Have you thought about putting an “about me” section in here somewhere? It isn’t immediately obvious who’s blog this is. Perhaps there is one somewhere but I haven’t found it.

Yes, this blog really is a personal journal more than a public account. It probably is helping to keep me on track and helping to make me accountable.

I endorse what has been said about Plurk. Haven’t looked at Netvibes, but have been using Google Reader for quite a long time and if it ain’t broke why fix it!

I guess, like earlier discussions in other places about bibliographic tools, one of the important things on this DPhil journey is getting the different props in place for myself - and making sure they are tools which I personally feel comfortable with.

Finally getting back here to make a comment….

@misetak is right - the register to comment feature is a deterrent - it’ll be interesting to see if you get more comments now it is disabled. However, my experience with blogs is that it’s mostly a one-way conversation unless you’re covering controversial topics that people are passionate about. (Not that they shouldn’t be passionate about learning!!). I use my blogs as a way of keeping my own stuff in one place - as well as sharing it with others. I think a blog is good as a reflective learning journal - but in this case is probably best kept private so you can make whatever jottings make sense to you.

A wiki sounds like a good solution for what you want to do. You can keep it completely private or public or allow just some people to read it - or even write in it. My favourite tool is PBWiki (http://pbwiki.com/) which is free. I have one set up for my doctoral studies (http://carolsdoctorate.pbwiki.com/) - open to public view with just a handful of people given access to write & access the files I have attached to it. I have heaps of wikis on the go for everything from project planning to operations manual.

I also like Plurk (http://www.plurk.com) for getting comments from others. The drop down comments box is conducive to on-going conversations and the sharing of ideas.

My favourite RSS reader is Netvibes - it organises my life.

(All of this in retrospect & just for the record. Looks like your new wiki is doing the trick)

Cheers

I think you’re having a bit of a Luddite moment, to be honest. To my mind a blog is a tool, just like any other tool. It’s good for some things, and it’s not good for some things. There’s no point using it for the things it’s not good for. For instance, I don’t think it works as a means of capturing half formed thoughts; OneNote, mapping tools or a personal journal are much better for those. I use office documents scattered all over my desktop for adding half formed thoughts to the subject in question.

I’ve found blogging very useful in three respects. First it makes me finish my half formed thoughts. That’s very useful in a life that is full of half formed thoughts. The idea of writing for an audience, even if there isn’t actually one there, makes me work my thoughts through to a conclusion, which either makes them publishable or makes me realise they weren’t worth pursuing. Either outcome is a result.

Secondly, there are many different ways of journalling, all of which have different effects. One of the things that’s bothered me about journalling for a long time is that a journal is a social document, even if it’s private. it can’t be divorced from the influences around you that got you to the point you’re at when you write. But I suspect that very often the discourse of privacy gives people the impression that they’re writing something that has no link to the world outside. Blogging with comments that gives other people the opportunity to respond and then gives you the opportunity to deepen your own response brings the socialness of the situation into the foreground. It remains under your control, and is structured so that there is a spine of the author’s thinking interleaved with responses from others, which makes it a very personal account but with a social aspect. I think that’s good, and potentially very provocative.

Thirdly, I like the fact that the basic html functionality is there. Sometimes a post provokes a response, as yours did on troublesome learning, which I felt was worth a blog in its own right. I linked to your post, and you have now linked to mine. That’s all to the good as far as I can see. You can also link within your own blog as well as tagging.They’re just different ways of doing the same thing, and of carrying on a conversation in a different way. In my own blogosphere I quite often make new discoveries by following links from blogs I read regularly to places I’ve never found before. Yes, there are too many to deal with properly, but that is the way of the web, n’est-ce pas?

Part of the problem with the lack of comments is the need to register and log in before we can comment. This is illustrated nicely with the discussion in plurk that followed your posting (http://www.plurk.com/p/cktef).

When people are busy, this is the sort of thing that makes us give up. I wonder if this is more of a problem because we have to sign in before we have written the comment. Blogger does it the other way around - write the comment and then log in to post it. The fact that we have already invested the time in writing the comment means we are more likely to invest a little bit more to post it.

Just a thought.