So, we have come to the point in my S603 technology course when I am going to start blogging about blogging. As we say here at SLIS, this assignment is über meta. The following are my reflections and opinions concerning the process of blogging in this class, WordPress.com, and blogging in general.
I found this entire process to be excruciatingly easy. In fact, it is sort of charming. WordPress is easy to access and provides an intuitive process for establishing a blog. The library of themes provided by WordPress is immense and growing larger everyday. This allows your blog to reflect your aesthetics, without having to be a CSS wizard. The WordPress dashboard system of management is comprehensive and provides satisfactory explanations under the “Help” tab (if needed.) I appreciated how “Widgets” could be dragged and dropped into my blog’s platform. The categorization and tagging system allows for the accurate/effective representation and organization of my ideas and posts. Additionally, it was easy to add media (pictures or video) to my blog. I drew all of my videos from Youtube and the images were either from Wikimedia Commons (drawn from their selection of public domain images) or were screenshots from my own computer. I found that adding media was the most critical part of making my blog viable, as it made the blog more than scrolling through text. While I hope that my text was adequate, I know that my blog was buttressed by making it more engaging visually.
I am getting old. I know this. I have accepted this fact, even though I still act like a fool. All of that said, I think that I am going to employ some of the lessons from this course, and put them into play. First and foremost, I think that I will continue to maintain a blog. I used to think of the blogosphere as a number of bloated egos spouting off. My perceptions are changing about this. Blogging is wildly democratic, and allows many marginalized voices to be heard in a powerful forum. While I truly do not have a following, I think that I will maintain this blog to continue posting music, news, images, and recipes that I find compelling. I like this as a means to share information with friends and perhaps the greater community. Not to be dismissive of these humble beginnings, but I will probably go back and delete some of the posts concerning library technology. I am afraid that new-comers to the blog might find that stuff to be a bit of a turn-off. But maybe I do not really know my audience yet.
One aspect of blogging that I truly enjoyed was the fluid prose that it allows. One does not need to be formal in this forum. My background is in writing hyper-technical and legal documents, ergo, this blog represents a dramatic shift in my voice and tone. While this is for a graduate level workshop, my approach has been whimsical. The Internet is terrible in conveying tone, as sarcasm is almost always lost, but I hope that this blog was able to capture my personality.
I enjoyed this classes requirement that we place our assignments on our blog. This wa san effective manner of turning in our work, but more importantly, this allowed me to witness the genius of my peers. I say that in all sincerity. (No, really.) I have actually learned about some stuff from others in the class, especially Nicholae’s exploration of LibraryThing. I feel that this process made our class dynamic more amicable.
