quiet. I wasn’t ‘a blogger’ - I was just testing the tools. I told one or two people, but this comment was quite honest:
To the best of my knowledge, only a few people have looked over this blogspot…and most of them are me or related, but probably more will (hi Cathy), so I thought a few more links would jolly things along..
Only later when I learnt that one or two people had my address did I start taking it a little more seriously. I remember showing someone Michele and Colin’s blogspot and suddenly seeing a link mine on the sidebar. That was a bit emotional. I was a bit shocked. That was a transition point. I thought, if other people are really going to read this it better be worth it. I suppose I constructed an audience at that point. I started making a bit more of an effort - mentioned my blog to one or two people who I thought might be interested. Lately, I’ve been a lot more upfront about it. I’ve come out as a blogger - I’m really into it! And now this is a new phase, because I’ve made a transition now in terms of wanting to fully understand what blogging means…and this autoethnography is a tool.
We are the research, the researched and the researchers, so I think the key is just to try to capture what’s going on in order to make sense of the practice of blogging and the performance of identity in blogging. If anything blogtrax could be metablogging - a blog in which themes about the blogosphere arise, get tested, revised, changed and discarded. It could also be a place for records of discussions and links to readings or pattern-recognition in the work of others. As a sort of research credibility insurance exercise I’m going to look up a bit about autoethnography. At the moment I see this study as ‘two interwoven autoethnographies of (academic?) bloggers’ - although I’m not particularly keen to close down on that too quickly. BTW on a more mundane level, the blogtrax skin/ layout etc could be changed…does it need images?…feel free, I think at the moment anything goes!
Thanks and all systems nearly go
This is great, all as planned so far, with user names etc as we discussed.
I think Typepad looks good but will need time to look up properly.
Am feeling uncertain already … do you think we need to blog here everytime we blog something on out personal blogs?
And shall I write a few notes from our meeting on here too to set out some of the things we think might be themes? Maybe I could list some issues, some themes and some questions? These would not be to set down boundaries, but would be part of our record keeping.
