News & Views
Blog Day 2008
By Terry Freedman
Tue, 19 Aug 2008, 08:06

Information about an initiative intended to help you find new, and different, blogs to read.

What it is, how to get involved and whether it's worth bothering with.

The purpose of Blog Day 2008

I came across this news courtesy of Tracy Hamilton at the Discovery Through eLearning blog. The idea is for bloggers to get to know the work of other bloggers that are different to their own in some significant way. You can find more information here, but the crux of the matter is that on 31 August you recommend five blogs, and use a tag and a link back to the Blog Day website to ensure that all the recommendations are collated.

I am not quite sure whether this is genuine or simply a means of driving traffic to that website, but let's give it the benefit of the doubt. What are the pros and cons of this?

Good points about Blog Day

• One of the problems we all face is finding ourselves in a sort of echo chamber. We naturally gravitate to blogs that seem to reflect our own values, but I find it becomes intellectually stifling after a while. This seems to me to be a way of discovering different voices in a less-than-random manner.
  
  
• I think it will be interesting to see what other blogs people we (think we) know are reading. It will, I am sure, cast a new light on them to some extent.
  
  
• It's always interesting to see collections of blogs in one place, as it were, because it makes it easy to explore unfamiliar ones.

Bad points about Blog Day

• Well, there's the slight doubt I've already voiced, brought about mainly by the fact that there is ad on the site inviting people to take part in an alpha trial of a free news collation application. I've put my name forward for that just out of curiosity, but it did put me on my guard a bit.
  
  
• It seems completely nuts to me to have Blog Day on a Sunday. I know it's all artificial anyway, because the website will still be there subsequently, but still.
  
  
• Following on from the last point, having an event on a particular day on the web, when the resources are going to be accessible ad infinitum, seems to me like one of those anomalies (like the K12 Online Conference). It sounds like a good idea, until you start to wonder what the point of it is, because having a time-related event is only meaningful if the event is accessible, or able to be participated in, only at that time. At least the K12 Conference has some live events. Don't get me wrong: I'm not knocking these things per se, just questioning the logic behind it.

I've only just discovered Blog Day, so if this is a well-established annual event you will, I hope, pardon my ignorance.

© Terry Freedman Tue, 19 Aug 2008