I seem to spend less time looking at blogs, library or otherwise. I don’t know if this is just me or if it is a general experience. The demands of work, life and Twitter perhaps. No doubt Walt will inform us in due course whether the volume of library blogging, at least, is up or down, whatever about the quality or interest.
However, as soon as I say that I realise that it is probably not true. I do look at quite a lot of things that are sort of quasi-blogs/quasi-news (e.g on Cnet) which I do not tend to think of as blogs because they do not have a strong personal voice. I occasionally look at some other things which are clearly ‘blogs’, if in some managed space. The blogs at HarvardBusiness.org are an example, and they seem a bit flat, as if produced to order.
In this context, I was quite interested to read the job advert for the editor of the BBC Internet Blog.
The BBC internet blog is the key audience facing accountability blog for senior staff in the BBC’s online and technology teams (e.g. BBC Online, BBC iPlayer, Future Media & Technology, Online Media Group, A&Mi, Vision Multi-platform). It aims to showcase the work of these teams and to respond to live issues in the blogosphere and elsewhere on what the BBC does in technology and online.
The blog is a fast moving editorial proposition which aims to publish a blog post every day. [BBC – Jobs – Job Details]
This prompts me to think that perhaps the word blog has become overburdened and as a result somewhat fuzzy in use. Sometimes we use it for the mechanics, for a mode of delivery which has become a useful and general web publishing medium: a stream of messages which are individually commentable, addressible, and signed, which can be subscribed to as a stream and which can be aggregated and mixed in various ways. Other times we may mean this, but we are principally thinking of the personal voice that comes through …
So, I probably spend as much or more time looking at blogs in that mechanical sense. But I probably spend less time listening to individual, idiosyncratic voices …
