e-poche.net

I had a brief discussion with Dan today about the public nature of the blog and how it affects the way we construct our personal virtual spaces.  We didn’t come to any conclusions, but several good questions were raised.   Our discussion came about from a quick test of the waypath project, one of whose features is a search engine into which you input the URL of a specific blog posting (like your own latest one) and then it hunts down similar posts throughout the blogosphere.  I imagined that in several years, such a feature could be automated, so that any posting you made would immediately be linked (in some form or another) to postings of a similar nature on other blogs, creating an even more reticular body of knowledge.  How might that change the way we post to our blogs?  And how *do* we post to our blogs?  How do we create a post knowing that itwill be ’public’ and represent a product of our mind?  What does ‘public’ mean to bloggers and how does their conception of ‘public’ change the way they construct their blogs?  To what extent do their fears and desires influence their postings….or their own self-images for that matter?  To what extent does the blog represent their self-images?  Or in what way might it differ?  Is there a relationship between the ‘psychological profiles’ (if that’s even possible) of  bloggers and the ‘type’ of blogs they create?  If learning takes place on blogs, how does it?  What kind of learning takes place on blogs?  Could these public spaces of reflection, description, and narration play a significant role in their formal education, or not?  What are the personal and educational consequences (amongst others) of running a blog over an extended period of time?  How will upcoming technological advances change personal webpublishing and what effect will that have on our learning and concept of self?  I can go on for pages….I’ll stop here.