Wisconsin Union Blend

As I look at the many different features that one could include in his or her blog, I’m wondering what people’s thoughts are on what features are absolutely necessary to blogging.

There are some features which are a part of all blogs regardless of platform:

1. All blogs have an audience.
2. Posts are dated in reverse chronological order and can be linked to directly (permalink).
3. Posts are “labeled” or categorized with tags.
4. Posts are edited by none other than the author.
5. Posts are written in the first person, author chooses what to say.

Then there are many features of a blog which are debatable such as:

1. It has to have frequent updates.
2. It should have a feed.
3. The posts need to be brief.
4. It has to allow comments.
5. It has to incorporate external links.

I would argue that blogs should allow comments and incorporate external links because blogging, to me, means bringing in outside voices as a way of bouncing ideas off of people, getting feedback and rethinking your positions or making better arguments to support them. And one way of bringing in outside voices and supporting your positions is to link to other blogs or websites that do so.

Which features do you feel are necessary to blogs? Would you add others?

The Physics building here on campus has a room for the general public to peruse, do some experiments and learn a bit about the subject. There is an experiment that, to me, seems like how we learn about bloggers. It’s called ‘Particle Pinball.’ Here’s a photo of it.

There’s a three-sided, covered box at one end and a knob on top of the box that you turn. When you turn the knob, it changes the shape of the item inside of the box. You never see what the shape is.

At the other end of the experiment you have a rapid-fire, air gun that shoots small metal balls into the open side of box and you’re supposed to determine the shape of the item in the box by the way and angles that the metal balls bounce and ricochet back out of the box.

The same approach can be said for how we get to know people who blog.

Take the case of a law professor here on campus — Ann Althouse. Professor Althouse is a prominent blogger who has written and discussed blogging quite extensively on and off-campus. I didn’t know that or her at all when I began my search. I found her when I was researching blogs and saw her name in a Chronicle of Higher Education commentary that she had written on the perils of blogging in academia. So I thought, “Great, I’ll look at her blog and see what I can learn. Maybe I’ll go and talk with her.”

Fire one — I went to her blog — Althouse– and started looking at her posts. The first one read “Just got an iPhone, it seems pretty cool.” I thought, “So.” Then I saw that she had 32 comments on that post. That’s quite a few comments for a post that isn’t all that interesting. I mean, there’s no commentary on her part other than it seems cool. Then I started looking at her other posts and I saw that she was getting lots of comments on lots of other things she was blogging about. So I decided to check out her ranking through Technorati.

Fire two — Well, Prof. Althouse blogs quite a bit and about things that draw commentary. She writes about the law and politics — two subjects that are certain to get people talking. She had a very high ranking which means lots of people read her posts or link to her blog. But that didn’t interest me so much as the other information about her that I saw. I saw blogs that made references to her — some of them weren’t so nice. I also saw videos from YouTube that she was in. And I saw samples of her photography from her Flickr site.

Firing Away — In about an hour I had read many samples of her writing, read what others were writing about her, heard her voice, and learned that she likes to take pictures of flowers. Through her blog and its connectedness to other blogs via comments, links or trackbacks, I started to get a sense of not only her online presence, but also felt like I had developed an early opinion to the question of “Who is Ann Althouse?”

Prof. Althouse is a blogger who gets bombarded by her readers and their comments. She is bombarded by other bloggers who post about her or the things about which she writes. She’s bombarded by her willingness to put herself and her thoughts “out in the open.” And like the rapid-fire air gun game, all of this bombardment helped me to begin the process of defining the shape of Ann Althouse. You see which posts get the most attention and which comments ricochet off or bounce back to another blog. You get to hear her opinions and how other people interpret those opinions.

This dynamic is exciting and unnerving and it’s no wonder that Prof. Althouse says that she has learned to develop a thick skin. With all of this activity constantly swarming around her and testing her edges, she needs to have that resilience. Personally, it’s amazing to me that someone would choose to be so open about themselves with blogging. It seems to me that no matter how much we think we’re presenting ourselves in a reasonable or likable or innocent or totally obscure way, with all of the buzz in the blogosphere, who you are is always being scrutinized.