Let me start by stating that I am not writing in my native language. I am writing in my first language, though. I am Deaf. I should be signing to you rather than writing to you. I could be vlogging this, but I plan to introduce multiple avenues of exploration for you, and hyperlinking a vlog would be difficult (but not impossible). Another consideration is that I’m writing to someone from the majority language culture with little knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL, not to be confused with Age Sex Location as it’s popularly known within the context of internet communication). Also, my parenthetical habits would be too annoying in an oral context plus I’d like to allow you to have some time to peruse and ponder my information and ideas.
BLOGGING
So. I want to talk about blogging. It’s new. Well, it’s not new—it’s been around since the mid-90s. We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing our Culture (2002) and Say Everything by Scott Rosenberg cover the history of blogging well. It first emerged as a means of sharing information, usually links of interest to friends and other followers of a particular webpage that a user maintained a link list. Blog–>web log (as log of links visited/for you to visit). Some of the early webloggers such as Dave Winer and Jorn Barger focused on link lists, accompanied by annotations and commentary. Early blogs were handcoded but with the advent of easier applications such as Blogger, evolution occurred. Really, the technology didn’t evolve so much as the *behavior* evolved. Blogs allowed for diverse avenues of personal expression, whether it is an introspective personal journal or a site devoted to covering a particular interest, “blurring the lines between weblogs and online diaries, a line that had never been visible to anyone except the most hardcore webloggers” (Rosenberg 115).
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