Over at the academic group weblog Crooked Timber, they are asking their readers why do you run a weblog? This just happens to be one of my own PhD research questions! I intend to look at a much broader field than simply academic blogging activity but I still find the answers interesting – particularly as I try to think how I might fit such responses into my own (Bourdieusian) theoretical framework.
By a bizarre coincidence a friend of mine posted “a very similar question”:http://www.electricpenguin.com/blatherings/archives/002289.html at the same time. A “paper on the subject”:http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jpd/classes/ics234cw04/nardi.pdf [PDF] has been submitted to Communications of the ACM.
What about you? Why do you have a blog or personal home page (if you do)? If you had one once and abandoned it was there something you were hoping would happen that didn’t? Please use the comment feature to answer – I would be interested to know.
Hm, I was going to add a trackback ping from your posting to my blog entry about it, but .. you don’t seem to have trackback enabled?
Well, the URL is http://rae.tnir.org/archives/000528.html
Comment by Reid — 18 March 2004 @ 2:07 pm
David,
You were actually part of my inspiration for starting a blog. Before, the site was more of a personal journal. A place to reflect, complain, share good times and bad. But a few years ago I turned it into a site dedicated to “art, architecture, design, technology, & life. in manhattan.” I loved doing it, and spent many hours a day/week working on the site. I hope I touched some lives, and helped people, especially those in Manhattan, get a little closer to the wonderous joys the city has to offer.
Along the way, however, work engulfed my life, and I stopped posting. I miss it terribly. (I hope some others miss it as well!) I’m trying to start it again, but now I feel my first posting had better be really good. Waiting for time. Waiting for inspiration…
Comment by david — 18 March 2004 @ 6:04 pm
Thanks for highlighting this David, it’s really relevant to my research right now, at a time when I could do with some free data!
Comment by Mark Brady — 19 March 2004 @ 6:43 pm