I am responding in part to rather long night of vivid lucid dreaming about the topic of defining the nature of academic blogging, brought on by a long stretch of active blogging the day and night before, and likely inspired as well by Walter Ong's textbook, Orality and Literacy. In addition, I posted a photo of a thousand of small fish in a holding pond, and it reminded me of the idea of piling [1. I first came across this idea in Lilia Efimova's blog, when she was referring to the classifying of posts using similar tags and adding posts to categories.]

From reading Walter Ong's chapter on how writing creates consciousness, I recognized that how we are taught to write is constrained by what we write with, the very technologies themselves. And how we do write in such a new medium such as blogging is tempered by how we are used to writing, and by the conventions we are expected to follow.

Currently, blogs are not so widely accepted as the equivalent as academic writing. It is so new in the history of writing, that standards are maintained by peer review boards to ensure quality of presentation, to set very clear expectations for writers and readers of journals. Writing an academic paper about blogging, in my limited experience, is a frustrating experience. It is like asking the cat to be a dog. How can blogging be demonstrated under the constraints of the writing conventions of a formal journal, when the very journal prevents the use of the texturing blogging makes possible?

To date, blogging is simple, amounting to some use of links, photos, and a couple comments. I am demonstrating a number of techniques that can added to academic blogging so that it separates blogging from other earlier formats, creating a new genre with its own set of rules and conventions.

here is a test