Dear diary: blogging for grades

So I started writing a post the other day talking about how I don’t understand the whole blogging thing and that it bores the …. out of me (are we allowed to swear, as in real life, or is this an alter-universe? I'm not sure of blog etiquite), and that here I was being forced to write and worse READ blogs just so I can get a grade.

Then we talked about anonymity in the tutorial and I realised that had the class blog been anonymous I would already have posted that blog – that I had saved as a Word file and am now editing… significantly! Actually, I’m not using any of it.

So obviously anonymity does matter.

Here are some blogging issues I'd like to put out there:

On screen

Having a piece of paper to read is so much easier. You can come and go to it as you please, and you don’t have to dial up every time you want to read it again. Lovely if you have broadband but not when you have a USB modem that keeps kicking you off the internet….

Got yo’self a reader, boy

It’s hard concentrating on someone’s 1000-word post when the whole thing is sitting there in front of you, staring, taunting. Dennis, although your MySpace post was long, I really enjoyed it. But that may be mainly because of another thing we talked about in class, the echo chamber effect – you were preaching to the converted, brother.

Journals

Blogs and journals look rather similar, just in another guise. I almost started a livejournal, but lost interest halfway through setting it up. Plus, who’s gonna care what I did today: “Dear diary, today I went to school and I think I’m the only one in class who doesn’t like blogs.”

Now I’m re-reading this wondering if it is finished. (Who knew there would be pre-first-blog-post anxiety.) So to bring up another point from class – immediacy. Is this really central to blogs? If we are going to self-censor because the blog isn’t anonymous, then is it really immediate? Does everybody post exactly what they write the first time they type it up?

Dear diary: today I wrote my first post on the class blog.