Recently in Blogs and blogging Category

Does it further the philosophical (or ethical or religious) goal of promoting human flourishing? Have you learned anything? Or is it just a waste of time? These questions come up for discussion from time to time, most recently in light of remarks at LDS General Conference (reviewed in this Nine Moons post) suggesting blogging is a distraction from more important things (which would probably include just about anything except playing video games or watching television). Nine Moons disagrees, and suggests this defense (of blogging, not gaming): "I'm doing a great work and cannot come down."

Amy Welborn is a mother and a blogger, but she's no mommyblogger. And now she's at Beliefnet: Via Media is her new weblog. I might have said a few things about how I never really connected with her posts at the old blog with the touching name (Charlotte Was Both), but after reading in her first post about the circumstances surrounding the move, I thought better of it. I look forward to a wider variety of topics at the new blog and invite everyone to visit there from time to time.

At Mormon Matters a couple of weeks ago, "A Truth-Seekers Guide to the Bloggernacle and Beyond," relating a few rules for sifting reliable posts and comments from the not-so-reliable stuff one reads. I know college profs stuggle to teach undergrads that "a reliable source" does not mean anything one finds via Google. A few of the suggestions from the post: Does the writer cite any sources? Are the supposed "experts" actually qualified? What's the rest of the story (the other side of the argument)? Have you given opposing viewpoints a fair hearing?

Great ideas ... but who's got the time? This morning I touched the bases on "slow blogging" by reading Emily Jensen's column, then the LDS Media Talk post "Slow Blogging," then the New York Times piece "Haste, Scorned: Blogging at a Snail's Pace," then finally visited ground zero of the movement, the Slow Blog (tagline: it happens when it happens) and its Slow Blog Manifesto (Slow Blogging is speaking like it matters. ... It is deliberate in its pace.) So how slow is slow?

I don't always appreciate Andrew Sullivan's approach, but I did enjoy his recent article in the Atlantic, "Why I Blog." The intro blurb (and please, if you know the technical term for the italicized paragraph that appears between the headline and the first paragraph, post it) praises this new and evolving thing, the blog.

As blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that's enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal.