Academic blogger Jean Burgess at Queensland University reflect on how one’s personal web presence as evolved (with social networking and googling)–it’s apparently getting more difficult than ever for Google to report back individual home pages….remember, those things with “under construction” icons?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this also, but in the context of how academic blogging is beginning to intersect meaningfully with professional social networking spaces such as Plaxo or Linkedin through feeds. I first syndicated this blog to the University of Michigan’s alumni social network, but have since added Plaxo.
Here’s an excellent quote from Burgess’ blog entry on this subject:
One thing that has struck me lately, is that this hyper-distributed version of online presence, connecting us in different ways to a variety of colleagues, professional, personal, and online acquaintances, and close friends, couldn’t be further from the 1990s personal home page – a one-stop shop that often seemed to incorporate everything from a CV to cat photos, holiday snaps, essays and online diary. It’s important to note that, given the comparative unevenness of internet access, use and participation at the time, the personal home page was a form of cultural production never adopted at anything like the current scale of blogs and SNS profiles.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 