You’d think from all the discussion about blogging being a highly interactive community activity from “Joi Ito”:http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html, “Jim Moore”:http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jmoore/secondsuperpower.html, “Ross Mayfield”:http://www.socialtext.net/mayfield/index.cgi?social_network_dynamics_and_participatory_politics and others that “Blogger”:http://www.blogger.com/, one of the most popular weblog services, would have been supporting the ability to comment for a long time now. But of course it hasn’t been – until now.

Of course a dedicated blogger could always add the facility to comment to their site using an external add-on but how many would? Well, apparently not many. Overall, “less than half”:http://www.ics.uci.edu/%7Ejpd/classes/ics234cw04/herring.pdf of people have comments turned on in their weblogs and this largely depends on what the default setting for the software provided is (and the number of comments actually made on most weblogs is low to none).

Anyhow, let’s not be too churlish – the latest revision of Blogger does add some good features – it even adds one or two things I can’t get through Moveable Type (as standard) yet – the ability to email a posting to your blog for example, and the creation of a standardised ‘blogger profile’ page. It’s just a pity it only offers Atom, not RSS feeds, and doesn’t support the absolutely vital feature of categories (see below this post and the list of categories I provide on the right).

A netfriend of mine, Melanie McBride has written an excellent overview of the issues around “Blogging, Equality and the Future”:http://www.mindjack.com/feature/linkedout.html on “Mindjack”:http://www.mindjack.com/, a magazine I have been involved with for some time. It quotes those who believe blogging is a vital democratic tool but also includes the welcome cautionary voice of “Danah Boyd”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ who points out the un-acknowledged barriers to blogging (very much in the terms I plan to in my own PhD). I could go on but why not read the article for yourself!

I start far more posts than I actually post (I have 30 in draft at the moment) because I am disciplining myself to one post a day. Which is why I am only just now bringing My So-Called Blog (written in January) to your attention.

It isn’t very deep or academically rigorous but it’s nonetheless fascinating to me because it shows the motivations and some of the consequences of this behaviour. My favourite quote:

He wanted his posts to be read, and feared that people would read them, and hoped that people would read them, and didn’t care if people read them. He wanted to be included while priding himself on his outsider status. And while he sometimes wrote messages that were explicitly public — announcing a band practice, for instance — he also had his own stringent notions of etiquette. His crush had an online journal, but J. had never read it; that would be too intrusive, he explained.

Thanks to Many-to-Many for the link

In the spirit of Phil Gyford’s rendition of “Pepys Diary”:https://blog.org/archives/000604.html there are several other weblog-ified classic literary diaries that have started up. The classic Victorian diary spoof “Diary of a Nobody”:http://www.diaryofanobody.net/ is quite entertaining.

It is “Simon Cozens”:http://simon-cozens.org/’ (rather free) English translation of The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon Pillow Talk, however, that is to my mind the most successful adaptation yet. Why? Because in his rendition it seems exactly like the blog of a contemporary teenage girl, yet the reflections (of a woman in the court of the Japanese Emperor) are a thousand years old. Rarely does history seem to speak to us so directly.

Of course “some people”:http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/32554 think in making its relevance apparent Simon is barbarously mangling the poetry of the original text. Well, there’s nothing to prevent people who find it interesting from taking a look at the extracts translated by others that are “available online”:http://home.infionline.net/~ddisse/shonagon.html, buying the ‘canonical’ paperback translation by Ivan Morris (Amazon UK) (Amazon US) or even the reading it “in the original”:http://www.wao.or.jp/naniuji/koten/makurano.htm. Besides, his is the most complete translation available online for free (that I am aware of).

It’s in the planning stages (see “this wiki”:http://joi.ito.com/joiwiki/LoicLondonMay04) but seems to be settling around the evening of May 12th. It looks as if there’ll be at least 50 people coming, including quite a few of the people on “my blogroll”:http://www.bloglines.com/public/derb/. I’ll be there – especially if it’s at a Japanese restaurant…

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

(If you like this you may also want to check out “Notcon”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_net_politics.html#001081)

I’d like to collect a selection of weblogging “manifestos” containing descriptions of what weblogging is supposed to be “for” and who webloggers are (not statistical surveys, but people’s views). I sense that there is a growing self-awareness from “a list” bloggers and an emergent notion of what weblogging is supposed to be about but I would like to trace its roots. Can any of my readers suggest a good way of collecting and analysing what has been said in a way that is ‘unbiased’?

I want to write about the documents I have found wearing my academic hat so I can’t just say ‘here are some interesting links that I found’ – I have to be able to claim that these are in some way representative – or preferably that these are the most influential. I tried typing ‘weblog manifesto’ into various weblogging search engines and didn’t get much back that was useful. Googling for ‘weblog manifesto’ found some interesting stuff (a “commercial blogging manifesto”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2003/02/26.html and a “Draft Manifesto for the Role of Weblogs in the Larger Society”:http://www.thesentimentalist.com/archives/000076.html), but I sense that the links I found were not the most influential either. I didn’t find the paper on “Emergent Democracy”:http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html that way for example – and I imagine it has been influential (or at least the views of its writers have been). I would be interested in the most important “old media” writers about weblogging as well. Any ideas?

Thanks to Ezther Hargittai for the link (and creating the graph)

A recent blog survey on Expectations of Privacy and Accountability from Fernanda Viégas at the “MIT’s media lab”:http://web.media.mit.edu/. The results found were interesting but I found one of the asides in the report interesting as well, for a different reason. Ninety percent of those blogging in their (admittedly biased) sample have better than a high school education but the report begins by being critical of the notion that weblogging is “a marginal activity restricted to the technically savvy”?

“Giles Turnbull”:http://www.gorjuss.com/index.html asked readers of a mailing list he runs “why they gave up blogging”:http://www.gorjuss.com/luvly/20040317-blogless.html. The answers were interesting, particularly if you look at them from a Bourdieusian perspective. Reading between the lines, several of them started weblogging because it was ‘cool’ then gave up when it seemed like everyone else was doing it and it therefore became uncool. Or as one respondent said, “General sense of despair with: a) myself, b) the internet population in general.” I wonder whether the generally more snarky and amusing character of the comments he received were anything to do with his respondents being more likely to be British? Hmm…

Thanks to the ever-interesting Danah Boyd for the link

It’s always worth taking a look down the right side of blog.org from time to time, as I keep adding little additional features there as I find them on other people’s weblogs. Since my last major innovation, “adding RSS links to the subject categories”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_weblogs.html#001012 I have:

• changed the way I represent the weblogs I subscribe to. Rather than give you an increasingly long, unorganized list, I now point you to “my bloglines page”:http://www.bloglines.com/public/derb/ where you can see them all organized by subject and read them the same way I do
• added it a section for “what I’m reading”:http://allconsuming.net/weblog.cgi?url=http://www.blog.org/ (with its own “XML feed”:http://allconsuming.net/xml/users/currently_reading.derb.xml of course)
• added the “Weather Pixie”:http://weatherpixie.com/ at the bottom to let you know what the weather is like here in London UK where I live.

Any suggestions about what I should add next?