I sent the
book manuscript to Continuum on 21 November (almost three months late). As you can see, I didn't do much
updating of the blog when I was revising the manuscript. I'll use it from now on to add references I missed and new links.
I started
this book in summer 2006. I noticed in
the last stages of the book how much the blogs had changed in
two years. Some slowed down or stopped. Baghdad Burning posted less and less, as the
dramatic events of 2003 moved into the depressing day-to-day tit-for-tat
killings of 2005, ending finally with poignant posts on her emigration to Syria in October 2007, a year ago. The Head Heeb, whose
informed comments on African politics had drawn a large following, quit to
spend more time on his law practice; his
more recent posts vanished from Blogmosis, leaving only early posts still on his earlier host, Blogspot, and reminding us of the fragility of this
medium. (Librarians who archive selected
blogs will be doing academics a great service).
Dr. Dave keeps threatening to quit posting on his public blog at
unknowngenius.com, continuing only with a blog known to a few friends, but he keeps up occasional posts, and a keitai log of evocative mobile phone photos. Now he has
actually started work on a PhD (so he doesn't use the joking 'Dr' tag anymore), and it seems to involve linguistics; I probably wouldn't have dared comment on his
blog had I known he would be studying Rhetorical Structure Theory.
Many of the
blogs I have been following have changed address: India Uncut and Israeli Mom moved from Blogspot's free hosting service to their own URLs, as they gained more traffic and wanted more
control over format, while Cosmic Variance has moved from its own site to being
one of several blogs hosted by Discover magazine.
Language Log moved to a new server at Penn, with an explanation about the hardware side of keeping a blog going. Dooce redesigned her site, and she, like Instapudit and BoingBoing, now offers video material.
There have
been changes in popularity, and in the ways popularity is measured. Instapundit, the iconic political blog of
2006, seems to be way down the Technorati lists (at 938); I don't know if that reflects some broad
shift in the zeitgeist or just a technical factor in the shift from his own URL
to Pajamas Media. (It remains for me the benchmark for short, witty links,
posted through the day, though I am glad that his candidate did not win the
2008 election). Dooce, meanwhile, has
shot up the Technorati popularity list, at 30, the most popular of the 'parenting' category. Though
Heather Armstrong's intimate, gossipy tone sounds like she is talking to four
friends over coffee, it is probably the second-most-read blog of all those I
studied. The most popular was and
still is BoingBoing, now at 6 in the Technorati list, and it deserves to be;
it was alwaysthe best place on my blogroll to go when I wanted to pass a
few minutes with playful notes or serious analyses of internet issues.
I found
some new blogs in the course of writing the book. I added Raising Yousuf (now Raising Yousuf and Noor) and Laila El-Haddad has
been good at keeping up posts despite a difficult life as artist, mother, and
migrant. I wanted to add something from
the excellent Global Voices Online, and settled on Bob Chen because he had such
vivid reports of the Szechuan earthquake in
spring 2008. Stephanie Booth remains interesting even when she is explicitly
self-promotional (that's her job), and she does demonstrate some new
technologies I need to think about, and of course I like the bilingual bits. From
the other end of the geek/newbie continuum,
I added My Mom's Blog just because it seems to be consistently
well-written, in a style that is different from those of the other bloggers I
study.
Some of my
additions reflect my own interests.
Language Log is, of course, a resource as well as a topic for a linguist
studying blogs; some colleagues think
the writing can be over-elaborate and in-groupy, but I find it remarkably
consistent in mixing entertainment and serious points. It is perhaps the great on-going popular book
on linguistics to supersede Pinker. The
West End Whingers were added in pure selfishness; I go to
plays in London enough to enjoy their jokes abotu theatres and theatre-goers, though I have found their sense of humour is
not everybody's cup of tea (or glass of merlot).
I have been following two different mostly-vegetarian cooking blogs, 101
Cookbooks and Chocolate & Zucchini, both of them tipped for me by Ryan Davidson, who did a BA dissertation on cookery blogs a couple years ago. They have remained reliable sources of
recipes, and I sometimes analysed and then cooked the same entry.
One of my colleagues has poined out that, while I was writing about blogs, other people in the department have been writing them. But he didn't tell me any URLs, so I guess I can't give them a plug, or analyse their styles. Apparently they are better at keeping up with posts than I am.
So the
blogosphere
changes, even in two years, and the changes are probably too fast for print to keep up. By the time my book comes out in August 2009,
many links will be dead, and some of what is now done on blogs will be done in
other ways, for instance through Twitter, Flickr, or YouTube. I will try to keep up posts for a while so
that I can update it. And I'll continue to enjoy reading these blogs.
