As I was leaving for SHARP 2003 last summer, Kari asked, “Will you blog the conference?” Having just gotten back from CCCC 2004, Jeff writes, “I really canít see how people manage to blog conferences in real time. I canít listen, talk, or type at the same time.” I found that I could get a wifi signal in one of the conference meeting rooms at ASECS 2004, but I did not try to blog live. I worry about getting the details wrong in someone’s paper (or worse, missing the point altogether). I did take some very detailed notes on my legal pad, imagining myself blogging it later, perhaps in bullet-point format like Kathleen at SCMS 2004, and in this way did thoughts of blogging make me pay better attention than I usually do. But when it came time to consider what to post, I decided that I didn’t feel comfortable putting the details of someone else’s argument online. This is not to say that I think it’s wrong in principle to do this, just that I wasn’t confident enough in my own summary of someone else’s argument to do so. If this blog were just for my own use, my attitude would be different, but my latest stats say that I get about 400 visits a day, so…
George, like you, I get about 400 visits a day, and I think that knowledge may have changed the way that I blog research, specifically my reaction to the ideas of others. I mentioned two or three conference papers in my blog, but I tried to avoid characterizing their argument in too much detail for similar reasons (I’ve now had several people contact me after googling themselves, none of them correcting me specifically, but still). Not sure what the solution is. I’ve thought about creating a shadow blog where I could have more control over my audience, but I’m afraid that it would just create even more work than I need.
Well, I’ve thought about using a blog as a kind of note-taking tool, not for public consumption. I think it’s not a bad idea. It would be searchable, and if you enabled the categories, you could browse through various related entries.