JP Rangaswami and the NewTailBlog avalanche
Edit: David N. Wallace picks up the idea and mentions previous actions with the same basic concept…
Edit #2: …and Dominic Sayers is the first to tag a NewTailBlog, his pick being Emma Kennedy. I like the idea of calling my CV page Everything I have ever done.
Yesterday JP Rangaswami proposed what you could call a grassroots initiative to generate more interest in new and yet-unnoticed bloggers. I love the idea (well, I admit, partly because I suggested it) and I’m looking forward to presenting a few of my daily reads here soon. JP’s own blog, by the way, is one that you should definitly be reading if you’re interested in what the unboxed digital society looks like.
What really got me thinking was this part of JP’s suggestion:
Every now and then, choose a blog that, in your opinion, doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Introduce it to your community. Keep the intro short. Tag it NewTailBlog.
Blogging allows you to start conversations with people that you normally might not get in touch with, people who sometimes share common interests but approach them from different angles. Business blogging is such a topic for me: I’m a linguist, but obviously my research into corporate blogs as a new text type would be silly if I didn’t talk to the people who actually produce business blogs. So I’m really talking to both the academic and the business community (or, possibly, just to myself - you decide), two communities that communicate far less with each other than I would like.*
So what I’ll try to do is to create connections between these two cultures by linking to bloggers with different backgrounds. Hmm, maybe I should link to two different blogs (one edu, one biz) concerned with a similar topic and match them up? Who knows what interesting conversations might happen…
What do you think?
* Sadly, this is especially true regarding the humanities. Linguistics is generally practiced as an empirical social science, but understandably non-academics don’t care a whole lot about that distinction.
