blogging for rookies

Blog links to help shorten the learning curve:

Blogger
Movable Type
Typepad
Live Journal
WordPress
MSN Spaces


--For an excellent definition of "blog," see Jill Walker's entry for the forthcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory.

--Blogger has extensive help documentation and a virtual tour of their service.

--Miriam Jones has posted some useful blogging links on her own wonderful blog.

--Mark Bernstein has written what has become a canonical essay about blogging.

--Liz Lawley writes about blogs as social software.

--Mark Grimsley writes about the symbiosis between blogging and scholarship.

--Matthew Kirschenbaum enlists his readers' help in cataloguing some of the professional rewards of blogging.


Blogging is about what Claire MacDonald calls "making writing": "stepping back from doing writing, thinking about what it looks like and how to handle it as material. All text has texture. It feels, looks, and sounds different in different places. Spellings change with context; even fonts affect our emotions. The language we use shifts its ground as we speak and write."

Experimental blogging/great writing/making writing:
Jane Pinckard (allegory)
KF (metaphor)
KF (ellipsis/demonstrative pronouns)
William Gibson: "Mr. Buk's Window"


So what else is a blog?

Jason Rhody:
sagging skin in need of fleshing out

Matt Kirschenbaum:
a public workbench

Eloise Oyzon:
external memory
a fractal

John Hiler:
Borg journalism

Julian Dibbel:
cabinet of curiosities, or Wunderkammer

Mark Dery:
viral journalism
"the closest thing we have to telepathy"
a Cornell box
a front-row seat to the movies projected on the inside of other people's heads

Richard MacManus:
a turntable for scratching and remixing information
a braindump

Stumbled across any apt/cool/bizarro/left-field blog metaphors lately? Or composed one of your own? Please let me know in the comments to this post or in an email sent to kkru{at}mail{dot}rochester{dot}edu


Student posts:
Pat Kelly: image description
Michael Fugate: FCRemix
Kathleen Morimoto: phonograph
Leslie: cut-up
Lee: LOC visit