The Blogtrax enterprise speeds along its timeline towards the Inside Out paper and the Miami destination. Destination or station? It seems more like a journey or a duration than anything else. In some sense Blogtrax was complete at its inception, as good a part of the process of turning inside out as any. Blogging seems to work in an inside-out-sort-of-way. Face to face we may begin with academic/professional persona (maybe later on some personal stuff floats in); in blogging we start with ourselves (or the MilkTray version) then bring the academic/professional in from time to time. Maybe.

inventive and ephemeral media need to be sustained (…..) that are sites of experimentation for practices of writing and linguistic performance; for language, both written and spoken, is everyone’s commodity, the site par excellence of anonymous practices of creation and circulation, in which culture, and thus a freedom, is crystallized and concretized. (deCerteau, 1997:128)

Our edited, reviewed, revised and published texts begin and end, are complete and bounded despite the fact that we claim they are part of an ongoing conversation, but our postings are much more spontaneous, even at times inchoate, rambling, half-connected and never complete. Perhaps at best they are insider stories. They turn inside out - and this autoethnographic process does this, too. The inner workings of jottings, musings, impressionistic thoughts and emotions go down, go public prior to substantial reworking. And as they go along they collect and discard readers, comments, and other links. Later postings begin to allow new readings of old ones and what seemed like a well-worn track along which the research process progresses becomes one path among many.

Still, there’s analysis, and summation, writing up and the whole tricky business of presentation. The part where you start to lose depth by attempting to achieve coherence. We have to learn to handle complexity and turn that multidimensional patchwork of bloglives into something else, something more conventional and bounded. But, really, to be faithful to the enterprise, even the early drafts of paragraphs and fragments and bits that will eventually be hidden or deleted are potential postings on Blogtrax. Another avenue for publication, capturing the process on the move as far as one ever can.