I believe that this week's assignment to read both Hannah and Professor Dalke's blogs made me extremely aware of how I felt not only as a reader, but as a student studying the blog as an emerging genre.

First, some questions that arose as I read "Valpo Vida" : 1) I noticed that you apologized to your readers/noted that this was your personal log. Did you feel this was a duty? An unconscious decision, or was there reasoning? 2) Your blog was very much a log, and you did not mention personal details as much as events. Was this conscious? How do you feel about bloggers who do put feelings and more 'intimate' details on their sites? 3) Your blog was a travel journal, and I assumed that you began it as a way to keep in touch/keep your family and friends up to date on your time abroad. Is this true? If so (and please correct me if I am wrong), how do you feel about our class reading it?

 Class was started with Anne quoting aybala50's post about the hard-to-categorize nature of blogs. Anne asked aybala50 to elaborate, leading to general agreement of Jo(e)'s idea of a blog as a medium to various genres, and not a genre within itself. 

We are now done with generalizing about blogging, and we will begin to move into specific blogs. For Thursday, we will be reading as much as we can bear from Hannah's blog and Anne's blog. Then, we will see a transition from the personal blog to the academic blog.

Question posed at this point: What kind of reading does a blog invite?

We were asked to think about the reading experience of reading from a computer vs. reading a print source. 

In her "Blogs," Sarah Boxer seems to love the 'foul mouths and tough hides' of the bloggers she reads, citing sarcastic apologies and new Internet words as reasons blogs are superior to print media. To me, these traits embody the worst of blogging-- surely a refusal to admit other points of view is exactly the failing of print media that the Internet is most prepared to rectify? The discussion we started in class on Thursday about writing academically in public seemed to me to suggest that the open conversation and expanded audience that the Internet makes possible would push authors to write for a response, and to open their ideas up to comment from readers.

"Blogging as a Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog" by Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd brings up many points I immediately found myself replying to in my head.  For one thing, I loved the discussion of exhibition and voyeurism.  In general, people enjoy the power of the blog and the attention it gets them but are embarrassed when the wrong people read their private thoughts.

I am here posting a link to one of my favorite sites, TV Tropes.  Hopefully no one takes this as incentive to waste several hours. 

I am surprised I didn't think of it sooner when we discussed resorting genres, to be honest.  TV Tropes has myriad pages about tropes, cliches, themes, character types, and anything imaginable that is present in books, movies, anime/manga, comics, television, internet culture, and even real life.  By doing so, works of all different genres and even mediums are completely resorted based on common ideas that are present in them.

When I talk about formatting on a blog, I'm talking about more than just where your paragraph breaks should be and how many spaces should be between those paragraphs.  I'm also talking about making sure that when you copy/paste your entry from Word into the blog site that all of your apostrophes and quotation marks are still part of the entry.  I couldn't get through Carolyn R.

SUGGESTED READING: Richard Mayer, "Can Problem Solving Skills be Taught?" Learning and Instruction.
Bill Huber will facilitate a conversation on transfer.