The WELL: inkwell.vue.258: David Kline, "Blog!"

#102: David Kline (dkline) Fri 18 Nov 05 14:57

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 14:57:00 PST

Just wanted to point to a fascinating piece in the Columbia Journalism Review (by Paul Berger, a contributing editor to my book) on the differences between the British and American blogging scene.

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/051117berger/ [Read entire topic]

#101: David Kline (dkline) Fri 18 Nov 05 12:49

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 12:49:00 PST

Thanks for having me. And thank you, Jon, for leading the discussion. [Read entire topic]

#100: Hal Royaltey (hal) Fri 18 Nov 05 12:41

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 12:41:00 PST

Hard to believe, but our two weeks have passed and the interview is officially over, and it's time to thank David and Jon for a great time.

On the Well, however, nothing is ever really over. Please feel free to continue the discussion. There are a number of questions and comments still hanging fire ...

Thanks guys!! [Read entire topic]

#99: David Kline (dkline) Fri 18 Nov 05 10:57

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 10:57:00 PST

Actually, Sharon, a recent AOL survey found that blogs are more likely to deal with personal matters than politics or current events, and nearly 50% of bloggers see the activity as a form of therapy.

According to this survey, about one-half of bloggers (48.7%) keep a blog because it serves as a form of therapy, and 40.8% say it helps them keep in touch with family and friends. Just 16.2% say they are interested in journalism, and 7.5% want to expose political information. Few see blogging as their ticket to fame.

I addressed this issue in my book: _____________

Blogs help break through the anonymity and isolation of modern life. They give people a voice and a forum with which to speak truth to power -- or at least to reach out and touch someone. And although blogs certainly won't give rise to a million new citizen-Shakespeares, they do enable talented but heretofore-unacknowledged people with something to say to find an audience -- and thereby pluck from the indifference of daily life a bit of validation for themselves, their ideas and their creative abilities.

In other words, blogging's ultimate product is "empowerment." A weblog "creates a fluid and living form of self-representation, like an avatar in cyberspace that we wear like a skin," says the Web producer Tom Coates. "Through it we articulate ourselves."

Or, to put it another way, "I blog, therefore I am."

[Indeed, blogging] can produce a new and powerful sense of meaning in a blogger's life. Tens of thousands of women, for example, are now documenting their rites of passage as new mothers or in new careers through blogs -- and just as important, sharing those experiences with others and receiving support and counsel in the process. In a similar vein, many others are writing a daily record of their battles against cancer and other deadly illnesses, sharing their strength, hopes and fears with friends and supporters they never knew they had.

The truth is that these are not just the tiresome ramblings of the boring written to the bored. Though for the most part not professional writers, bloggers are often eloquent in the way that only those who are not self-consciously polished often are -- raw, uncensored, and energized by the sound of their newly-awakened voices. And by keeping a daily record of their rites of passage, bloggers often give a shape and meaning to the stages and cycles of their lives that would otherwise be missed in the helter-skelter of modern existence.

Sages and psychotherapists, after all, always advise us to view the struggles of our lives as journeys -- as pilgrimages, if you will -- so that we might gain from them not just the memory of difficulties endured but the wisdom of lessons learned and challenges met. Finally this advice is being put into practice on a massive scale, by millions of ordinary people through their blogs. And while it is impossible to divine the end result of this epic social experiment on either the individual lives of the bloggers themselves or on society as a whole -- other than, perhaps, to predict a decline in the numbers of people who visit therapists just to have someone to talk with about their lives -- one must assume that the more deliberatively people appraise and document their lives, the more purposefully those lives will be lived.

________________________ [Read entire topic]

#98: Gail Williams (gail) Fri 18 Nov 05 10:42

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 10:42:00 PST

Why not? Lots of interesting ideas, and plenty to talk about! [Read entire topic]

#97: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Fri 18 Nov 05 10:35

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 10:35:00 PST

We didn't get to blogging and media, either. There are so many kinds of blogs, we could go on for weeks.

A new discussion starts today, but as a former host of inkwell, I know it's fine for us to keep posting here. I'm prepared to hang around and hope David will hang in, too. [Read entire topic]

#96: Sharon Brogan (sbmontana) Thu 17 Nov 05 22:01

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 22:01:00 PST

We have focused mostly on political and business blogs -- as most discussions do -- but most blogs are neither of these. They are personal blogs, some with a theme (knitting, or kids, or poetry) and some that are more like public journals or 'commonplace books'. These are the blogs I like to read. This is the kind of blog I write -- or 'keep' --

I'm curious why they aren't the blogs we talk about? Because they are on the 'long tail', with small (relatively) audiences?

I am confident that my poems get more readers online than they would if I were actually "published" -- between Watermark and my poetry sites, hundreds of hits a day. For poems. I think this is amazing. [Read entire topic]

#95: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Thu 17 Nov 05 21:00

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 21:00:00 PST

Good idea!

Meanwhile, this is the last night of the _Blog!_ discussion, unless we want to continue hanging out. David, do you have anything to add? [Read entire topic]

#94: Nancy White (choco) Thu 17 Nov 05 19:50

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 19:50:00 PST

Hey, we should invite Alexandra to be a guest in VC and blogs! [Read entire topic]

#93: Sharon Brogan (sbmontana) Wed 16 Nov 05 20:15

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 20:15:00 PST

The Newshour did a long piece tonight on "Citizen Journalism": http://www.pbs.org/newshour/media/index.html [Read entire topic]