History and Blogging

I have only recently joined BlogCatalog, which the majority of you may already have discovered and exploited ages ago. So far I have been finding a lot of interesting blogs and discussions there. In particular, they’re inviting all BlogCatalog people to join Bloggers Against Abuse on September 27th. The conditions are simple:

On Sept. 27th, blog about putting an end to some sort of Abuse (you decide what kind of abuse to blog about).

To read more, follow this link.

And on Oct. 15th we’re invited to take part in the Blog Action Day. Bloggers from all over the world, in whatever language they write, are invited to blog about environment. Go to the Blog Action Day’s homepage to read about how you can participate.

You have obviously noticed the title of this post. The organisers of both days offer to their potential participants an opportunity to make history as a kind of incentive for joining the cause. Looking back, we had One Day in History project which accumulated blog entries from all over Britain; we had a similar project with emails. As far as various blog action days go, my favourite is still the last year’s Global Orgasm Day.

I very much like the fact that the blogging community is realising more and more that with every bit of writing they put on the web they’re making history. On one of the discussion boards on BlogCatalog I suggested that a couple of years down the line we’ll be using blogs as historical sources for all sorts of studies. I didn’t expand on this in that thread, but let’s consider for a minute an average blog. It combines writing with photos from Flickr, music from Last.fm, and videos from YouTube. All four – the written word, photos, audio, and video – are historical sources. So, not only will we soon stumble upon “The History of Blogging” in our nearest bookshop, but we will also begin to find links to blog posts in the academic and semi-academic studies.

And when this happens, the issue of privacy will probably be forgotten completely. For, if a leading academic approaches a blogger asking to use their musings about national economy, a recent war, or sex, in their research, will the blogger’s vanity be too weak to withstand a temptation of being quoted in a thick book? However much time we’ve begun to spend in the virtual world, being able to hold in your hands a tangible record of your stardom is still something we all crave.

Update:

I’ve had a comment from Pelf at The Giving Hands. This young woman who is a biologist and veterinarian (apart from many other things from A to Z she’s been in her life) has started a blog to write specifically on the issues of saving and protecting the environment. Her own blogging challenge has been to blog about environment for the whole month, from Sept 15th to October 15th. As she is inviting us to read and comment on her blog, I found this post about green gifts particularly interesting. A few of my colleagues at work are getting married next year, so I might start thinking of something “green” for them. Read 10 ways to green your gifts.