Rolling with the punches

Posted on | October 8, 2007 | 12 Comments

Just as I was thinking about formalising a paper I’ve been working on about research blogging, I read a pretty personal if pseudonymous attack on a colleague’s blog. It’s not only made me quite angry but has me thinking more about what’s at stake in having an online presence. I won’t link to the post here in case I upset the person even further, but part of what caused offence was that I had taken them off my blogroll.

I’m not sure how many readers pay attention to blogrolls now that feed readers are so popular; I rarely read all of the blogs I already subscribe to so I tend not to be looking for more. But for what it’s worth I tend to put less than a quarter of the feeds I read in my blogroll at a time. Then I edit it every few months based on changing research interests, new blogging colleagues who may need some exposure, and the frequency of posts on the blogs of friends and other acquaintances accumulated along the way.

Some, like Jean’s and Adrian’s, will be staying for good, because they helped me start blogging in the first place. Others stay because blogging is our prime form of communication between infrequent meet-ups. But I don’t like long blogrolls for aesthetic reasons as much as anything (and Nick or anyone else who can help, I’m also trying to work out how to make my archives on the sidebar shorter, for the same reason). As I update my blogroll again today, conscious of this improvised and rather arbitrary framework—and now paranoid about the power dynamics I’m inscribing at the same time—I’m wondering whether I’ve been going about this the wrong way.

Have other people had similar experiences with blogroll faux pas? Am I obliged to link to everyone I know? Everyone who links to me? Anyone at all? Who decides this etiquette? And does every blogger need to have an explicit position on it?

I’ve seen these issues discussed in the past, and a number of high-traffic blogs found the best solution was to abandon having a blogroll at all. I’ve also read a lot about the consequences of ‘unfriending’ on social networking sites, which is usually explained/ dismissed in terms of the heightened insecurity of teenage sociality (even though the same research often shows that teens aren’t necessarily the average user for the sites themselves). But I didn’t realise blogrolls were quite this important. Should I?

Incidentally, the MACS meeting we’re having in the CCCS on Friday is talking about the pros and cons of maintaining an online presence, especially for career opportunities. If I didn’t already have a long list on either side of that divide, now I have even more. John Quiggin will be the guest speaker. He has a very long blogroll.

Maybe the other issue that’s been raised by this incident is that it’s made me increasingly sure about what I am and what I’m not prepared to blog about. In Newcastle recently I was a bit stunned by one of the speakers who was explaining why she blogged about her abortion as well as her mother’s death from cancer. As someone who has gone through the second of those experiences, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t be able to do the same. It shocked me to have been confronted with that person’s alternative decision, to have that difference made so clear, on an issue that’s quite significant to my life. Anyway, it’s the fascinating line between what each individual believes should be made public and kept private that my research is investigating, which obviously doesn’t mean I am the most successful navigator of these questions in my own practice. I’m not sure one necessitates the other, but hopefully the former will help with the latter.

Category: Academia, Web(log) Stuff

Comments

12 Responses to “Rolling with the punches”

  1. M-H
    October 8th, 2007 @ 5:01 pm

    I’ve deleted blogrolls on all my blogs. I use one feed for my hobby interests (’play’) and a different one for edublogs and blogs about blogging etc (which feel more like ‘work’). Blogrolls are a pain to keep updated and, as you’ve discovered, people can read much more into them than you intended all too easily.

  2. Nick Caldwell
    October 8th, 2007 @ 9:38 pm

    I’ll have a think about sorting out the archives when I work up the courage to migrate you to the new server (it’s probably not hard but I’m more used to migrating Textpattern sites).

    Blogrolls are indeed a pain to manage, but it helps if the tool has some way to automate updates to them (which I think Wordpress does now). But I do favour them because they still offer really rewarding opportunities for exploration. I’ve discovered incredible writers through blogrolls such as the terrifyingly comprehensive one at Making Light: (http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/)

  3. glen
    October 9th, 2007 @ 7:34 am

    my blogroll is currently broken. something to do with the database and upgrading wordpress. i will fix it in about 6 weeks ;)

  4. Graham
    October 9th, 2007 @ 10:11 am

    ooh, i’ve been derolled…which is fair because i haven’t posted in months and haven’t posted regularly in half a year.

  5. melgregg
    October 9th, 2007 @ 10:30 am

    Good luck Glen :-)

    And Graham: phew! I’m still eagerly subscribed tho, and you’ve been concentrating on important stuff, right? Like getting confirmed!! Congratulations. Will we be celebrating in Adelaide?

  6. Graham
    October 9th, 2007 @ 11:14 am

    Thanks. I will be in Adelaide and I’m actually doing a paper this year too. It’s on strategic appropriation as a means of cultural sustainability. I will need to find an irish bar in a strip mall soon after tho. Hoep to see you there.

  7. creativity/machine » on distributed presence (and blogrolls)
    October 9th, 2007 @ 12:44 pm

    [...] At the same time, some discussion of blogrolls has come up at Mel’s blog. I have been thinking about that this morning in terms of the increasingly distributed quality of ‘online presence’, and the uses of social media relative to technological shifts, that I mentioned above. [...]

  8. Jason W
    October 9th, 2007 @ 3:57 pm

    Hey! I am a HCT blogroll debutante (well with Barry and Axel anyway)! Calloo, Callay!

  9. barry
    October 9th, 2007 @ 6:42 pm

    hey, sweet! thanks Mel!

    but, you know, if you ever want to delinkulate me, i won’t be upset, i’ll take it with good humour. :)

  10. lolcademy
    October 11th, 2007 @ 3:06 pm

    i can has reciprocal linkage?

  11. melgregg
    October 11th, 2007 @ 3:49 pm

    Ha ha ha…. if you give me your address! If not, I will certainly ask permission to quote your handle or maybe even use it in an essay title some time!

    Thanks for the giggle.

  12. home cooked theory » Blog Archive » Rates of writing
    November 18th, 2007 @ 7:21 pm

    [...] It’s the same paper I was planning to write before about academic blogging, but which various circumstances seemed to be conspiring to prevent me from finishing. Now finally feels the right time to try to publish it – particularly since the moment of hype for blogs seems to have passed, and platforms like Facebook and Twitter are reminding some of us what was valuable about blogging for a particular moment. [...]

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