blogtrax

I've been thinking back over my blogging history. I think my blog has evolved - perhaps, it's changing all the time. My first postings (just over a year ago) were quite tentative. I didn't have any idea what I was trying to do. I learnt about blogging from Colin, and I was just trying out really. I tried to keep it quiet. I wasn't 'a blogger' - I was just testing the tools. I told one or two people, but this comment was quite honest:
To the best of my knowledge, only a few people have looked over this blogspot...and most of them are me or related, but probably more will (hi Cathy), so I thought a few more links would jolly things along..
Only later when I learnt that one or two people had my address did I start taking it a little more seriously. I remember showing someone Michele and Colin's blogspot and suddenly seeing a link mine on the sidebar. That was a bit emotional. I was a bit shocked. That was a transition point. I thought, if other people are really going to read this it better be worth it. I suppose I constructed an audience at that point. I started making a bit more of an effort - mentioned my blog to one or two people who I thought might be interested. Lately, I've been a lot more upfront about it. I've come out as a blogger - I'm really into it! And now this is a new phase, because I've made a transition now in terms of wanting to fully understand what blogging means...and this autoethnography is a tool.

This feels quite strange already.
I began the DrJoolz blog as a research thing, where I wanted to see whether my assumptions about what it was like to blog, or to have a strong online presence was what I thought it would be.
I hd believed people to feel themselves as part of a group very quickly; I had thought that interactants would want to meet in meat space. Speaking for myself in my affinity space, I have had these suspicions confirmed.
What I did not realise was how obsessed I would become with being part of a group and I was not prepared for how strongly I would want to belong to that group.
I spend ages surfing now (even more than before) and have an obsession withb chasing tracks.
Is it work or is it play? I am beginning to think that I cannot separate work from non work as I become more and more enmeshed in the web.

In my other online research, I had noticed how often people's diaries, or logs, or homepages etc etc would provide evidence that people's off line lives were woven through with the values and activities which were professed in their web spaces.For example, the teen witch sites I looked at would have diaries, or photos of bedrooms which reflected strong indications of the embeddedness of Wiccan matters in their lives. It is as if the members of particular, themed, affinity spaces strengthened their membership to the group by authenticating themselves through glimpses of their meat space existances. They would show evidence of what they were readig, wearing and doing as forever woven through with the language and artefacts associated with Wiccan stuff. (Same goes for all the other 'themed spaces' I have observed. )

And I think I do this too, but I am realising also that through my blogging, certain themes in my log are genuinely the themes which weave through my thoughts all the time. Not sure of cause and effect here.

This morning I put a whole thing on my blog about a non pc web site my sister had sent me a link too. After writing about it I deleted the whole thing as it did not seem consistent with what I was doing. Also I thought that other bloggers in my space would probably not like it. (How can I tell who is reading it though?)

Guy told me he thought about something called 'show and hide' which fits all tihs editing stuff. We are presenting specific aspects of our identities of course.

Today I ran out of space on Flickr, my photo web site, so had to pay up to enlarge my storage space. This involved me paying through paypal. I forgot my password as I hve not used the account for a while (not been on e bay in a while) and so had to follow a complex chain of events to get a new password and then finally upload a silly picture of my notebook/bag.
Something there about identity, literacy practices and so on etc etc. (Prapsalso something about avoidance strategies - don't want to complete my RAE forms.)

We are the research, the researched and the researchers, so I think the key is just to try to capture what's going on in order to make sense of the practice of blogging and the performance of identity in blogging. If anything blogtrax could be metablogging - a blog in which themes about the blogosphere arise, get tested, revised, changed and discarded. It could also be a place for records of discussions and links to readings or pattern-recognition in the work of others. As a sort of research credibility insurance exercise I'm going to look up a bit about autoethnography. At the moment I see this study as 'two interwoven autoethnographies of (academic?) bloggers' - although I'm not particularly keen to close down on that too quickly. BTW on a more mundane level, the blogtrax skin/ layout etc could be changed...does it need images?...feel free, I think at the moment anything goes!

This is great, all as planned so far, with user names etc as we discussed.
I think Typepad looks good but will need time to look up properly.

Am feeling uncertain already ... do you think we need to blog here everytime we blog something on out personal blogs?

And shall I write a few notes from our meeting on here too to set out some of the things we think might be themes? Maybe I could list some issues, some themes and some questions? These would not be to set down boundaries, but would be part of our record keeping.

I've set this up having looked up Typepad (costs for more than one author); Movabletype (free trial and then you pay); Xanga (looks good but maybe not for us - my daughter's) and the new MSN (looks a bit naff). Let's get to work!