What it is … is clear enough, now that I’ve had to make one. At first glance, it looks more or less like a personal homepage. The difference? It’s optimized for the easy entering and display of new content (usually text), like diary entries – which others are free to comment on. Unlike a homepage, it’s a place of ongoing communication: the author or authors make a new posting, a (regular?) visitor (alerted to the new posting or simply dropping in) or collaborator reads it and can then elect to comment on it. In short it’s like a meeting place, where ideas or views are presented and mulled over by some fixed or open community of readers. Ideas change, ideas develop … and in the end you’ve got some kind of “discourse” going. This assumes you’ve got something of interest to say, something that others would be interested in commenting on, and that you’ve somehow in fact found this audience of “others” ready to visit your blog site.
Nice description. Once I had an argument with my colleague from another course we facilitated together. She said that we as facilitators shouldn’t spend much time on commenting students’ homeworks in their weblogs as it would not happen in a real life setting anyway (that someone actually write a comment to your post). So I like your thought that “you’ve got something of interest to say, something that others would be interested in commenting on” and this is a great challenge…
See you around!
Terje
I’m not expecting too many comments myself. But thanks for responding, and thanks for writing in English. I don’t mind much if you write in Estonian, but actually, it’s kind of nice to read a comment in English.
John