Matt finally blogged FranÁois Lachance’s peripheral approach to blogging – FranÁois, as you’ll have noticed, has no blog of his own, but posts his thoughts in other bloggers’ comments, forging otherwise undiscussed connections between the bloggers in the cluster he visits, or probably in part creates. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, without writing about it, and I’m glad to see Matt’s thoughts:

this is blogging in the margins, distributed blogging at the interstices of the discourse network. FranÁois appears on no oneís blogroll, his entries are not tracked by blogdex or weblogs.com or similar sites. He is an utter non-entity in the standard ecological renderings of the blogosphere, yet he unquestionably has a presence ìhere.î

The other day a commenter to Jane’s blog wrote a completely tangential comment, a wonderful short short story about her and a neighbour. Several comments later, after other commenters had ignored it, Denise writes: “johanna rocks. she needs her own writing space.” After that, Jane and Johanna herself briefly discuss the story. Perhaps peripheral blogging is the beginning of a trend? These are the productive examples. Comment spam is the bad side of blog-hijacking.

Francois certainly has a voice that is heard through his myriad comments across blogs.

8 thoughts on “peripheral blogging

  1. Jason

    Weez had a brief post about it a while back as well, with some interesting comments:

    http://weez.oyzon.com/archives/000176.html

    (Hmm. I must be channeling Francois.)

  2. hanna

    This topic also arose today on an IRC channel that I frequent. Specifically, the discussion there focussed on the act of taking over another person’s disused LiveJournal and posting one’s own ideas there as comments.

  3. Francois Lachance

    What is the difference between a complete and an incomplete tangent? [A set of mediations yet to come.]

    What is the difference between a peripheral approach and Francois Lachance’s peripheral approach? [A set of meditations]

    For more on the complexity of possession and ownership see the comments attached to a chutry experiment entry:

    quote> It is the asking of the question “Are we not all blogging on borrowed time?” that can be attributed to a moment that is mine or may become characterized as a question I often ask. […] think about the art of timing questions

  4. Meehan Keely

    Art is vision, not expression.

  5. join-the-dots

    coincidences

  6. cogdogblog

    Blogging in the Margins- Comment Blogginh
    Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, English professor at University of Maryland, blogs about comment blogging a different mode of effective participation in the blog world simply by using the comment space of other weblog. Kirschenbaum cites how François L…

  7. WeezBlog

    fun in the interstices
    I’ve been blogjacked. -g- and Francois are making an uninteresting post most interesting. Activating transitional spaces and maximizing the areas of greatest potential….

  8. the chutry experiment

    So I have a question….
    Would we be asking so many questions about Francois if he had his own blog? I’m not sure I can add to the range of observations that others have already made, especially this late at night (I’ll have to remember…

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