BlogsAreAlive

= = =**Blogs Are Alive**= == All those naysayers are full of themselves when they say "Blogs are Dead"- sure the fad may have faded, but blogging is still a powerful force in the internet universe, where daily there are massive acts of positive goodness. **If you know this, and can share some links and ideas to support the case, please add them below.** On the other hand, if you prefer to side with the death mob, add your voices to the zombie chorus over at [|Blogs Are Dead].


 * Blog in New York shines light on positive city event (though the death bloggers seem to live in the comments) http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/a-simpler-safer-grand-army-plaza-brooklyn-edition/ via arvind in twitter http://twitter.com/arvind/statuses/13319874704
 * Far from being dead, blogs are finally re-emerging from the dimly cast shadow of feeble social networking tools like facebook as people realize the incredible watering down of communication and social relations that services like this *impose* on us, and the need to reclaim our individual voices and identities. Sure, we're learning lots of tricks too, so the brevity of twitter and the ease of tools like posterous and tumblr are now part of the dynamic, but we will slowly (hopefully, and with effort) see the re-emergence of the distributed, decentralized and highly personalized conversations that led us to love the blogosphere in the first place. 1272913873
 * The MLA has its Evaluation of Digital Work Wiki which cites research blogs as something to be considered as a part of scholarly work, though the distributed nature of blogs means they can be ephemeral meaning valuable work becomes harder to find or disappears (see the Lessig example on the Blogs Are Dead).
 * I don't know if this qualifies as "educational" or even if you're only looking for ed blogs, but here is one of my favorites, a still kickin' and very much alive blog: [|Free Range Kids]. Just look at the comment threads! Some posts get over 50 comments and they're not spam and they're not trolls - it's actually interesting to read the comment threads.
 * Students at Penn State have taken upon themselves to use the blog format to create a very popular online student news source. Is it blogging in the purest sense? You decide. [|Onward State] . More and more I see the power of blogs as a tool to allow multiple people to co-author a living document. See the student and faculty work at [|The Digital Dialogue].
 * Blogs are being purified and are on their way to become a more respected form of media. All the "cat diary" people are now moving to [|meow based twitter accounts]. The invention of microblogs will actually make blogs stronger and more robust. All these people who were blogging with far more space than their thoughts needed are now constrained to 140 characters. The few who still feel the need to blog will be the better for this purification. Just as PPT has bullet pointed information into obscurity and created an intense hatred of the product, microblogging will go the same route.
 * Wrote a post this week beginning to expand the idea that maybe the term "blogging" is what's dead, rather than the practice: [|http://cribchronicles.com/2010/05/02/i-have-seen-the-future-baby/]. We don't call all writers by the same handle - novelists, essayists, journalists, tech writers, PR writers, humourists, historians, & ed theorists all work in print (at least partly) but are defined by content rather than medium. Blogging may have reached the point where the fact that it happens online or is read on a screen is irrelevant...in my still-lively corner of the blogosphere there's been significant factioning over the past couple of years between so-called mommybloggers who write narrative, reflective stuff & mommybloggers who moved to pure PR-pitches and reviews. What was once a large but semi-coherent community seems to have splintered into multiple communities, mostly based on style & connections. Maybe we need to start calling those communities and the writing done in them by separate names, at least when the "blogging is DEAD" refrain comes up. b/c some things are deader than others. Bloggers are out there for different purposes but a lot of writing's going on.

Brian's links:

All hail [|The Bava]

[|Connection points]

[]

[]

[|Write To Reply]

[]