The idea that you can "think rhizomically" insinuates that you should consider things in terms of having no center or structure. But Professor Dalke mentioned an interesting point last class: Can you organize the world without a center? Isn't an individual constantly thinking in terms of themselves? Jo(e) references the blogging medium, talking about "Bitch Ph.D."s blog as "her ideas, her opinions, her style of writing". Wouldn't that mean that a blog is an expression of an individual, putting whomever is posting, whether it be the blogger themselves or someone leaving a remark about the material, in the spotlight? Just by skimming through the comments on Jo(e)'s blog, one finds a sea of "I"s...

The Internet is a wonderful place.  However, it's also very dangerous.  It's easy to think about the dangers the Internet presents when you first shop on a new website, and you wonder whether or not giving them your credit card information is really a good idea.  Or when you meet someone new online, you wonder if they're actually who they say they are, or if they're really twice your age and incredibly creepy.  I think the most dangerous thing about the internet, however, is the way it allows us to mask ourselves in anonymity and pretend like that makes it okay for us to behave badly. Or even the thought that using nicknames means that no one will find out who we are.

As jo(e) notes in "Blogging as an Emerging Genre," a blog offers the potential for "a text with multiple voices," less constrained by a single format of writing and open to everyone. In the responses to jo(e)'s post, numerous words (many contradictory) in relation to the concept of blogging caught my attention: "broader," vs. "trivial," "superficial by its instant, easy access." Individuals' purposes in blogging also differed: "the blog is this kind of spastic release of energy for me" vs.

Dictionary.com says the definition of a database is "a comprehensive collection of related data organized for convenient access, generally in a computer."

The same site recognizes an archive as "any extensive record or collection of data."

     Jo(e)'s post was interesting, but the comments after it were even more so.  The post by Dr.K concerning how "information gets trivialized and made superficial by its instant, easy access" when it is put on the internet brought up memories from Folsom's article. Databases and blogs are unifiers in the sense that they open new doors to those who had limited access to their information before, but is this necessarily a good thing?

Laurie McNeill's article "The Diary on the Internet" was published in 2003, meaning all the examples cited were from 2002 and sooner.  Many of them were even from the nineties!  I did not become acquainted with internet culture until I was nine, in 2001 (when I actually had a website on Digimon), and of course, I was nine and did not frequent any serious parts of the internet.

As we are reading these articles and blog posts about the genre of blogs, I began to think about why I read the blogs I read, and why I don't write one myself. (The second was fairly obvious, and flows from the first: I have a dairy, but a truly private, paper and pen documentation of lists and life, because nothing I say has a purpose besides fulling a need I have to catalog my life.) But I also realized as McNeill mentioned that "I am drawn to Web diaries that most closely resemble traditional literary tests" (25) that all of the blogs I read are by authors (and while I do not read many blogs, this is still, I believe, significant). They are usually by authors who have written books I like, and who do not often post meaningless rambles.

We began today's class by building a "web" among us, using points of likeness. This seemed hard to do, and we ended up using very general categories ("woman," "student"). We next turned to discussion about the klutziness/user-unfriendliness of our course page...there are too many places to "click," and so we get discouraged from being responsive to one another's comments....how to work w/ this limitation?