Blogs as places?

Henry Farrell referred here to his blog as a “place.” Which seemed funny to me because I think of a blog as a “thing.” Henry replied:

That’s the way that I [Henry] think about blogs (or at least group blogs and blogs with comments) – places where people meet up, chat, form communities, drift away from each other etc.

My analogy was blog-as-newspaper, the self-publishing idea, and I’m not used to thinking of a newspaper, or even a listserv, as a place. I think there is an aspect of the analogy that I’m still missing.

P.S. See Mark Liberman’s thoughts in his blog here.

11 thoughts on “Blogs as places?

  1. My blog is a place, although it is not strikingly a place where people "hang out." Hmmmm, another point in usage – when I link to pieces elsewhere, I very strongly these days tend to say "at" rather than "in" – if I really was reading the newspaper as actual paper, I might say "in the Times," but in reality & on blog it is "at the Times" or "at the Guardian" – the notion has strongly moved for me, as a conceptual framework, in this place-based way.

  2. Why is that? What's so place-like about webpages as compared to newspapers? Is it that the url is a web "address"? Unlike a listserv, which doesn't seem to live in any particular location?

  3. You're missing the comments. A newspaper is a unidirectional thing (despite the letters). A blog with comments becomes a third space, a place where people hang out and interact and discuss. Communities actually form this way, and real life friendships take hold.

  4. Yeah, but a listserv is essentially _all_ comments, and it seems more like a "thing" than a "place," no? I think the idea of a url as a web-location may be key.

  5. Listserv may be all comments, but the communications is still unidirectional — the comments arrive in your inbox. If you want to reply, you send out an email which lands in some other inbox. Compare to a usenet group, or an internet forum — posts are still all comments, but they are arranged in a way that you can inspect them all at one time in a single location.

    That is why I think of forums as "places" — I can see all the messages in one place.

  6. This post made me realize something about my choice of prepositions: with listservs, I use on ("I saw this on the XYZ listserv . . . "), but with group blogs, I use at ("Over at Crooked Timber . . .") as though it were a place. I buy things on e-bay, but I read things at The Drudge Report or the Times website. If I go to the newsstand and get a newspaper, the kind you actually hold in your hands, I'll say I read about something in the Daily News. Maybe we should check with the people at the Language Log.

  7. From the beginning, the Web's metaphor has been a series of locations, borrowed from the technological reality of servers that hold documents on "sites" and that link to other "sites". In reality, you linked to documents, but they lived in an environment.

    It's an apt metaphor, actually. Sites are alive and active. Documents move in and out. Content changes. They have histories. There is a sense of "placeness" about sites, rather than the "itness" of a rigid format like newspapers. Blogs merely inherited the place metaphor.

  8. Oh, I definitely tend to think of a blog as a place, unless it has features that clearly make it seem otherwise.

    I will say "I left a comment at Intrinsically Knotted", or I might ask myself "Why don't we see what's new at Dana's blog?" – usually a blog feels like a location to which I go in order to hear a particular person or group of people say what's on their mind, and hear passersby comment on their discussion (in spite of the fact that it's visual rather than auditory).

  9. i can say blog is platform where you can express your feelings and in return you will get users expression towards the topic you have wrote !

    A blog with comments becomes a third space, a place where people hang out and interact and discuss

  10. I concur with Jay Livingston's usage entirely. I note that I use "on" for forums. "On the boards," I suppose, visualizes the message board as an actual board to which one can attach messages. I think I use "on" for Wikipedia too, although I am likely to refer to Wikipedia and Google as anthropomorphic sources. "Google tells me…"

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