Blogging Miscellanea

A few more observations on bloggery before moving on to the next experiment:

I took a little stroll through Blogger Land last night (actually too long a stroll--it's kind of hypnotic) by clicking the Next Blog links on a series of blogs. It's an international and multilingual community. Of the blogs I sampled, most were in English, but two or three clearly not by native speakers. A few were in Spanish, a couple in Chinese, one or two in Portuguese, one in Swedish, one in what I think was Indonesian. I found blogs on travel, photography (amateur and professional), and ghost pictures, blogs for non-profit organizations, and a surprising number of family blogs--probably the biggest single category in this random sample. One couple devoted a whole blog to their baby daughter. Will this girl be saying the world's loudest "MO-OM!!" in a dozen years, or will she take it as a matter of course, one of a cohort of kids who grew up chronicled on the Web?

It also occurred to me that the existence of all these blogs, Facebook and MySpace profiles, and various other Web sites confers a kind of public anonymity that is similar in a way to what cities have always done. That is, your business may be out in public, but with so many other people in the same situation, nobody's necessarily interested in it! As a matter of fact, it can be difficult to find one of these personal blogs with a search engine even if you're specifically looking for it. Not that I don't still feel concerns about privacy.

Our set of blogs here at ITPLD creates a whole new wrinkle on anonymity. I know who some of my fellow ITPLD bloggers are and have an idea who one or two people might be. Others I really have no idea, but I know they are people I work with and see in the library often, maybe every day. It's kind of like a Halloween costume party--I know I know this person ... but who is it?

One more odd thing. Somehow, when adding a comment to someone's post last night, I accidentally discovered that Blogger provides an alternative to visual word recognition--auditory verification? Something like that, I don't remember exactly what Blogger calls it. You have a box to type numbers in, and a strange robot voice tells you to type in what you hear. Then you hear this weird soup of distorted voices saying a jumble of things that can't be made out, and about every 1 or 2 seconds a clearer, but disembodied and not-quite-human, voice is heard saying a number, which you type in. It works, but it's the kind of sound experience I'd expect from a movie like "The Ring." Just the creepiest thing I've heard in a long, long time. Brr.