Blog or Die! It’s the closing camp plenary with Jim Groom and Guests

Does Jim, Jim, do you count as Italian or American?

I am definitely Italian.

[LAUGHTER]

OK, we are on air, actually, for 12 seconds.

So whatever we said for the last 12 seconds, bring it us.

[LAUGHTER]

Because you have the--

that's Christina and Jake's.

I'm going to have everyone--

but I love your laugh.

I'm going to have everyone introduce themselves.

This session is the plenary session.

And it is called Blog or Die.

And so I'm not sure exactly what that means.

But I hope together as a group, we can put this together.

I wanted this to be a session where anyone--

and in the actual Discord link or Discord chat

for this summer camp, you will see a link.

And you can freely join in this session at any time

and add your two cents about Blog or Die.

Because I think that makes sense for the ending plenary.

It has been a group effort throughout.

And so it would be wonderful to have more people.

And I think we have more people.

Oh, Tim Clark.

Great.

So anyway, I'm going to go introduce myself.

I'm Jim Groom.

I work at Reclaim Hosting.

And I am going to hand it off to Taylor, who's

going to then hand it off.

And everyone will introduce themselves, and we'll start.

Sure, I'm Taylor Jayden.

I also work at Reclaim Hosting.

I'll hand it off to Christina.

Hi, I'm Christina Hendricks.

I work at University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC,

Canada.

I'll hand it to Tom.

So I'm Woodward.

I work at Middlebury College.

And I have been blogging or dying

since, I guess, around 2005, which kind of makes me feel old.

But maybe Alan will make me feel better.

Oh, now it's the geriatric show.

Alan Levine from an undisclosed location.

But I work for Open Education Global.

And I met all these characters through the blogs.

Mine was 2003, but that's just because I copied Darcy Norman.

And oh, I got to hand it to my good friend, Terry,

who I owe a picture because I drew it

through a town named after you.

I was--

The mic's not working.

I'm going to introduce Terry Green, who's

my good friend, who's in Petersburg, Ontario.

And he's got a lot to say.

And hopefully, he'll get his microphone sorted out.

But he's a blogger, not a dyer.

And then good to see Tim Clark.

Oh my gosh, it's been forever, Tim.

How are you?

I'm well, thanks.

My name's Tim Clark.

I've been thinking I should blog since 2010.

And yeah, that part of it's come and gone.

But I am committing today to turning over a new leaf.

And check with me in a year.

Blog or die.

Fantastic.

So one of the things that inspired for me

this closing plenary with the kind of tongue in cheek title

was recently, Taylor and I were working with a faculty member,

Chris Long, who was at Michigan State University.

And he was leaving Michigan State

and going to the University of Oregon.

And one of his top priorities was

taking his site, which is called The Long Road,

and moving it off of MSU's domain of one's own

onto his own server space, whether it's cPanel

or I think he went on to Reclaim Press.

He's on Reclaim Press.

Got to plug Reclaim Press.

That's right.

He's on Reclaim Press.

But what was most interesting to me is not so much where he went

is how important his blog space was to him.

Because like Tom and Alan and many of the folks on this call,

he started blogging around 2006.

And he has a lifetime of work, a career's worth

of work on this space that was completely crucial in his mind.

And I imagine other folks here feel the same.

And that's what I want to find out to their professional life

and to what they've done.

So how many folks here who have been blogging for a good while

feel similarly about this space that they created some time ago

and why?

Feel free.

It's open to the folks on the call, people

who have blogged recently and those who haven't, Tim.

Sorry.

I didn't mean to say that.

I guess I can get us started.

So I started in 2006.

So it's been 18 years, which is kind of amazing.

So yesterday, I started writing.

And I just posted this morning a blog about blogging.

And I realized that in 2006, I wrote a blog about blogging.

And I've put that into the blog post, which

I just threw onto Discord.

But in that post, I really reflected

on what I've done with the blog over the past 18 years.

And it has been so important, just as a record,

if nothing else, of what I've been doing

and what I've been thinking about.

Like, it's a place to go back and find, oh, yeah,

I read that article.

And I reflected on it.

And that was really cool.

Or I kept all of my presentations.

Well, maybe I've forgotten some.

But anyway, most of them are there.

And I can go back and find the slides.

And some of them are on different platforms.

Oh, but they're all on the blog.

So it's just been this really wonderful kind

of record of what I've been thinking about over the years.

Dead hair.

Fill it.

We got plenty of folks to fill it.

[LAUGHTER]

Well, I will say that that's the ultimate value,

is having that record.

But you don't realize that until much later.

And so that's really done become, I think,

an incentive to start.

And so I was thinking, too, that when the old-timers here

did start, I mean, that was our network.

It was distributed.

It was fractioned.

We had the conversations there.

And that was a lot of the reason for doing that.

And now we get that sort of feedback and networking

and connection through these many other things that we use.

And so the question is, why do we still go back to that?

And I think a lot of it is the value

of having your stuff in one place.

And frankly, I don't care if anybody looks at it anymore.

And so it's really a lot for my own satisfaction.

And this feels like something Tom Wilber would say.

I just feel better when I do it.

And so when I'm in that dead spot, which

means I haven't vlogged for a while,

it seems to open up something.

And I really can't even explain it.

And I've had a lot of experiences

where I was thinking of the radio metaphor,

that it continues to send these little pulses out,

like when we communicate with the ancient satellites that

were launched that are still floating out past Jupiter.

They're still sending signals.

And so every now and then, for some strange reason,

someone comes across a blog post.

And they comment.

And then you're like, well, wait a minute.

I don't even remember writing that.

So I have to refresh my memory.

And that's really rewarding.

But I think it says something to that value of having something

at least that's fixed and is going to stay there.

And my favorite thing is I don't care if anybody ever looks

at it, but I'm going to hang on to it and keep it.

It's like collecting old toys and stamps and things.

And if anybody else gets pleasure or joy out of it,

I think that's the bonus.

So like everybody else here, I'm feeling that energetic

when I get home from this trip that I'm on to get all these

things that have been floating around in my head down there.

Just because it used to be like I can't not sit down and write

this.

And now it feels a little bit more diffused.

But that's still there.

So I hold on to that.

There's always something there about it.

I don't know if I really convince a lot of people

anymore to take it on.

But the more I look and I follow people--

and there's a lot of people.

They do it in all kinds of different ways now.

So it's not about the platform or what you're doing.

And I think it's not like it ever died.

I think it just gets lost in all the noise of everything else.

But it's still alive and very healthy.

Well, and I think what's kind of fun, perhaps in a learning way,

is I lost my initial blogging stuff because it was on--

what was it?

It was on the stuff James Farmer originally ran prior to EduBlogs

on the South by site.

IncuSub, that's it.

Oh, my god.

James Farmer.

Yeah, so ancient times, but stuff that just went away.

And hopefully, I learned my lesson there

and kept my stuff in a thing that I control from then on.

But that's why my current blog starts in 2006 sometime.

And it's kind of fun when you talk about both, I think,

an outboard, like functional memory,

because I forget all the stuff I do pretty instantly.

Being able to search there or even those little Easter

eggs when you're searching on Google

and you find your own stuff come in, which is hilarious

and a little embarrassing.

And like Alan says, when I started,

it sounds like it was much more of communication.

And I thought a lot more about audience and the fact that--

and there was a lot more, I think,

audience and back and forth and comments and blog posts.

And that stuff kind of evaporated.

And I've made my peace with it.

So I mean, I just write things mostly for myself.

And I think a lot more recently, like my dad's super old.

He's like 8,000 years old.

And he wrote down all these memories of his life in a PDF.

And I took them, and I put them in a blog called Memories.

And so now it's searchable, and it's online,

and you can find it.

And I'm starting to think about that a lot more

as my kids get older.

Because Alan, I feel like, does an amazing job of mixing

workish type stuff and a lot more personal things.

And I've never really done that.

So I'm kind of thinking about how I want all that to work.

Because this is blog or die.

I think it is blog and you die.

So what do you leave behind, and how do you even

think about that, I think is kind of part of this for me.

There's a weird between space, the way

people talk about their blogs, that

is a mixture of creative language

and around writing and expression and stuff.

And also the same way people talk about tuning up a car

and the infrastructure of that.

I'm not sure how I'm going to engineer all that,

that I really enjoy, especially as a technologist.

That's kind of my thing, is how those blend,

and I find that interesting.

But also, when it really comes down to it,

it's about how you're expressing that.

I'm going to blog about my work and my life,

and I want them to be separate, and that's cool.

There can be different blogs, different sites,

or I want them to be the same thing and all in one site

or whatever.

It gets to the questions we ask ourselves

all the time about continually asking ourselves

about identity.

And to me, that's an important part of the blog,

is that you have those choices, and you can change your mind

even and say retroactively, like, you know what?

No, I'm putting these together, or I'm moving it, or whatever.

And you don't really get that with tools you don't

have as much control over.

And I don't know if I have a point other than to say,

that's one of my favorite things about this.

And I like even hearing people talk about it,

because I find that useful as someone who is also thinking

these things through too.

That's quite profound, because the tool doesn't

dictate the way you do that.

And it takes a while to figure that out.

And so you figure out that balance or that desire

over the long haul of doing it for some time.

Tim, I'm going to put you on the spot

here, because I'm a very good radio host.

I'm going to ask you, recently we

discussed in the community chat, your presence is always magic,

just so you know.

You talked about rethinking blogging and some

of the kind of struggles you've had with blogging

professionally and beyond.

And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that,

because I think it's an interesting point

to highlight here.

It's not always an easy road to hoe,

especially if it's part of your professional identity

and you're struggling with that.

Yeah, thank you.

Well, I think the first thing that I'll say

is the old expression, the cobbler's children

have no shoes.

When you're doing WordPress workshops three or four times

a week for classes and helping other people break and fix

their sites, and sometimes the thought

of jumping in there and doing those kinds of things

myself isn't as motivating as it could be.

But I'm over that, I think, because really,

as we've been talking about over the course of the week,

the microblogging sites--

and I'm not going to say the one--

has really sort of motivated me to have

a way to express myself.

The other thing, honestly, that really got in my way

was someone high up in the administration of my school

actually found my blog and was reading it.

And I found that to be a real chill on my motivation

to jump in there and to express myself,

because the best advice I had ever gotten, I think,

was from Alan.

Write like no one's reading, because no one is.

And once I found that someone was,

it changed my relationship with blogging.

But I've been away for a couple of years,

and I don't think that person is even tracking that stuff

anymore.

So I feel a little bit better about it jumping back in now.

But if it were something where I felt like only the people I

care to communicate to had access to it,

it's not really the same platform, right?

I mean, the idea is to share and to work openly.

And I just have to get over myself.

And if that person or others within my college or whatever

find it, then they're just going to kind of have

to take it as it is.

So that's an excellent point on when someone's reading.

I mean, the whole kind of tagline for DS106 Radio

is no one's listening.

It's a joke.

Brian Lamb and I started early on

that we keep on returning to with the idea that if you get

one or two listener, this week has been an absolute outlier.

If you get one or two listeners, you

are rich as kings on this radio station.

But it brings up another question, I think, for me,

and probably why another reason why I wanted to do this session

is with the diaspora post sites like microblogging sites

that I won't name, thanks to Tim,

or other spaces where people have congregated,

whether it's LinkedIn, which really--

talk about a chill.

I get a chill when people blog on LinkedIn.

That really makes me--

it horrifies me.

Or Facebook, or you name it.

People have said-- and I hear this a lot on Mastodon,

because Mastodon's Mastodon--

is like the community, network community of blogging

is coming back.

We're going to be able to bring it back.

It's like the Who going out on tour again,

when they're 70s or 80s.

And I hold on to that.

I hold on to the fact that I keep on blogging,

because like Tom, you said, or Alan, you said,

it's become a habit.

And it's part of what I do.

But I do miss the community there.

And I do miss the back and forth.

And I'm lucky.

I still have some of that, really, on my blog.

It hasn't totally gone.

But do we believe, as a group, that we

can relive some of the golden days of blogging

that happened in 2006, or '07, or '08?

What's your take on that?

No chance.

Absolutely no chance.

Go ahead and crush that dream.

Bury it.

It will never, ever happen again like that.

OK.

Who else wants to answer this question?

Thanks, Tom.

Thanks for your input.

Who else?

I don't know if I could be as vehement as Tom.

But I've painfully accepted that,

and lived for the idea that it doesn't devalue it.

But it can still become something else.

And it becomes the thing that we do because we care about it,

or it does something for us.

Or I can read something that Christina posted,

and still be able to filter back to all the connections

I have by interactions with her through blogs and other means.

And then other times, it's still a real joy

to stumble across a blogger I've never read before.

And so I think it's giving up the idea of the audience,

and have it become the thing--

like Taylor, I'm just going to go in the garage

and tune up my car.

Who cares if anybody hears how terrible it sounds?

Terrible metaphor.

But I'm with Tom.

Yeah, I wish it would be.

And I wish there was something like that.

But yeah, I've had to accept that that's kind of passé.

But it doesn't leave room for it to become something else.

So that's my optimism.

Yeah, I resonate a lot with a lot of that.

I feel like there was that heyday.

And that's what I keep coming back to in blogging,

is this memory of all the times when we would comment

on each other's blogs.

And one thing I mentioned in my post from this morning

is this sense of community.

But I feel like I'm working to get that elsewhere.

And Dina Mastodon is one place.

So this community right here is another place.

And I just don't know that blogging is going to do it.

A lot of people have moved to these other sites.

They've moved to email newsletters,

which are a form of blogging, just a really different kind

of form.

And so yeah, I'm not seeing it coming back.

But that's not why I blog.

I really appreciated, Tim, your point about wait a minute,

somebody is actually reading this that I'm not

sure I want to read it.

Because the thing that I love about blogging, probably

most of all, is what it does for me,

that it helps me clarify my views.

And I have to think through things

before I understand what I'm thinking.

Or I have to write through things

before I understand what I'm thinking.

And sometimes I don't necessarily

want people at my institution reading that.

That's not really what I'm hoping for.

I would love all you to.

But yeah, I totally resonated with that point.

Thanks, Tim.

I think we need to, as a hosting company,

provide a service where it's easy to block your own campus's

IP range to your blog.

It sounds like a highly requested feature

in this group, at least.

[LAUGHTER]

Big brother reclaim hosting.

It's like, only people not here in this geographical region

can read this.

$50 add-on.

Well, and I don't mean to be a bummer by saying we're not

going to relive the golden age.

Are you still talking about this?

Yes.

But I mean, that's the thing, though.

You can still do the stuff that you like.

You know what I mean?

And if you're not doing the commenting on the stuff

and bemoaning the lack of the golden age,

the move away from it, you can't do that, in my mind.

If you don't practice what you're preaching,

in terms of both the posting and the commenting

and the knitting the stuff together

to build that community, just be happy with whatever

it is that exists.

Otherwise, get to work.

Those are your choices, in my mind.

Or bemoan it on Twitter, or apps,

or whatever the hell we're calling it.

I'm going to blog or die.

Right?

Blog or die.

Blog or be quiet.

I have a question that probably doesn't have a great answer,

but I'll ask it anyway.

In mid to late 2000s, I was reading a lot of news

and stuff via RSS.

But I wasn't really aware of, in the 2000s especially,

small blogs.

That's just not a thing I was tuned into yet at that time.

And my question has always been, how much of this

is a community growing and a smaller percentage, therefore,

of that community blogging?

I understand that everything that's

been said around, hey, this was the tool

that we had for this networking.

That makes perfect sense to me.

But it does seem, on the one hand,

that there's also more people in this small space

of higher ed and folks interested in the interaction

with technology.

There's more people doing that work.

There's whole degrees now that didn't exist not that long ago.

Is that at play here?

Or not really?

Am I just being too optimistic?

So are you asking, does it feel different

because of proportionality?

Like, the audience has gotten so big,

still there's a huge chunk of people using blogs,

but it just feels like there aren't--

I think there's some aspect of that.

Because back in the day, I feel like I

knew every single person who wrote

about education and technology.

I could name them.

And I've been to their house, probably

knitted them something for a baby.

Who knows?

Helped name their dog.

That is what it felt like.

And I think there's a chunk of that.

But even among those old veterans,

like Dean Cheresky does a ton of blogging

and LinkedIn for various reasons.

He's both a Canadian and an old school

blogger in the ed tech space.

And he lives in a place called Moose Jaw.

Alan might know something about that.

So you know what I mean?

There is still aspects of that community.

But where the conversation has changed,

I think, has functionally changed.

And I think maybe, too, like I'm getting old

and you keep seeing this, like I've

moved into a leadership position,

so I can't write things that are true,

which is a factual part of the kind of education hierarchy.

So maybe, too, like as the people I know have gotten older

and ended up in different positions, like some of how

and what they write has changed pretty dramatically,

not just because of technology, but because of the way politics

works in higher ed or lower ed or medium ed.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

I think that point you make about knowing everybody

who was blogging in the ed tech sphere circa 2005

to circa 2006 was really poignant,

because I felt that way as well.

But it was also a moment where I felt like, oh, I

can now subscribe to a whole bunch of movie blogs,

the WFMU blog.

There was just a wide range of people

who were coming into this space and also

kind of enjoying that sense.

And I don't know if part of it is that I've kind of still

focused in on that community that I knew

and kind of depended on them, or if blogging has truly died.

Because I still read a lot of blogs well outside of ed tech

that give me a lot.

And so I struggle with this.

I'm more of the optimist, I think.

I think that people--

I still believe that people are going

to want some record of their stuff,

and they are going to want to have

a kind of ongoing narrative of their professional life.

I think that's the value of the blog,

at least it has been for me.

And we talked about the outboard nature of it,

and several folks have referred to reading posts

and not really remembering they ever wrote them.

And for me, that happens all the time.

And it's trippy, because I don't know

if I'm going senile, which is a possibility,

or if it's just the way that my brain, while it's maybe

in there, is not wired to remember this stuff,

whereas the blog just brings it right back.

And technically, I'm able to kind of fix things

that I have fixed before.

And I have narrated before, but when I come to it,

I didn't even remember I had that problem or fixed it.

It's really like-- you feel a little bit like outside

yourself, like who is the person who wrote this post,

and what did they know that I don't know now?

It was really a strange feeling.

And I don't know if that goes into--

other people have had this situation,

but for me, that's become a real value of it.

It's actually a really practical value.

Like, as my memory starts to go--

and you talked about memories, Tom--

I have this record that helps me kind of recapture

some of my professional work.

And it's invaluable in that regard.

I hope you think of that, too.

[LAUGHTER]

Blogging causes madness.

Yeah.

Everybody's too polite to jump in.

No, I have a great job.

Well, I have CRS, too, because I'm really old.

And I'm the new--

it's weird.

I'm the oldest, and I'm the new kid.

So I don't know.

I guess I have to get used to that.

It was the same thing when I went back to school.

So back in 2006, I had a job.

So I bring the working class perspective,

if there's such a thing.

Probably isn't.

But I've been blogging off and on, but very off and on.

But now I have a new ghost platform.

So maybe I'll blog more.

And I just want to say thanks to Reclaim Hosting

for building a community, because we are so fragmented.

And I've got I don't know how many accounts now

across different media.

It's impossible to keep up.

So I'm trying to centralize my own stuff.

And we'll see where it goes.

Good point there, Mark Corbett Wilson,

who thank you for pointing in.

One of the things about Ghost that's interesting

is that it does potentially tap you into the Fediverse.

And that's something that part of my hope

is that maybe there's new ways of accessing folks

what they write easily, which may

lead to what we lost when we lost RSS readers,

like Google Reader.

I don't know.

So over to you, Naren.

I'm sorry to interrupt.

But that's one of the things that maybe provides

another potential moment of hope.

Yeah.

I think you're so right, Jim.

And yesterday in the session when Kerry Pinney joined us,

Taylor and me, we talked about federation and the importance

of your own domain before you start pushing messages out

into different networks.

Because one of the things we talked about,

how ephemeral some of the social media that we now use

has become.

And you don't know what the platform might

do tomorrow or next year.

And so having your own domain and having your content

on there then helps you restore backup and all of that.

And I was just going to say, Alan, we

talked about you and your great OER24 gaster yesterday.

We shared the link in the Discord chat

as well, because Taylor and Kerry and I were reflecting

on where that Mission Macedon experiment had gotten to.

So yeah, we were talking about the links

between blogging and federated social networks.

Oh, you're very kind, Maren.

That was just a fun thing to do for the sake of doing it.

I guess in the prime of what we're remembering,

first of all, I don't think any of us

were taking ourselves seriously.

And even talking about it, we were just doing it.

And so I want to find that space.

And you can't exactly do that again,

because we're all very meta-aware.

And I just fully expect--

yeah, I fully believe in the federal government

and I think that pitch, I don't think it's a solution.

I think it's permanently disaggregated.

And I just find--

we find people in these different spaces.

Like Jim, I'm appalled by LinkedIn.

But if there's something of value from LinkedIn,

I'm going to trust that someone in my network

will send it out in some other way.

And I think that's the real federation,

is that everything is dispersed.

And I don't think there is a technical way

to sort of wrap it into a neat thing that

makes it work for us.

And then I need to sit down and write about that again.

I just find solace in that.

And it's like, that's the last thing I can hold up.

So if my blog creators--

yeah, I got to get with Taylor.

I want to get the big ship on Reclaim Press.

And I just want to sit down and start just spitting out stuff

again and not thinking so much about it.

It is-- sorry.

No, go ahead.

I'll say it is interesting to think of that in the way

that the federation isn't like a-- it's not a technical

problem.

It's a technical solution to a cultural problem, which

is inherently-- I find the federal stuff really

interesting and sort of energizing.

I do think it's-- I don't think it's a "the" solution.

I do think it's a really interesting way

to sort of breathe life into, and almost back--

in a backdoor kind of way, get people used to the idea

that these different things in different places,

they're at different domain names.

Ooh, scary.

They can talk to each other, and that's fine.

That's totally fine, even if they don't talk to each other.

Because it's the web.

If it's on the web, it still should be easy to access,

as long as it's public.

This kind of even goes back to me

talking about [INAUDIBLE] numbers,

like integrate blogging or course resources.

Many people in this call or listening

have done the same thing, help integrate stuff

from the open web into a course.

And then they're talking about student feedback of, well,

it's hard to know where all the stuff for my course is.

So I'm just going to put it all in the LMS.

And it's like, or links.

Links does this.

And you know what?

You can even put links in the LMS.

And I wonder if these federated tools will help.

There's a fundamental literacy of the web

that I don't think has gone away.

But I do think we always have to strive to push forward

and make sure people understand.

And I hope federations can help with that.

I'm not sure that they will.

But--

It kind of goes to your idea of scale to the community.

We've got so many more people on the internet.

And I feel like the gap between our economy, maybe,

between the upper 0.01% with a certain kind of technology

knowledge and a certain awareness of privacy

and ownership and the technology entwinement,

it's like the gap between those and most people

feels like it's grown greater and greater,

in part because the audience is expanding and expanding.

And the technology stuff is getting, perhaps,

stranger and stranger.

And there's more and more of it.

So all that's going to happen.

And it's just-- and you see people,

like I threw in Apple News, coming in there.

There's stuff that I hate.

The fact that they can take a regular URL

and mess it up so that I can't even figure out

where it came from without opening it

in their stupid app enrages me.

It's just a website.

Give it back to me.

And they're just so good at that.

And there's so much money behind it.

It's just an ongoing struggle.

Don't you think the systematic disruption

of our voices on our blogs connecting easily

is kind of conspiratorial?

Don't you think they want to keep us apart?

Don't you think the intention is they know together we're

stronger and more powerful, and they're

trying to shut us down, make us feel alone and alienated?

It won't be the first time capitalism

did such a thing to us.

So I want to pick up on a point that Terry Green made

in the chat.

And I'm sorry Terry Green couldn't be here.

He was having my problems, but he did check in here.

And many thanks, Terry.

You talked about how AI is going to impact the ability

to find various blog posts.

And Alan, I know you wrote a lot about AI.

I know many folks here have talked about AI.

And I just think, do we find the fact that if you're a blogger

and you've been blogging for a long time,

and you are intentionally avoiding AI,

can you put some sort of stamp on your blog?

Like, hey, you're getting actual human-generated content.

Great stuff.

Any thoughts on that?

Christina, you're nodding your head.

Any ideas about, will there be a moment very soon where

we'll be distinguishing between blogs that don't use AI?

I don't know.

I was just nodding because I was thinking, yeah,

oh, I should put that on my blog.

And I know Stephen Downs does that.

He's got 100% human-generated on his newsletter, right?

So yeah, but at the same time, I've

also seen ones that do have AI stuff on them.

And it can be used in useful ways.

And they disclose that that's the case.

And it can still be really useful content.

So I don't necessarily want to be completely anti-AI.

But yeah, my blog is 100% human-written.

And that's because I do it mostly for myself.

When I was listing out all the things

that I value about blogging, it was all

because I find it really useful for myself,

and my own thinking, and my own reflecting.

And so using AI would not really, I don't know,

help with that.

For me, anyway.

Yeah.

I don't want to make it a bun of my typos and bad links.

[LAUGHS]

I don't want to--

if you can't figure out that it's not human,

then I don't know if I'm really interested in that

you're reading.

So I understand the assertion there.

But I think it can be indicated through the writing.

And it's going to get so blurred and jelled.

And so I just resign.

I can't control that.

And so I just want to keep on doing it.

I want to tug at it, for Christina's sake,

as best as I can to the things that I think are important.

And I'm sorry.

I'm going to have to run.

But this has been a championship session.

And it's so great.

And I'm looking for all your blog posts.

I'm talking to myself mainly.

[LAUGHS]

Big fan.

Nice, naughty pie, Alan.

Out there in the big sky country.

So I'd like to make a counterpoint.

As someone who doesn't have a terminal degree

in communication or literature, I

find chatbots useful for developing ideas.

But also, as we teach at storycenter.org--

there was an advertisement--

with our digital storytellers, it can't tell your story.

I mean, it's a fact.

So no, it can't tell your story.

It can't blog your blogs.

It can't do that.

But there's a lot of stuff it can do.

And so that's why here comes another commercial.

My ghost is called "Talking with Machines."

Because I do find it a little bit--

I don't know what word.

I don't know what adjective to use.

But I'll go with interesting.

That here we use all this technology,

and now we're talking about 100% human content?

Well, maybe.

But as I said in our Western Roundup,

ever since they put up them telegraph lines,

everything changed.

And I'd like to think I'm 100% human,

but I got a lot of people telling me that maybe I'm not.

I love that sentiment, Mark.

Because I do think it does come down

to what your intention is and how you're using the thing.

So I think most--

we've heard a couple times in this session already,

blogs for me as a way to express and then look back

and all that stuff.

AI, probably not useful in the output of that, of like,

I will tell, hey, JTPT, I did this thing last week.

Make it a blog post so I can remember this in 10 years.

So it doesn't have the details or whatever.

It can.

Yeah, exactly.

But as a tool to proofread, maybe,

or to help you start an idea, I find these--

I don't use them a lot, contrary to what you might believe,

based on my sessions.

But I do find it useful as a writing block.

By writing block, I mean--

because typically, I will prompt you with something,

write something terrible.

I go, cool, I can do better than that.

And I find that really useful.

And not that I'm a very good writer, but it gives me--

I don't know, just in the right space in some ways.

Same way as talking to my spouse about something

that I'm working on, right?

And so-- not in the same way.

But there's an element to that.

And I do really think it comes down to what's interesting

and what your purpose really is.

And the one thing I'll say is I do find that--

the other thing that comforts me, I guess,

in the whole, like, is blogs going

to be lost in AI content storm is, yeah, maybe by volume.

Like, any content created by AI has a business model attached

to it, I think in most cases.

And our blogs don't usually, right?

They're for us.

I'm not selling my blog.

Some people, I guess, do.

They're newsletters, but that's its own thing, right?

And so I don't think that that's going to necessarily change

this type of blogging.

At least not in a way that's obvious to me.

If I could just co-sign that, I think

what Taylor's done is model a really important skill

or a couple of skills that I would

hope that the students I interact with

acquire in their time here.

One is to sort of evaluate the analogs or the antecedents

of any technology, because all technologies come

from something.

And whether it's RSS, the analog being a clipping service,

which was something that people used for decades back

in the newspaper days, or there's

thousands of examples that you can draw from.

The fact that we use slides as the metaphor

for online presentations.

And there's no carousel, I promise you,

or a 35 millimeter slide anywhere in that process.

I think that what a lot of students, younger people who

interact with technology, don't understand

is how to look at anything that they're provided

and to sort of stitch together what its purpose is

and what's come before it and how it might best be used.

And then all of this is really just

what I've learned from the person who's

been most influential in my professional life,

and it's Lauren Taub.

She comes from a media studies background.

And the other thing that she tried to emphasize with everyone

is that technology isn't neutral.

We try to reinforce the fact that, like you said, Taylor,

there is an agenda.

Sometimes it's benign, and sometimes it isn't.

But being able to sort of reveal that and recognize that,

I think, is a form of 21st century literacy

that we need to really impress.

The last thing I think that Laura

talks about a lot is agency.

And this shouldn't be unfamiliar to any of us.

But the thing that I like about self-hosting,

the thing that feels so comfortable and empowering

when I'm working with students is

helping them to recognize how much agency they have

by doing things themselves rather than relying

on proprietary platforms.

I want to make sure people have time to talk.

Maren, do you have anything to add there?

I've been listening really interestingly.

And I guess, like, you know, I--

like, because I'm bilingual and I learned kind of how

to blog in my second language, in English,

and I was an art student at the time.

And I was really interested in how to do that.

And I think that's been really helpful.

I was an art student at the time.

And like, for me, blogging fitted into my idea

of having a sketchbook.

Like, and at art school, for like years,

we were really encouraged to do that.

It was part of the assessment process, you know.

Then you just kind of, like, documented your practice.

And it was all about practice.

It was all about, you know, like, I

learned how to carve marble.

That is a very slow game.

So if you weren't-- you know, you

couldn't see anything changing from week to week.

So you had to kind of write down in order

to show what you'd been thinking about in the process.

And for me, like, that's where blogging came into my world.

Like, I started blogging about my art projects,

you know, like, being like a shop window,

basically, for practice.

And then, like, when I did my PhD

and I studied, like, cemeteries, like, I set up a cemeteries

blog, like, a proper gothy academic affair.

You know, so for me, like, I've been

blogging for, like, half my life.

Like, I was saying to Jim and Taylor

when we moved my blog over to Reclaim Press,

like, I hadn't realized this was nearly 20 years of my life

that was moving.

And, like, you know, it was so important to me.

And I can never--

like, when people say to me, like, oh, you

could have, like, magic content, I would--

for me, that's, like, a completely different language.

Because, like, that's completely no point to me

to have easy content creation.

Like, the whole point is, as Christina said earlier,

about the practice, about reflecting, knowing my own mind.

I often blog, and then in the end, I've written something,

and I didn't know this is what I was thinking.

And that is the whole point for me.

But I want to say, I'm getting really into the audio thing.

And Taylor and I were talking about the other day

that I've started audio blogging, where I'm basically

doing voice notes while I'm walking my dogs,

and I'm dictating my blog posts, and then transcribing them

when I get home.

Because one thing I'm aware of is

that the more time I spend staring at a screen,

the kind of less I move.

And I'm kind of trying to be more active

and looking after my well-being.

So I think I'm taking the audio thing to the blogging sphere.

And I'm trying to kind of see how

I can get more of the reflective process

into my blog through dictation and voice notes and things.

So that is kind of like a completely different angle,

like not at all AI-related.

But I am getting more into that kind of space

of using dictation.

And I guess transcription software

is trained on data sets as well.

So that's kind of my bit for it for now.

Well, after what you've done for audio on DS106 Radio this week,

which I hope everyone out there in the listening audience

gives both Taylor and Maren a huge shout out

for the great work they have done to bring us all together

this week on audio.

Amazing stuff.

So I do want to say a question that

has been kind of rumbling around my head,

and you, Maren, talking about it,

makes me think a little bit about this.

This is important stuff to you.

This is stuff where you have--

you're moving your blog.

We started off with Chris Long talking about a similar thing.

Like, this is their life's work.

This is an important part of it.

So how do you feel about that stuff being scraped and then

used by these large language models amongst

with billions of other sites, right?

And then the basically owners of these companies

or these companies basically say, that's fair use.

I mean, how many of you remember when we as bloggers

were so petrified of companies coming after us for potentially

using their content?

Is it odd to anyone else that the tables have turned

and they seem so cavalier in saying, oh, yeah,

it's not illegal.

We're just going to take your stuff.

Like--

I will-- I have to--

I'm bursting-- I will keep this extremely short, I promise.

But I'm livid about this, especially because one thing

we're dealing with--

I haven't blogged about it yet, but I will--

is while that is happening, you also

have Google, who, of course, owns YouTube.

It's currently blocking access to certain types of API calls

to vast ranges of the internet by IP address.

So I'm dealing with the fact that you can't really

syndicate video from YouTube in the same way.

And of course, YouTube is not a platform I own,

so this is the consequences of that.

I'm not unfamiliar with that.

But it's-- yep, couldn't be a clearer double standard.

[LAUGHTER]

That's pretty much how I feel.

Yes.

I do, too.

Although I have to say, I've recently qualified as a coach,

and I do a lot of coaching and leadership development now

on a paid basis.

And because I'm now in a coaching world,

I get bombarded by adverts that tell me

that there is an AI tool out there

that people can use to get all the coaching that they need.

And I am yet to find a human being that wants that.

And I certainly don't.

And I guess I always hope that enough folk in the world

will value what I value about the human beings,

and the craft, and the expertise, and the experience

that they bring into my world, that I

will remain relevant, and useful,

and cherished in my life.

And I really don't feel afraid of that,

that my content will somehow replace me.

I'm feeling quite happy with the content I'm producing.

And I think, Jim, kudos to you for doing a blogging

tour de force in the run up to the summer camp,

because keeping it going, and putting stuff out there,

and just sharing everything from retro gaming,

to conference attendances, to what's

happening in the Barva studio, and the arcade.

And there is so much multimedia stuff happening.

I think this is where my heart is.

I think my online life is just a small window into what

reality is like, isn't it?

Well, I'm so glad I didn't make that comment I was going

to make earlier about what I love about Reclaim and the ed

tech space is there aren't any marketers in it.

But-- oops.

But to balance that, Maren, I've been

struggling with how to talk about craftsmanship,

because that's what I did for 40 years.

I was a professional craftsman.

And us spatial people are really marginalized,

beyond all my other identities that are so obvious.

Spatial people are really marginalized

in the text-heavy academic sphere, especially,

but also online.

Yeah.

And to a point that Martin Weller makes in the comments

in Discord, I understand that some of us might be like,

oh, now you're concerned, Jim, about all this open content

you put out that someone else is using it?

Isn't that why you did it?

And I-- absolutely.

I'm at one with it.

I have figured out a way in Cloudflare

to block anyone from scraping my site very creatively.

But at the same time, I just wish that--

yes, I understand that.

But I just wish they didn't have the game rigged.

As soon as they benefit from it, it's

a very different conversation.

Because I've lost tens, maybe hundreds of videos on YouTube

when this whole copyright hammer was dropped on me in 2011,

2012.

And I have most of the stuff backed up.

I'm not too worried.

But it was super annoying to get that drop

and then have those same people come around

who are kind of scraping this stuff and be like, well,

actually, we're not breaking any laws.

I mean, it is.

It's hypocritical.

It's a sign of these companies can't be trusted,

which is nothing new either.

But this is another great example of it.

And so yes, I definitely stick to my commitment

to OpenMartin.

But it doesn't mean I can't be mad about it.

That's why I'm at 2.

I actually don't personally have any issue

with something being trained on--

I don't know why you'd want to train on my poor writing

anyway.

But I don't have a problem with that.

It's the reciprocal-- it's the non-reciprocality, I guess,

is that really, really bothers me.

Yeah.

And the lockdown consecutively.

Well, I do think it's fair for folks that do have a problem.

That, I think, is a valid concern.

It's just not mine right now anyway.

Yeah, I think maybe if I were a Neil Gaiman or someone who

wrote for hire, it was really a good writer,

I'd be more pissed off than I am.

But I just still feel like it's slimy,

the way in which they're bringing lawyers in because

they can afford to.

But again, nothing new to see here.

I imagine.

We have about four or five minutes left in this session.

I want to thank you all for joining.

It's been a great session.

But if you were to give-- and I'll go around the horn--

if you were to give a reason to blog or die to this audience

that's listening to us right now,

I want you to give it as succinctly as you can.

I'm going to pass the baton to Taylor, who's

again going to pass the baton to who he sees fit to answer

this question, and again and again and again till we're done.

So why blog or die, Taylor?

My answer to why is similar to-- it's

been mentioned a couple times.

You mentioned it, Jim, and Alan mentioned it, the idea of--

and Christine, you mentioned it-- of looking back

on the work that you've done.

And that is, I am a dad with a five-year-old.

And that just-- the timeline of your life

has started to mean something different for me now,

in a way that it didn't when I was, say,

in college or high school.

I didn't think-- I am now learning, maybe late or early,

I don't know.

But I'm now learning that the things that I create

matter to me, and I don't take the time to write about them

or put them in an easily findable place enough.

So blogging, to me, seems like the best way to do that.

So that's why it's important to me.

Hand that baton over.

Yeah, hand it to Maren.

In the words of Paul Bond, because blogging is for life.

Couldn't say it better.

Christina.

I was just looking over the blog post I wrote this morning.

So there's a lot of reasons to blog.

But one of them, I guess, I haven't talked about

is taking notes on things that I've read

and reflecting on that.

And I was noting that I could have just done that on my own.

I could have just written it down for myself.

But I feel like sharing that with other people

might actually be useful for them.

So yeah, I guess that's one thing.

I'll pass it to Tom.

Well, I think blogging is not just cat journals.

That was our old thing, right?

Blogging can be whatever you want it to be.

So it can be the thing where you find value and joy and benefits.

And it doesn't have to be a pressure thing

that I'm going to knock out five this week.

I got to get an audience of x.

It can be what you want it to be.

So let it be that.

And I'll pass it to Tim.

Well, for myself, I think it's sort of taking

the stress of high-value production out of my own writing.

For so long, what I've been working on

has to be good because there's a presentation or a proposal

or something.

And I think that's really ruined my writing.

I want to be able to model for other people,

have something I can show folks to say, hey, it's a process.

And sometimes you have to get three bad ideas out of the way

before the good one comes.

And I think my block now going forward

is where I want to do that kind of stuff instead of a journal

that gets stuck on the shelf or something.

Last but not least, I guess.

That's it, Mark.

Go.

So I'm on the opposite end of the landscape from Taylor.

My horizon is a little closer.

I'm going to be 70 in a couple months.

It doesn't look like it.

I curse that I've lived with it my whole life.

OMG.

So I'm thinking in terms of building a Memex because I have CRS.

I won't say what that is.

So the second brain or an extended memory is a good thing.

And I work with higher education.

So I think in terms of e-portfolios

and collecting all my stuff.

So again, I have a lot of stuff to collect.

And the main reason that I'm interested

is despite all the propaganda, I've

never experienced democracy for one minute in my entire life.

I lived in a one-party state my whole life.

And so democracy is really important.

So that's why I'm interested in working with the larger audience

that is before us and to spread the literacy

and get more people involved.

Great.

So finally on this session, and we're at time, I find--

I mean, I'm blogging a lot now, more and more.

Taylor, to your point, I started blogging

when I started a family.

The two came together.

My first blog, I was a blog father.

I created a site for my son with a Smurf header.

And it was called Planet Miles.

And it was just to capture the history of him as a small boy,

as almost an infant.

And it's funny, because I have moments now where

my kids know I blog.

They kind of make fun of me for blogging often.

And they also read some of my blog posts

and then make fun of me for specific things I've said.

And I love that more than anything.

Like the fact that they can talk smack on me for things

that I wouldn't necessarily say to them because of the context,

but yet there's still a conversation between us

as a result, is really rewarding.

And it goes back to that idea of who your audience is

and how many few people I'm writing for.

Many of the people are either in the chat

or in this space right here that I'm writing for.

And so I think that's why I blog.

That's why I blog or die.

And blog and die, as Tom said.

So anyway, thank you all for joining me in this session.

It could have been a train wreck without you.

And it was still a train wreck with you,

but it was a train wreck we shared together.

Thanks, folks.

And thanks, listeners.

Bye.

Thank you.

Bye.

Thank you.

I'm still on the air, but that's about to end.

And then Meredith Huffman coming to you live

with Two Hours of Music, starting now.