Over several days, on Twitter and today on our blogs, a mob of us have been having an extended conversation about …. well… it meandered. Basically it is about the role blogging took in our professional practice/personal lives when many of us first started, the role it has now, how it is different and whether the same sort of conversation still happens.

snail riffed on this comment that Ruth made on Con’s post:

“Perhaps the value is in the dedicated time to share one’s thoughts, rather than the medium.”

Well, it was sort of an addendum really. To a post which talked about the meandering, explorative and direct communication that blogging offers over publishing a journal article or writing a conference paper. An addendum whose existence beautifully illustrated the point he was making.

I think it is not just about time. I think it is about space too.

When Con identified conversationalists in her post today, she listed them as “(Kathryn, snail, Trish, Clare, Megan, Sam, Alisa)”, noting that she chose to refer to people by their Twitter handles because the conversation was on Twitter and not everyone blogs these days.

This resonates with part of the conversation last night, where we were talking about the fiddliness of commenting on blogs, and that to continue the conversation if we make a comment we would have to keep coming back to the blog site to check.

I got all spatial:

It stops me from replying on my own blog too…Feel like someone very nicely left me a thoughtful note on my front door, but then when I reply I am pinning it back on my front door…

….we once did not care & just replied.

I think far fewer ppl playing then, so we hung out more?

If a conversation happened on Twitter, I tend to link to the Twitter handle. If it was a comment on a blogpost, or something said on a blog, then I link to the blog. It feels like a different place. No different really to my academic work where I will cite someone’s work from an academic journal, or from a blog, according to the location it was published. And, likewise, it signals the level of formality, rigour and humour one is likely to find there.

YET…. when I wanted to locate snail’s blog, I just searched for his URL, the one I have found him under for years, snail.ws. Same with Con at flexnib.com. I know that if I enter that rather short search string, I will get to their place. Their corner of the web. And it does feel locational. Like I could leave a friendly note on their front door.

They may not be there at the moment, but I am confident they will be back in time to see it. Because, unlike Twitter, where the conversation of the last couple of days will swirl down the plughole with whatever else roiled today and yesterday, it feels like there is a longer time for meaning and conversation to settle in and still be important.

Their place is the context, not 15 different tweets that they need to have also read in the last 24 hours for what I am saying to make an iota of sense. It feels like chatting on the porch or over the fence, rather than jogging down mainstreet on the way to do twenty different errands, trying to optimize time.. and if I look carefully I can see Ruth’s footprints and snail’s footprints in Con’s yard too..