J-blog research: Final thoughts

Who I consider my audience has changed since I started started blogging last year. At first, I was just writing to practice and I notified my friends and family about it. Ever since I had that brief brush with local blog fame with Postman, I’ve been a little addicted to my blog stats. I often check them out to see if anything I’ve been writing is being read outside of the couple of people that have me on their RSS feeds.

I’ve found that posts about certain topics are bound to get some attention. Before the Alaska Way Viaduct advisory vote, any post I made related to the disputed roadway got some “traffic” from people who had used the Technorati search engine. NPR has been another topic sure to get some attention. After writing about how boring I think NPR is, I received a comment from a staffer at WNYC, an NPR affiliate in New York City. He suggested that I listen to a science show on the station called Radio Lab. The commenter was an intern on the show who was looking on the blog space for chatter about NPR and saw my post.

Do I know what it’s like to be a “real” blogger based on my experience? I think so. I don’t post as often as some and I don’t write as well as others or get many views but it doesn’t really matter. WordPress has provided me with this free tool and I keep it as active as I can. I write about things that interest me regardless of how my blog stats reflect how few people seem to share the interest.

I’ve learned that the blog beast needs to be fed or else it languishes. Since it’s such a great tool for getting information out there quickly, a blog with posts that are a few days or a week old looks nearly abandoned. I think blog readers demand freshness and my blog hasn’t been a testament to that. I was just happy to get past the 3-month mark by which a large number of newly-started blogs are abandoned. Many of my blog posts were written on the bus to school or work in order to get something out there, to feed the beast. Often times, a post was just some links to interesting tidbits with a minimum of text.

It’s probably obvious to those who’ve read the degree project that I’m a fan of Web 2.0. Admittedly, my use of Wikipedia and blogs as sources in the degree project is probably considered by some to be not exactly hard-core academic sourcing. But, that’s my point in using them. Academic sources like books and journal articles are still relevant as are journalistic sourcing but they are not the only sources of knowledge. It’s a fact that the combined intelligence of the masses will always outmatch the intelligence of any one person or small group of people (like, say, a newspaper). The tools that are available to the masses to share knowledge and to have conversations, is making this combined intelligence more powerful and harder to ignore.

The process of my research about blogs revealed an interesting if not hypocritical bias. I admit that despite the topic of my study my interview method of choice was the old- fashioned face to face sit-down. I feel that any form of communication that isn’t in-person is less desirable. When you’re in the same room as your interviewee you get spontaneous responses and you also get a sense of their feelings through non-verbal actions. Conversely, online conversations produce rehearsed and edited responses that to me feels less genuine. Does that mean I haven’t truly bought in to the modern method of social networking?

Nine months after my first post, I continue to learn how to use this tool. The reader, I assume, is probably not entirely sure what the Fernsehturm blog is all about. I’m not entirely sure either. Now that my degree project is done, I’m not sure what the next step is for the blog.

My interest in media will continue.

Stay tuned.