PhD Blog (dot) Net

The other day – when I should have been doing something more useful – I started thinking about how I get round to commenting on other blogs, and eventually came up with the following process:

• I read blog posts through my Desktop RSS Aggregator – Vienna on my new Mac (I still use Feedreader on my PC)
• I save any blog posts that are interesting in ‘Marked Articles.’
• If I think I might comment on a post I bookmark it. This involves right clicking the post feed to open it in Safari / Firefox to then be able to bookmark it via the Delicious plug-in.
• I have a system where I do not add tags to any bookmarks I only want in My Delicious site temporarily. That way they automatically go to ‘Unmarked bookmarks’ at the bottom of my tag list. I just write a quick memo in the Notes box (e.g. “comment on this”).
• Sometimes later (if I have time, or remember a specific post, or think of something interesting to say), I’ll go to My Delicious, open up the blog post and finally…write a comment.

This seems ridiculously complex. OK, I could I use a browser-based or online RSS aggregator to simplify the technology, but these tools integrate fairly seamlessly and it’s not a big deal to jump between them. Maybe a lot of the seemingly ‘simple’ processes we develop are as complex as this when broken down? So what’s my problem? Do other people just comment straight away on posts they read? What if there’s a load of them – perhaps they allocate time for replying to blogs. If a blog post is really interesting I often need to mull over it, let it sink in, consider its implications to my work. Hence the ‘loading bay’ process. I might get back to it later that day or the next – often I’ll just forget about it. My PhD study is concerned with such processes, and developing an efficient blogging discourse is one of the key skills that contributes to effective digital and web literacy.

I’m frequently surprised at the quick response rates on some blogs, and on occasions, I’ve been reluctant to submit a comment just because I happen to have taken several days getting round to reading a post. Is a comment devalued because it may be a few days or weeks ‘too late’? Do bloggers give up responding to comments after a given period? I regularly read about 100 blogs through RSS (with my recent switch to using a Mac, I now use Vienna). I try to do this every day, but hey, we all have other things to do in our lives.

Whilst I recognize the affordances of currency and informality which blogging provides over other forms of academic discourse, has the emphasis on immediacy gone too far? Jane Knight’s useful weekly round-up of blog posts and bookmarks (her latest is here) reminds me that, by default, many blogging architectures enable weekly, monthly and yearly summaries, whilst tagging systems provide effective archive retrieval through subject matter. I sometimes come across blog posts several years old that are still of profound interest and relevance. As blog posts are increasingly cited in formal academic literature, how do we best negotiate the vast cultural and temporal inconsistencies which exist between them?