I’m going to be audiochatting for a while with Scott Rettberg‘s students in half an hour or so, a fortnight before I actually go visit them – I’ve never audiochat-taught/lectured before, so it’ll be interesting. Scott’s New Media Studies class are starting a collaborative class project on blogs, putting together a collection of reviews they’ll write of various weblogs. So today we’re going to talk a bit about how you’d write about a weblog. I thought I’d point them to the Peer to Peer Review Project, where bloggers reviewed each others blogs. I also want to point out the importance of being aware of a weblog’s surroundings. Is the weblog part of a cluster? Who and what do they link to? So I might want to show them Technorati, I guess, and how to do a Google search to find out who’s linking to a site. What else would I want to say? Time, how a weblog exists in time, it’s episodic, you read a little, but again and again, across months and years, if you like the blog. So to write about a weblog you should not just visit it more than once, you should also poke around in the archives. Especially have a look at that First Post, it often explains why the blogger wants to blog. There are other things as well, of course. Design, frequency, style, the kind of things the blogger writes about, etc, etc etc…

It’ll be pretty interesting to see how the students’ project turns out. There aren’t many weblog reviews or critical readings of weblogs out there, and this is an interesting start.