The Blog As A Research Storage “File Cabinet”
In a few weeks I will be giving two introductory blogging workshops on my campus at Kennesaw State University. One thing I wanted to mention was the power of using blogs, even if you have no readers, as a resource to tuck away ideas. They come ready built with links which mean easier footnote searching, fact checking or idea development later.
Then I saw a BBC News article where academic Esther Maccallum-Stewart of Sussex University says, “The weblog meant a place to store ideas, links and references.”
So here I am tucking away this thought and this link for my blogging workshop. Very handy indeed.
Plus when you want to build an audience, the very act of blogging demands that you constantly search for what’s new and what’s important. In other words, what might at times, in bits and pieces, look like a waste of time can be, when dipped into later, a very productive enterprise when the bits and pieces are sewed together into a complete idea.
Indeed, later today I will be visiting TechLinks, a magazine devoted to Georgia’s technology industry. I will make the same point that its writers should start collecting information at a blog, using it as a public notebook and then, wham, when all begins to jell, turn it into an article.
