Some More Thoughts on Blogs
Don't Let Your Blog Come Back to Haunt You: In this article, Gerry McGovern provides an apt reminder that it's easy to get too comfortable in the informal atmosphere of the web, particularly when it comes to blogging. In the process he illuminates some common-sense--but also often overlooked--differences between the communities formed on blogs and other kinds of conversations.
That said, if you remember that problem I talked about last month with history and losing our records, blogging is possibly an antidote to some of that. That is, as McGovern points out, blogs are records--and although they take certain technology to read, because they're more public, there's a better chance that historians of the future will be able to read them than that they'll have access to our email records or our documents stored on our hard drives.
So although I would agree with Gerry McGovern's word of caution, as a person interested in historical writings and informal drafts indicating thoughts, I say: Blog on, bloggers. Think about first what you'd like to say to posterity, perhaps, as Thoreau may well have done when he wrote his journal (check out how Greg Perry re-packaged it as a daily blog). But blog on.
2 comments:
You used APT in the first sentence - wow! - I guess other things can come along and haunt you too - look out for the bus!
Is that Mike from long ago at Z? Long time no talk!
Yes, well... Of course a good pseudonym is always in order for certain writings. It's a time-honored writing tradition that's being continued on the web (rightly so in many cases). It's always important to make sure you want posterity to know that it's you before actually putting your name to a written piece, especially since http://www.archive.org tends to jump on keeping pieces for posterity, whether or not they've been deleted from the web.
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