I’ve found it very hard to comment and write here for many reasons, but probably mostly because I spend so much time in the blogosphere and know what I like to read. And like any fanboy, I like to pretend to the style and quality of writing that I enjoy in others. That is to say that there are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there thousands of blogs out there (that being just the LJ map), and there was a point where I was reading close to a hundred different blogs daily through an RSS reader. When you get that far into the blogosphere, however, you notice that much of what people write are responses to original material from prominent news sources (if it’s a focused blog – technology, gaming, etc.), or responses to their own life experiences. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t want to devalue the digital records people keep of their analogue lives, but at a certain point I can’t cope with that much emotional investment in people I don’t actually know.

So I've been contemplating setting up my own blog. It's exceedingly un-me to do so - or at least, me prior to this semester. But I've enjoyed getting my word vomit out on something that other people might actually read. It's somehow satisfying in a way that a private journal would not be.
Problem is, I don't know what I'd blog about. The best blogs seem to have themes - parenting blogs, political blogs, celebrity blogs, technology blogs.
What could I write about, besides "Boring college blog"?
Do any of you have your own blogs, outside of this one? What do you write about?

Have any of you seen this before? Night Owl’s post on the slick new version of iTunes reminded me that I’d come across this application a little while ago and meant to blog about it. Basically, it’s a flash-based player with an interface designed to look just like one of the pretty new video iPods (you get to choose whether you want the black or the white model), and it offers an amazingly extensive library of FREE streaming content -- I was seriously impressed by how many of my requests it was able to come up with.

Early in the semester, we asked the question 'What is a blog?' John McCain has a definitive answer. In a new and frightening piece of legislation a blog is defined as "any site that allows comments, authors and personal profiles." His bill proposes that blog sites be responsible for all content in their comments and user profiles. Its ostensible purpose is to curb the distribution of child pornography, but in reality its effects will be much more wide-ranging. Blogs are required to report any illegal images or videos that are posted or face stiff fines. Bloggers will have to police themselves, and since they may not know whether an image is copyrighted or "legal" some might have to shut down rather than risk paying the huge fines.

I just ran across a really interesting blog post on The Daily Dish about the nature of interpersonal connections online, particularly on blogs. It's definitely worth a read.

This is in response to Oz's post about email diaries. I had a similar experience at one point a few years ago, except mine occured on IM. I have a friend who I was intially introduced to by a mutual friend in real life, but who I first got to know well on IM. We were both working boring summer jobs far away from our normal circles of friends, so we ended up talking online a lot, sometimes for hours every day. When we got back to school, we started to see eachother in real life more, but we kept up with the incessant IM conversations for a long time.

It's true that the end of semester increase in post frequency has allowed for a lot of fun interaction. It also seems that without a ton of class reading to discuss, people are making fewer monologues and are actually responding to eachother, which I think is fun.

Early on, we talked a lot about whether blogs were truly interactive, or whether they offered a false interactivity. I think in these last few weeks I've gotten a better sense of the kind of interactivity that really serious bloggers manage. Professional bloggers often post several times a day, and when you have a group of peop

In the last couple of days, when I haven't been studying or writing, I've been checking my new favorite blogs for updates. When there aren't updates to read, I read the archives.
Well, people, I've hit day one on most of them. I've read all there is to read. And they usually only update once a week.
Which leads me to ask, what are you guys reading online? I need to feed my blog addiction!

Tom Delay has a blog. For 75 minutes that blog was open to public comments. 111 people used that window to vent their anger, calling him everything from a "disgrace" to an "assclown" to many much dirtier things and even wondering "When you're locked up, will you smuggle blog posts out in your visitors' rectums?" The open comments were shut down and removed, but this site preserved them as "A tribute to the 75-minute period where Tom Delay actually received feedback from America."

A few of the comments are thought-out and address specific questions, but most are just ugly name-calling. This semester we've seen comment sections used as a valuable space for dialogue between reader and author to occur. This type of dialogue seems especially suited for the political arena. Constituents could have a direct, instant, easy-to-use and respond-to, forum for conversation with their elected representatives. Yet the Delay debacle shows that this space is constantly in danger of being hopelessly corrupted by thoughtless vitriol. Granted Delay is a particularly hated and hateable politician, but I believe the same kind of comments would appear on say Hilary Clinton's blog if she were to allow open commenting.

I ran across yet another serious use of blogs while reading the news today. It seems like our friend the blog, whom we tend to think of as fun-loving, gossipy, and a bit ADD, has a serious side, too.

This article in the New York Times is talking about how a grassroots organization, Perverted Justice, which runs a blog by the same name (http://perverted-justice.com), has been remarkably effective in catching pedophiles. They have a group of 65 trained adult volunteers who pretend to be underage girls and boys in chat rooms, and when a pedophile agrees to meet the "child" in a certain location, he ends up meeting (and being arrested by) the police instead.