Blogging your academic self: the what, the why and the how long?
Abstract:
Blogging emerged as a novel channel for communication, but considering the ubiquity of blogs today, the idea of this channel being ‘new’ seems, well, a bit old. Blogs are everywhere, and the blogs of scholars are no exception. It might be more accurate to think of the form as evolved, since informal modes of communication are a staple of academe. This chapter is intended to benefit those considering personal blogs for communicating their own scholarly works and ideas, highlighting motivations to blog, rewards from blogging and tips for getting started. It is also intended to benefit those in the early majority already blogging, as both a refresher and confirmation of blogging strategies and benefits, as well as a twist – presenting issues and tips in regard to blog access and availability, both now and into the future.
Introduction
Many blogging academics report a wide variety of motivations to blog. For many, it is to quickly communicate their ideas and research to wider audiences than might be possible through formal publications, like the peer-reviewed journal article or (conveniently enough) the book chapter. A variety in motivation is coupled by variety in academic bloggers’ topical treatments, styles and approaches. And it gets to a bit of the challenge (and a bit of the fun) in discussing the blogs of academics. The blogosphere is immense. Technorati (2011), the largest blog directory in the world, indexes nearly 1.3 million blogs. While there has been much anecdotal reporting on academics’ adoption of blogs, available across a range of disciplines, no exhaustive, complete inventory of academic blogs or bloggers exists. The sheer size of the blogosphere does not lead to simply a ‘needle in a haystack’ scenario. Considering the variety in academic blogs and bloggers and the low barrier of entry for publication, it is more akin to a chameleon in a haystack. Blogs are added, deleted and forgotten on a daily basis. Lifespans vary, from blogs that are active – added to, modified and maintained – for mere days or weeks, to blogs remaining active for years.
Scholars in the blogosphere
Several neologisms have emerged to describe academics in the blogosphere, such as bloggership (Caron, 2006) and the blogademia (Saper, 2006). Consider some of these fairly straightforward titles, taken from a directory of academic blogs: ‘Information Processing’; ‘Quantum Quandaries’; ‘Discursive Philosophical Thought’; and ‘Finance and the Public Interest’. Now, how about these: ‘Eat the Dogs: On Science, History, and Exploration’; ‘Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, Steamboats are Ruining Everything’; and even, ‘Another Boring Academic has a Blog’. Following our primary school advice to not judge a book by its cover, we might also want to resist judging an academic’s blog by its header.
While no comprehensive inventory exists, there are ways to go about identifying blogging academics. You could simply visit departmental and individual faculty websites and have a look around. However, considering that blogs have diversity in form, styles, topicality and audience, identification as such may depend on navigational and identification clues provided by the blogger or host, or you may have to interpret for yourself whether it merits qualification. There are some tell-tale hallmarks of the medium. Blog posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order and support a range of object types and formats, including text, images, audio and video. Content published to the blog may be original to the blog or represent work originating elsewhere. Blogs support interactivity, such as through a commenting system and trackback features. They typically also support access controls to further refine interaction scenarios, such as password protection mechanisms.
In seeking out the blogs of academics, there is also a ‘birds of a feather’ effect. Have a look at an academic blogger’s blogroll. More often than not, this will lead to another academic’s blog (and another, and another, and so on). However, to take a more systematic approach to understanding the extent of blog publishing by academics, two important sources are academic blog directory listings and networks of scholar blogs. Networks are distinguished as an aggregate of blogs at one location that are typically organized by topical treatment or institutional affiliation, and, also typically, are organizationally-sponsored, such as by a publisher or a university. Just a few examples include the Law Professor Blogs, the Scientific American Blog Network and ScienceBlogs. Blog directory listings provide an index of academic blogs compiled for various reasons, such as topical treatment. For example, the Fourth Annual ABA Journal Blawg 100 is a listing of legal scholarships blogs, or blawgs, of merit (McDonough and Randag, 2010).
With all of these blogs, who are these academic bloggers then? The academic bloggers responding to my own study were found across all levels of professional age, real age, faculty rank, tenure status and publication and service history (Hank, 2011). The majority were tenured faculty, employed at the associate professor rank or higher. Nearly all blogged under their real names rather than pseudonymously. So, have a look around, as an academic blogger may very well be your colleague across the hall.
Motivations and benefits
Returning to motivations, two commonly reported are the sharing of professional experiences and ideas with peers and the general public, and to foster and build networks among an audience of readers, both the known and the unknown. Academics’ blog posts and topics may not relate exclusively to research, teaching and service. Just as motivations to blog are not mutually exclusive, nor is blog style, as found by White and Winn (2009). Bloggers tend to identify their blogs as both personal and professional.
When considered within the system of scholarly communication, an obvious question is whether a blog is a publication or, worded another way, does it qualify as scholarship? In my own study, eight out of ten scholars felt their blogs were a component of their scholarly records (Hank, 2011). Further, nearly seven out of ten scholars agreed that their blogs satisfied the parameters of scholarship for ‘unpublished scholarly outcomes and publications’, identified by Braxton et al. (2002) as ‘public, subject to critical review, and in a form that allows use and exchange by other members of the scholarly community’ (p. 141). Blogs can also be seen to be a link in a chain of scholarship and communication. A majority of respondents to my study reported that their blogs led to invitations to publish, present, provide service and collaborate.
Impact was also felt in other ways. A majority of scholars in my study felt their blogging had a positive impact across different aspects of their scholarly lives, including:
1. their creativity in examining research in new ways;
2. the overall quality of their research;
3. the quality and efficiency of their writing;
4. the quality of their teaching; and
5. their ability to share pre-publication materials with colleagues.
Further, nearly all respondents reported that blogging contributed to their enjoyment of their work as a scholar and improved visibility (Hank, 2011).
The one aspect of scholarly life that respondents did not feel improved as a result of their blogging was opportunities for promotion at their respective institutions. However, their blogs also did not impair these opportunities. Most felt that their blogs had no impact in regard to promotion. Several offered strategies, gained from personal experience as well as the experience of peers, for presenting blogs when up for tenure or review. The first was to emphasize the blog in regard to the requirement for service. The second was to apply Google Analytics, or a similar tool, to demonstrate the audience and reach of your blog (if you think it is demonstrable enough to show favourably on you). And third, it was recommended that one quantify invitations resulting from blogging. While these can be categorized, as mentioned earlier, to publish, present, serve and collaborate, specific examples of these invitations and resulting activities and publications might include:
Publishing: for example, monographs, textbooks and chapters; peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers; other scholarly papers and essays; commentary and opinion pieces; book reviews.
Presenting: for example, keynotes and plenary sessions; conference panels and paper sessions; workshops and tutorials; guest lectures.
Service: for example, professional association leadership roles and committees; conference committees; editorial boards; peer-review.
Collaboration: for example, research projects, grant monies; count of collaborators, including institutional affiliations and geographic locations, if different from your own.
Blog publishing: getting started … or getting more
While academics either new to blogging or considering starting a blog might be a bit hesitant joining this late in the game, late is not ‘too late’. Blogging isn’t going away just yet. Approximately six out of ten scholars blog about the same amount of time or more compared to when they first began to blog (ibid.).
The growth in blogging is attributed to many catalysts, one being the availability of free, easy-to-use blog publishing and hosting services. There are a range of publishing and hosting options, from application- or hosting-only tools and services to application and hosting services, either free or fee-based. Further, blog software programs may be provided as an exclusive application or in addition to a suite of applications. A clear majority of bloggers use a free blog publishing and hosting service, such as Blogger or WordPress.com. Some universities and colleges provide their own institutional blog hosting service. A minority take a homegrown approach, building the application and hosting it on their own servers.
And you may not use just one of these options. Blogger to blog is not necessarily a 1:1 ratio. Blogs may be published to by just one person, or be published to by a group of primary authors, referred to here as co-blogs. Bloggers may also publish to more than one blog, as reported by over four out of ten respondents in my study (ibid.). For example, an academic might publish to a blog for which they are the only author, then also contribute to a co-blog with colleagues from other institutions as well as maintain a teaching blog for communicating with students.
When choosing where and how to blog, think of the features and functions that are essential for you, with some questions below to get you started:
Do you want to go it alone, or invite others to join in? If the latter, blog publishing applications and hosting services typically allow for multiple people to publish to a blog. Make sure whatever application you choose supports this.
Do you want to pay for it? Obviously, your time is a valued resource that you spend on blogging, but consider whether you want to use a free or fee-based service. While blog subscription or hosting costs are typically low, such costs may impact which option you choose.
Where do you want to blog from? Blog applications support a range of options for publishing to your blog, such as directly through a blog editor feature, or through email and your mobile devices. Consider the different ways you may want to publish to your blog and check to make sure the applications you are considering support these.
What features are essential to you? So, are you ready to publish everything to the open web, or do you want to restrict access to your blog, in part or in whole? Do you want to allow commenting on all, some or none of your posts? Blogs support a variety of user interface elements. White and Winn (2009) identified 13 common blog tools, reporting that bloggers use, on average, seven of these tools. The most common are commenting systems, post-archiving by date or category, and built-in syndication. Other common features include search utilities, assigning posts to more than one category, trackbacking, support for video and photos, collaborative authorship, Twitter or other real-time update applications, mobile updating tools, blogrolls and a variety of widgets in support of other functions. What application and the associated features you choose will be informed by what you do – and don’t want to do – with your blog.
These features are not exhaustive. There are many other features to consider. Experiment and explore. I selected a particular layout for one of my now-defunct blogs once that did not allow me to remove the commenting system. As I wanted to publish some static pages, such as an ‘about page’ and a ‘disclaimer’ page, I didn’t just want to turn off the commenting feature, I wanted to make it invisible on those particular pages. After some experimentation and exploration, I ultimately went with another design.
Changing the design and layout of your blog, including adding or deleting features, is a given. And whether you are starting a blog or are a current blogger, whatever service and hosting option you choose may not be the only option you stay with during the lifetime of your blog. Approximately three out of ten scholars reported migrating, or moving, their respective blogs from one host location to another – and for some, more than once (Hank, 2011). For a few others, the migration was done for them by, for example, their service providers, blog network or co-bloggers.
And remember, you are entering into a co-dependent relationship when you blog, whether with a blog publishing application and hosting service provider, a managed blog network, or your institution’s own blog publishing service. Read the Terms of Service (TOS) agreements before subscribing to a service or agreeing to participate in a network. Are these terms you can live with? For example, we are aware of copyright issues when submitting our works to traditional publishers. Blogs also present our works, so considerations on what you can do with your content, as well as what you are agreeing to let providers do with it, may impact with whom and how you choose to publish a blog.
And still on the conventions of traditional publishing, we publish by our real names and we cite and credit the work of others that informs our own. Consider how you will incorporate these conventions into your blog writing. Blog publishing allows pseudonymous authorship which, depending on how you manage your online identity, might be more akin to anonymous authorship. However, a clear majority of scholars do identify themselves by their real names, along with other personal identifiers, such as field of study, professional role and place of employment (ibid.). This is typically achieved through a sidebar ‘about’ statement or a separate ‘about’ page. Consider publishing such a brief biography to your own blog. Such disclosure may contribute to awareness of your credibility and authority among your blog readers.
Also, give credit where credit is due. Blogs allow us to easily borrow or reuse content originating somewhere else. While formal citations crediting such use are not the norm in blogs, there should, at minimum, be an acknowledgment of the originating source. This is not just good academic practice, it is good blogging practice. Tim O’Reilly (2007) initiated the drafting of a ‘Blogger’s code of conduct’. You may want to check to see if your home institution or service provider has its own blogging code of conduct or other regulation or guidance documents, in addition to what is found in any TOS agreements.
Whatever codes of conduct you choose to follow or TOS agreements you agree to, listed below are a few suggestions on policies or other statements you may want to incorporate into your academic blog to help your readers, whether regular or occasional, make use of your blog. Such statements may be explicit (e.g., a distinct ‘policies’ or similarly named page) or implicit (e.g., included in a broad description of a blog’s overall scope and intent, as typically found in an ‘about’ page).
Who can do what with what? A copyright statement is a common feature of most blogs, typically appearing in the footer. While you may want to claim copyright to the content posted to your blog, it limits others’ ability to make use of what is on your blog. So, consider incorporating a Creative Commons licence. And consider making this applicable not only to original content you post to the blog, but also to contributions your readers might make, typically via commenting. See the Digital Curation blog (http://digitalcuration.blogspot.com/) for one such example.
How to, and who can, comment? In addition to addressing comments and use rights, you may also want to consider the inclusion of a commenting policy to inform commenters of how you plan to manage any comments, as well as set the tone for what is – and what is not – acceptable, and how unacceptable comments will be treated. Such a policy might address issues related to your moderation (i.e., reviewing, editing, deleting), eligibility (i.e., whether anonymous comments are allowed or not) and tone and language (i.e., no cursing, no name-calling, no spam).
Who is responsible for the blog’s content? This may seem an obvious answer; that is, you. But, is your institution responsible as well, if you’ve made your affiliation known to your readers? Or, say you are a blogging legal scholar, does your content represent legal advice? From a reading of a handful of disclaimer-style statements posted to legal scholarship ‘blawgs’, the answer is no. Consider including such a disclaimer-style statement on your own blog, regardless of your topical treatment. It might include a statement to the effect that the opinions expressed in your posts are your own and do not represent those of others. Those ‘others’ may include your employers, home institution, funders, blog network or other sponsoring organization and, as found on one blog, even the blogger’s own previously held opinions. Statements might make clear that the blog content does not constitute advice, whether medical, legal, investment, or otherwise. There are several examples of disclaimer-style language for content, whether original to you or linked or taken from other sources. For example, the blogger (and co-bloggers, if applicable) are not responsible for content, do not guarantee it is correct, and may not even necessarily agree with it. One blog disclaimer statement I reviewed addressed issues of confidentiality, stating that there was no guarantee communications made with the blogger would remain confidential, and another blogger addressed issues of privacy, stating that person(s) described on the blog represented composites of people, unless specifically identified.
There today, gone (or modified) tomorrow. Blogs are constantly changing. Not only are new posts published, but previously published posts might be modified or even deleted. A statement addressing such editing might be appropriate, though this is not a policy-style statement typical to most blogs. Such a statement might describe conditions under which posts may be edited with – or without – acknowledgement of such change. For example, one blog’s editing policy is that no acknowledgement is made if edits are presentation-related (i.e., spelling errors or other style-related edits), but if a post is determined to be ‘too misleading to leave posted’, or, ‘if we change our minds about something, we will fess up or just move on, but we won’t be sneaky about it’. Otherwise, posts will remain posted, even if ‘we later regret it’ (The Conglomerate, n.d., para. 2). A blog editing statement might also describe how such edits or modifications will be made known to readers. For example, as related at one blog, any change to a previously published post is listed at the bottom of that respective post, with a short description of why and when such change was made.
Getting noticed
There are lots of ways to bring attention to your blog (and, working in the reverse, these can be ways to avoid if you are not seeking to draw attention). Readers find their way to your blog through many paths. Think of the variety of ways you have found blogs (e.g., mentions in articles, interviews, or in other blog posts; blogrolls; institutional faculty pages or personal websites; business cards; faculty biographies posted to conference programmes or in publications, etc.) Consider these experiences as opportunities for yourself.
And there are things you can do to keep readers aware of your blog postings and other doings, with syndication services, such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS), a primary method. RSS allows automatic syndication. It benefits you as a blog author, allowing you to draw attention to your blog by making the content available in XML format through a variety of feed, or aggregator, services. Basically, you can deliver content to your readers, such as through email, rather than requiring them to directly visit your blog’s website. And as a blog reader, RSS allows you to subscribe to other bloggers’ feeds to stay aware of new content published to the blog without having to visit each respective blog site. There are several RSS or feed services you can consider using, both in your blog publishing and blog reading activities. Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader) is one example of a popular feed subscription service. Also, be aware of Atom (http://www.atomenabled.org) as well. Atom is another syndication format, developed as an alternative to RSS, though RSS is more commonly used. And, if you do tweet (or plan to tweet), you can syndicate your Twitter account with your blog to draw more traffic. See Chapter 6 for more about Twitter.
To raise your blog’s exposure, seek out blog indexing and search services, such as Technorati.com, or academic blog directories. A simple Google search will lead you to different indexes and directories where you can request that your blog be listed. Maybe you cross-publish posts between different blogs you publish to, and something found on one leads to regular reading of the other. Being listed or mentioned in others’ blogs, whether through a blogroll or from a mention in other bloggers’ posts, with trackbacks to your own, may lead to new readers discovering your blog. The opportunities for exposure are many. Simply summarized, promote your blog – using a number of channels and avenues available to you – if you want to draw readers. And, if you don’t, well, you can take some action to reduce traffic, such as asking to be de-listed in whatever directories or indexes your blog is found. There are, of course, limits to how much control one has over how your blog is linked and indexed on the web. However, enabling access controls at your blog, such as through password-protection mechanisms, can at least serve to prevent your blog from being read, even if found.
Getting over it
While blogging may capture your attention now, what about in the future? While disruptions of service may take you out of the blogging game briefly (as was the recent experience of those subscribing to Blogger), what of disruptions to our own lives? Our schedules change, our priorities change, our interests change. There may come a point in your blogging life where you want to take a break. It is recommended that you communicate such starts and stops, whether for now or forever, to your readers. If a short-term break, a simple ‘I’ll be back’ message, a la the Terminator, would suffice, though more information, such as an approximation of when, may be helpful to your readers. There might come a point, as well, when you want that break to be a permanent one. As academics, we don’t typically end an article, book, or conference presentation halfway through, leaving our readers and audiences hanging; nor do we have to with our blogs. Lawrence Lessig provides a great example of a last post, letting his readers know about the discontinuation, or in his words, ‘hibernation’, of his blog (Lessig, 2009). And, if you are stopping your blog, you may want to consider whether you will leave it up, letting your inactive blog fend for itself in a sort of blogosphere purgatory, or if you want to delete it. Keep in mind that even if you stop publishing to a blog, it doesn’t mean others, like blog spam bots, won’t try to. The blog you leave behind today, with all of its insightful posts and informational content, might look like a giant advertisement for things both savoury and unsavoury in the future.
Your blog today? Tomorrow?
Whatever reasons motivate you to blog, whether personal, professional, or a little bit of both, or whatever your thoughts on the legitimacy, value and impact of blogs within the system of scholarly communication, the form itself presents its own set of challenges when considering that a hallmark characteristic of the scholarly record is that it be cumulative. Borgman (2007) succinctly comments on the emergence of informal digital communications, such as blogs, noting, ‘they can be captured because digital communications leave a trace’ (p. 99).
These communications may leave a trace, but when considering the nature of the blog form as well as the technical, regulatory and social frameworks in which blogging takes place, for how long? Without either deliberate personal and/or programmatic approaches to the long-term stewardship of these digital communications, the scholar blogs of today may be unavailable in the future. And not only in the future, but even today. We have probably all experienced losing a work-in-progress or some other digital document (e.g., a spreadsheet, or lecture slides from a couple of years back). With our blogs, potential for loss is further complicated due to their co-produced form.
While we might think of ‘blogging as one’s personal printing press’, as aptly described by an interviewee in my study, the ‘personal’ element does not imply an independent printing press. Blogs are most definitely a co-dependent form, representing a mix of code, content and co-creators, the latter including – to name a few – bloggers, both the known and anonymous, blog commentators and service providers. This multiplicity of co-creators complicates blog preservation actions and raises a number of questions, not just in regard to issues as to what elements of blogs should be preserved, but, also, what elements can actually be preserved when considering the technical and regulatory landscape in which blogging takes place?
Bloggers in general, as Viegas (2005) reported, assume the persistency of their blogs unless deliberate action is taken by bloggers to remove their respective blog. Even if no longer maintained, it is assumed the blog will still be available via search engine caches. This assumes no other influences impacting service. We might not think Google will go dark one day, forever, taking Blogger with it, or that the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine,1 with its vast collection of blogs being just one of the content types presented, will just disappear. I am not so ‘Henny Penny, the world is ending’. I can’t imagine the web without Google or the Internet Archive (and nor do I want to). But isn’t a proactive approach to your blog content better than leaving things to chance? Garrett and Waters (1996), in a seminal report on digital preservation, identified content creators as the first line of defence. So, consider what you are doing, or might do, from the front line in respect to your blog.
Before going further, I think it is important to point out a distinction in terminology between ‘back-up’ and preservation, as well as those other related terms we might hear, including web archiving and digital archiving. Simply, back-up is used here to imply keeping content available and safe in the immediate use environment (the now) as well as into the short-term future. Preservation, however, implies access and use in the indefinite future, which might be a mighty, mighty long time. The goals of digital preservation have been succinctly described by Caplan (2008) as to get, describe, interpret, secure, authenticate, access and perform. These goals, respectively, necessitate a consideration of a triage of actions and approaches, when treated in the aggregate, to facilitate long-term preservation. A fuller treatment of these issues is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it does merit mentioning that many projects are currently ongoing to develop web archiving solutions.
So, depending on your preference – to keep or not to keep; in the short-term future or the long – I’d advise you to have a look around, as someone may very well already being doing it for you. Namely, the Internet Archive, through its Wayback Machine, which has been collecting blogs as part of a broader web archiving programme begun in 1996. Another example of an active, dedicated ‘blawg’ archiving programme is the Library of Congress’ Legal Blawgs Web Archive, begun in 2007. You don’t have to go it alone. You may want to look into whether there is a service or programme already available to you, maybe locally, through your home institution, such as a digital repository or archiving programme. Or through a national cultural heritage institution, such as the Library of Congress in the United States. Or, also, through a third-party provider blog back-up or archiving service. And remember the earlier reference to Creative Commons licences.2 The application of such licences to your blogs may help in sending the message to services, and their crawlers, working in support of archiving, as to what use they are permitted to make of your blog.
Whether you are more inclined to take personal action to preserve your blog or to let someone else take some action for you (or a combination of both approaches), there is no single best strategy, regardless if intent is for back-up or preservation. There’s an aptly named digital preservation initiative and open-source software application that provides some fundamental advice for those interested in the sustainability of their digital content, in whatever form it takes: LOCKSS, or Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe (http://www.lockss.org). The approach has been described as preservation by proliferation. A combination of strategies, for those inclined to keep their blogs of today available into tomorrow, is recommended. Further, you may want to consider what elements of your blog are most important for you to keep. While the default may be the entire blog, go back and have a look at your TOS agreements. Issues of copyright are much too grand – and challenging – to address here. But just be aware that while you may hold copyright to the content you post to your blog, it is a co-produced medium. What about the actual application and code itself? And again, what about the content originating elsewhere or posted to your blog by others? Intellectual property rights is a giant, thorny beast, but as any attempt to back-up or preserve your blog entails the basic act of copying, it is one we should be mindful of, though to what extent is debatable, particularly from a personal preservation perspective. Back-up of your blog does not necessarily mean you want to keep it all. Maybe you are only interested in the content of your posts, or maybe only select posts rather than all posts. Maybe you want to keep all the comments associated with the posts, or only some of them, or even none. The point is, we may not want to keep it all. Consider what you think will be useful into the future, both for your own access and use as well as for whomever else you think might benefit from such access and use. We could probably all agree that we live in an era of a surplus of recorded information. Managing all of the content we have available to us now is challenging. Considerations on what to keep and what not to keep, while they won’t alleviate these challenges into the future, may at least provide some relief, however mild, from seeking out the good and useful from the not so useful (or not at all useful) in the future.
From my work on the back-up and preservation preferences and practices of bloggers, a variety of approaches have been identified. You may want to consider how you might incorporate one or more of these into your regular blog maintenance activities.
Subscribe to a web or blog archiving or back-up service. And ‘subscribe’ is used loosely here. For example, maybe your blog is not listed on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine but you would like it to be. You can take action to enable its web crawler to pick up your blog. There are also free and fee-based blog back-up services, such as Backupify, BlogBackupr and BackupMyBlog.
Use export tools provided by your blog service provider. Most blog publishing and hosting services offer an export tool for your blog. That way, you can make and maintain your own back-ups whenever you want.
Do your own personal back-ups. You can also do your own personal back-ups using a variety of techniques, such as a blog back-up utility,3 database dump or other manual back-up. You can store these backups to a variety of locations, such as a personal server, institutional server, your workstation, removable storage media, out on the cloud4 or a number of other local or remote storage locations. And, depending on your personal preference, you may very well want to back-up the back-up to another location as well. Again, lots of copies keeps stuff safe.
Use back-up services provided at your institution. These back-up services can take many forms. Check with your institutional IT departments as well as your library or archive to see what services might be available to you. This may simply be daily back-ups to a remote host location, such as Iron Mountain, or a deposit to your institution’s digital repository.
Save and back-up ‘traces’ of your blog content. Again, maybe you are only interested in the content of your posts. Some bloggers report composing their posts in their email editor or a word processing program, or receiving their posts immediately following publication via their provider’s email notification system. And then, subsequently, saving and maintaining these ‘traces’ of their blogs as back-up. Also, others report capturing and saving the content that is syndicated as XML, such as through their blog’s respective RSS feed.
Mirror your blog, in part or in whole. Bloggers publishing to more than one blog may choose to cross-publish certain posts. This, in some way, contributes to the posts being available in more than one location, and hence serves somewhat as a form of back-up. Some bloggers even report mirroring their blogs in their entirety to another website. This, likewise, is seen to be reflective of a back-up by proliferation approach. This does introduce issues of version control, but simply noting that the blog is duplicated from another site, and possibly even a note as to the ‘official’ version – if you have so identified one as official – would be helpful for your readers.
Leave a paper trail. Some bloggers report that they print out their blog and file away these hardcopy surrogates of their digital form. While that impacts future users’ performance of the blog (you can’t exactly click a link printed to paper), it does provide an accurate copy of the informational content and layout of the blog. And further, paper, under ideal circumstances, is more stable than code.
If your blog is collaboratively authored, you may want to have some conversations with your co-bloggers in regard to back-up and preservation preferences and strategies, and then coordinate your approach among your blog’s primary authors. Co-authorship also introduces another conversation thread: are you interested in backing-up just your content, or the blog as a whole, representing the content of your co-bloggers? That will further inform your approach. And for those bloggers affiliated with a managed blog network, consider what back-up and preservation features are supported by your network. In interviews I conducted with some network-affiliated bloggers, none reported any awareness of their network’s back-up and preservation strategies.
Conclusions
Whether you are a blogging novice or a blogging pro, it is hoped that this chapter provides some useful information to either get you going, to keep you going or, even, to get you out. Blogging is not for everyone, me included. I am a sporadic and occasional blogger. However, I am a pretty prolific blog reader. Presented here are some suggestions on elements to consider including in your blog, such as policy statements and the like, to assist readers like me in knowing bloggers like you a little better (and, in turn, to better know your content). And further, while the barrier to beginning a blog is low, with plenty of free service options to choose from, it can still be seen as a costly endeavour when considering the time and resources needed to maintain it. Maintaining and sustaining a blog, and an audience, over the course of a week or a month may very well take as much time as the journal article you submitted last month. Blogging, depending on how integral it is in your life, is a potentially substantial investment of your time and resources. Hopefully, some of the back-up and preservation strategies provided here will serve you in protecting this potentially valuable asset, both for your own use into the future, as well as for the use of others.
References
Borgman, C.L. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2007.
Braxton, J.M., Luckey, W., Helland, P. Institutionalizing a Broader View of Scholarship Through Boyer’s Four Domains: ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass; 2002.
Caplan, P. The preservation of digital materials. Library Technology Reports. 2008; 44(2):5–38.
Caron, P.L. Are scholars better bloggers? Bloggership: how blogs are transforming legal scholarship. Washington University Law Review. 2006; 84(5):1025–1042.
The Conglomerate (n.d.) A non-exclusive list of blog policies & disclaimers. Retrieved from http://www.theconglomerate.org/disclaimers.html.
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1The Internet Archive posts information on how to enable crawling and capture to its website.
2Creative Commons (CC) licences fall into different licence categories according to the following conditions: attribution, noncommercial, no derivative works, and share alike.
3Blogger Backup is an example of a blog back-up utility.
4Dropbox and Joyent Public Cloud Hosting are two examples of cloud storage and service providers.