Man’s Search For Meaning(ful Blogs)
No, not a comment on Viktor Frankel’s book, which I haven’t read. Someday, maybe. It was a good day, a long day. I was up at 6:00, because I had to teach a research skills and library resources class to a group of third year chemical engineering design students. Less than half the class showed (25 out of 65, their loss, frankly), and the lecture went well. I spent the remainder of the day in a semi-daze, refueling on black coffee, spinach salad, and fruit.
During the day I had an interesting conversation with a colleague about blogging. She couldn’t see a reason to spend time blogging other than for something subject-specific, related to our profession, most likely. I accept her take on the activity – it’s not for everyone. And subject-specific blogs can be of great use to those who require a quick way to check on the latest developments or news in their areas of interests. A subject-specific blog, such as this one on nanotechnology, almost function as a slow-motion crawl or ticker (the name given to the line of news that crawls across the bottom of the screens of tv networks like CNN). Of course, news there changes every few seconds – an active subject blog might change only a few times a day. But the purpose is similar.
The nanotech blog mentioned above neatly indentifies the subject of each entry with a small graphic, each with a different subject name: nanomaterial, nanopeople, nanoevents, nanobiomed, etc. (These serve the same purpose as “category” in Moveable Type.) The challenge for my colleagues and I perhaps is to try to develop a useful blog for the library system.
October 23rd, 2002 at 19:50
Sorry to be off-topic here Randy but the ‘new’ design looks really good now with all the kinks worked out. Good job. (I see you succumbed to the all-powerful two-column design, too.)
October 23rd, 2002 at 19:58
hey babe – its not so much that i can’t see a reason to spend time ‘personal’ blogging, its that i’m certain no one wants or needs to hear about my suburban, domestic reality nor do i wish to spend time writing about it when i could be doing laundry….. : )
October 23rd, 2002 at 22:52
Thanks Zuchris, I appreciate the support – I *really* like the layout of your site.
The minor glitches continue, however. I resolved the issue of the right column disappearing into the blogbody by making a minor change in the css. However, now when I move the page up or down, certain lines in each entry go blurry and become unreadable unless the page is refreshed. Where is THAT coming from, I wonder?
Does it ever end? *sigh*