Blood Discusses Weblogs, World Doesn't Stop Still - Week 2 Reading Post-Lecture

It’s no surprise that this reading was all about weblogs, and supposedly how utterly fabulous they are (seeing as it is from a book about creating and maintaining weblogs, what would be the point in putting the negatives in there). Other then a basic overview of what makes a weblog a weblog (“It’s the format, stupid”, Me, 2005), Blood goes on to talk about the history of weblogs and the diversity of content in said weblogs. No surprises there. She goes into detail on some of the earlier weblogs, such as Lemonyellow and Be Nice to Bears, and eventually through all this information comes to what she sees as the three very broad categories for weblogs; “…blogs, notebooks and filters” (Blood, 2002, p6). From her point of view, the ‘Blogs’ were the short-form journals based on the webloggers daily life with little emphasis on links and more on content. Again in ‘Notebooks’ the weblogger’s content is most important, but tend to be of longer length and more likely to be used as records for ideas and theories then for external events. Finally, ‘Filters’ are in to Blood all joined under the heading of filters because of the important they place on the “…primacy of the link” (Blood, 2002, p8).

I keep on reading this reading, and it seems to keep on getting deeper and deeper in bias, the content being aimed as more of a salute to the weblog then a critical discussion on its constructive and destructive effects. I suppose that is to be expected from the introductory section of a book on how to create and maintain a weblog. I might extend this post later when I feel like it.