...or, Blogging Has Ancestry
The place blogs localized adaptations of the blog "genre," mixing traits from previous forms of writing.
1) Journals, Logs, and Field Notebooks (aka, What Would Thoreau blog?)
The place bloggers showed "close attention to place and daily cultivation ... of mind(s) trying to figure out (their) relationship with place."
One blogger explains the difference between a log book and blog as focusing on audience and geography:
"While anyone is able and welcome to read our logbooks, nobody ever does, because they are physically bound, literally and figuratively, in our living room. . . the weblog is a place where I can write something and know that at least fifteen, and probably many more, people will read it" (Feathers of Hope).
2) Personal Essays
"Each post reads like a short essay representing the mind at work...weav(ing) together photographs, personal experience, descriptions of places...and philosophical reflections on life and place, taking what seems at first like disparate elements and weaving them together into a meaningful whole...a way to experiment with notions of both self and place."
3)Ethnography and Journalism
Blogs serve as "a growing archive of local knowledge...important for responsible civic engagement in the community."
4) Travel Writing
Blogs allow authors to "step outside of routine and perceive a place with new eyes, to see what appears to be natural or inevitable as something constructed...a way of engaging with relatively ordinary places, the kinds of places we inhabit rather than visit, the places that do less work to help us see what's there."
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