Reply to comment

We started off discussing the usual audience of Laura Blankenship's blog, Geeky Mom, and learned that she has readers who are faculty at other schools, as well as a few mothers, but also an audience of some of her coworkers here at Bryn Mawr. But, she said, her coworkers rarely comment on the blog, though sometimes they do offer her comments in-person.

She also mentioned that she blogs about her kids sometimes, but she usually asks her kids' permission before writing about them, and they read the blog. This brought up some discussion on bloggers who write about every moment of their kids' lives, and how that might affect their kids in the future, once they've grown up.

From there, we talked about the evolution of blogs - they were originally invented as a way of sharing links, with a little commentary, but now, as Laura said, blogs are being used more as a type of social software (like Facebook or Myspace). She felt one of the big blogging booms began after 9/11, when people were seeking information from real people, not from the mainstream media, looking for the "real" story. 2004 was another "blogging boom," with the elections that year as the major topic.

We discussed how Laura's blog seems different from the others we've seen - the idea of Tim's blog is to create a public sphere; Kate used her blog as a sort of food column and diary; and the main drive behind Laura's blog seems to be creating connections and networking. She is very aware of her audience, she says, and knows who her loyal readers and commenters are. She also includes a lot more personal information on her blog. Readers can tell from following the blog when her house is messy, when she's off of work for a vacation, etc. She also showed us an entry she wrote a couple of years ago, asking her readers to help her decide an outfit for a formal event (she posted photos of all the different options).

It was also suggested that perhaps Geeky Mom is a hybrid of the other two blogs we had looked at so far - it contains a lot of personal information at some parts, which in a way gives it a diary feel like Kate's blog, but other sections are about technology, education, and promote more generalized conversation, like on Tim's blog. Some people preferred reading the personal entries, while others preferred to read about topics in technology or education, but the overall reaction of the class seemed to be that everyone felt welcomed by one aspect or another of Geeky Mom.

We finished by talking about the course more generally. Do we feel that Prof. Dalke is making us do a hybrid (or a hydra, as she said, which may not be coherent with itself) by having us post our papers online? Are we writing blog entries, or just putting our academic papers on display? Could that be an emerging genre?