[Nancy White: Blogging and Community]

This evening I'm going to have the pleasure of meeting Nancy White and I'll get to hear her discuss "What happens when you talk about Blogs and Community in one breath." It should be really interesting. I wonder if she will discuss the paradigm shift (as I see it) that has occured with blogging. I'm thinking of Rebecca Blood's article which reminds us that Jorn Barger conceived of the term "weblog" in 1997 to mean a "web page where a Web logger ‘logs’ all the other Web pages she finds interesting" (54). This sounds more like del.icio.us. Blogging instead, seems to me, to be more of a community action. We blog, we link to others, we communicate, we share information...But could this change from (almost) clinical documentation to personal reflection have come about thanks to the software which is available for blogging? When Barger thought of weblogs in 1997 there was no Blogger software to make blogging easy for "anyone" to take it up. Does the way Blogger (and other software) is set up (suggesting we have links in a side-bar, upload images, use permalinks, track entries by tags, etc...) affect how and what we write about? I wonder if web 2.0 will signal a shift for blogging? Maybe blogging squared?