Blogging Challenge
Groundhog Day is the perfect day to make my first blogging about blogging post. I’m sure there will be many more. We don’t have groundhogs in the western US, so I’m going with their cousins the prairie dog.
Maren Deepwell from Reclaim Hosting challenged the Reclaim Community with a list of questions about our blogging. So, for the first time, as is my wont, I researched the history of blogging.
According to many websites, Links.net created by Justin Hall in 1994 was the first “blog.” A student at Swarthmore College, he wrote "Welcome to my first attempt at Hypertext." While Ted Nelson coined the term ‘hypertext’ in the mid 60s, Doug Engelbart expanded on the concept and was the first to collaborate live inside a document in his 1968 “Mother of All Demos.” I’m amazed this first post includes an audio file. According to his alma mater’s website, Hall lives in San Francisco, California.
In 1997 Jorn Barger coined the term "weblog"; “If you think of a better name than ‘weblog’, just start using it and see if it catches on. It’s all Darwinian.” Some posts (rumors?) say Barger is in Socorro, New Mexico. We visited my mother's aunt that was an unmarried real estate agent and cousins that were school teachers in Socorro when I was a kid. We were there on July 20th 1969 and I remember thinking my grandfather and his siblings grew up with oil lamps and horse drawn carriages in Edinburgh, Scotland, and here we all were watching men walk on the moon. Socorro is on the top of my list of places to move if I have to leave California because I canna afford to live in my home state anymore.
In 1999, Peter Merholz introduced the term "blog" when he posted on the sidebar of Peterme.com the following:
"For What It's Worth
I've decided to pronounce the word "weblog" as wee'- blog. Or "blog" for short."
Merholz recalled: "I didn't think much of it. I was just being silly, shifting the syllabic break one letter to the left. I started using the word in my posts, and some folks, when emailing me, would use it, too. I enjoyed it's crudeness, it's dissonance...
I like that it's roughly onomatopoeic of vomiting. These sites (mine included!) tend to be a kind of information upchucking."
Merholz is a proud Oaklander from Oakland, California, where I lived for many years.
I’ll paraphrase Jorn Barger: If you think of a better hashtag than #we_blog, just start using it and see if it catches on. It’s all Darwinian.”
Maren posted; “...we are setting up a new blogging community of practice all about blogging, AKA Bloggers Anonymous,” a “Reclaim Hosting EdTech community space on Discord,” and that we should “tag all posts on our social media channels with the hashtag #blogging4life...”
Maren Deepwell
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
I became interested in eportfolios as a middle aged returning community college student. One of my student jobs was with the foundation that managed the scholarships for our four college district. We also supported a 20 member first generation cohort and I was the one who demonstrated the new Google apps and encouraged them to use Google’s Blogger to create free and simple eportfolios. Are public eportfolios blogging?
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why do you use it?
I use Ghost, PeerTube, and Castopod. I have a PixelFed.social account but intend to install my own instance to be completely self-hosted. I also intend to have all my work automatically backed up into flat archives. It’s a process. Is a constellation of self-hosted FOSS a platform?
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Blogger, WordPress, and probably ones I don’t remember. Is creating Google Sites to share resources and document learning, blogging?
How do you write your posts?
I occasionally write long hand but most of my text is typed. OCR is handy for script and I’m doing more voice note taking: my android recorder transcribes into Google Docs.
I’m a digital storyteller and try to use my own images but love to use historic images from the commons too. And now I’m ‘generating’ images to process into my own pictures.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
I’m too scattered to say I have a method to my writing madness. Yet.
Do you normally publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit?
I’m a naturally critical person so I prefer to sleep on all my communications: email, social, and blogs. To tone them down. That’s not always possible.
What's your favorite post on your blog?
On my old WP it’s “Hoagy, Bix, Wolfgang Beethoven Bunkhouse and me”
On my new blog it’s “Reflecting on digital storytelling: past, present, and future at DS106 Radio Summer Camp” with the recording from when I got to introduce Jim Groom to Joe Lambert. Two OGs shared their digital storytelling origins.
Any future plans for the blog?
I’m looking forward to learning all the affordances of these new (to me) technologies and finding an audience. I'm a lifelong learner, retired scientific glassblower and critical digital humanist, I glean meaning from experiences and tell stories.
I’ve been a door-to-door salesman, a bookseller, a bronze foundry man, a hawker for a game at the original Renaissance Pleasure Faire, a glass artists’ assistant, a high tech glassblower in Surveillance Valley, a sales clerk for a Victorian tailor at the Great Dickens Christmas Fair, the resident atheist at the west coast’s finest spiritual emporium, and am now a digital storytelling facilitator with StoryCenter.org and the ‘technologian’ at the Western Institute for Social Research. Those are just my paid gigs. I poured concrete at Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, AZ, did all manner of tasks for the Crucible Fire Arts Center in Oakland, CA, and helped organize four student governments to advocate for tens of thousands of urban students, also in Oakland. I represented students on District shared governance committees was the sole student representative on the Financial Aid Software Upgrade project for two years. When we started organizing only a third of the students were receiving their Federal financial aid on time, it’s been more than ninety percent ever since.
One day I’ll figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Until then, I’m an elder with a lifetime of stories to document and share.
#bloggingaboutblogging #blogging4life #we_blog #4life