Literary Kinds

The "Geeky Mom" blog presents a wide range of subjects, from parenting to university politics. The blog itself is not only a platform of thought, but also a daily diary. "Geeky Mom" regales us with stories of daily life, being a working mother, etc. The comments flow from the same river, not making discussion, but affirming or asking questions based on the post.

After watching (most of) the Remix/Manifesto movie, I found myself wondering about these ideals in relation to the literary/publishing world. I think this was probably because of the appearance of Cory Doctorow, although he only really spoke about the music side of things in this documentary. He's a 'YA' author (or not, it's just a genre a few of his books have fallen into... who knows what he'd have to say about that) whose books are now available online rather than through a publisher.

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. 

I was looking through some webcomics and blogs today after our discussion in class, and I came across this particularly applicable comic by xkcd.com. I believe it was Ed Folsom who mentioned fractals in relation to genre, quoting Dimock on the "fractal database." Here is "Blogofractal" as pictured by xkcd.

http://xkcd.com/124

Dictionary.com says the definition of a database is "a comprehensive collection of related data organized for convenient access, generally in a computer."

The same site recognizes an archive as "any extensive record or collection of data."