Final Reflections

I’d like to begin my final reflection by writing about my personal experience in the past month, from beginning to end, with my blog. I find the concept of a ‘blog’ to be fascinating. Online, each individual blog is intensely personal—overwhelmingly they represent the viewpoints of a single author. Some are compiled by groups of writers, some are maintained by organizations, but even in these circumstances the blog is often a conglomeration of relatively homogenous perspectives. Yet, unlike its predecessors, private journals, letters, and daily logs, blogging is a public exercise in introspection. A person’s blog posts are available for access by the largest readership that has ever existed.

When I began writing on my interim blog, Green Con, I expressed my wonder at the sheer quantity of information that was passing through the millions blog sites on the Internet every day. In my month of blogging, that amazement has not diminished. The knowledge that there are thousands of writers posting at every hour of the day—well, let’s just say that trying to visualize the enormity of the blogosphere is a stretch for anyone’s imagination. The end result of the compilation of these thousands of personal accounts in the realm of blogging is a vast electronic discussion that intersects and diverges on a number of topics.

To be frank, the vastness of the blogosphere intimidated me at first. I was a newcomer to the realm of blogging; I had read a few LiveJournal blogs that my friends kept while they were on studies abroad, but that was about it. Will I be saying anything new? How do I draw readers in? What happens if I get noticed? What if someone holds me accountable for an opinion I give on my blog?

Suffice it to say that I had a lot of concerns. Yet, each one of those concerns was outweighed by the excitement that I had when I began blogging. Looking back on it, with 18 posts behind me, I can say that Green Con was a fascinating first experience. Setting up my blog template was terrifically entertaining. It’s like designing your own home. Metaphorically speaking, of course. I had a great time calling all the shots with the template of the blog, and I’m proud of how the aesthetics turned out. Even so, I’m always looking for ways to improve it.

The content was a little trickier to master than the template, and I’d like to turn now to a discussion of my posting process, and some problems that I encountered with it.

So, how did I go about choosing a small selection of environmental blogs to monitor out of the online miasma of personal diaries, news blogs, photo blogs, video blogs, and professional blogs? Choosing which blogs to review was actually the hardest and most crucial stage in the development of my blog. Prior to choosing my “research blogs,” I had very little familiarity with any environmental blogs. I didn’t know what to expect, nor did I know what I was looking for.

In this part of my blog planning, the tracking website Technorati was of great help. Technorati’s “Blog Authority” measuring tool allowed me to select blogs based on how many sites have referenced that specific blog by posting links to it. For example, TreeHugger currently has an authority of 7,787, which means that nearly 7,787 other blogs have referenced TreeHugger in articles on their websites. My blog, on the other hand, has an authority of 0.

Technorati merely helped me narrow the field with my choices, however. It was by no means the only criteria I took into account when I picked my blogs. I also looked at the credentials of the writers/creators of each blog, the content of each blog, the awards that blog has received, and the mission statement of each blog (if they had one). Many blogs included an “About” page that was very helpful in determining the quality of the website. Finally, I hoped to include a variety of perspectives in my research list, so I purposefully sought out blogs that I felt represented different facets of the “green” conversation.

My selection process seemed sound enough on paper, but it led to a few unforeseen complications. Over the course of the past month, I've come to realize that, though choosing blogs that have disparate areas of coverage may provide me with a variety of perspectives, I can't expect each individual blog to always have relevant articles concerning the research topics I've chosen. The variety that I tried to cultivate in my research selection meant that I was stymied 11 different occasions when I was attempting to run an issue analysis on a specific blog. On those occasions, I was forced to turn to another source, hazard a guess at the blog’s stance, or (even worse) write nothing at all. My “Presidential Hopefuls: the Sequel” entry was particularly disastrous for its lack of conclusive results. I was even forced to drop one of my original selections because I decided it didn’t have the sort of coverage I was looking for in a research blog.

At the end of the month, I tried to rectify this problem by choosing an issue, and then only writing summaries for the blogs that I believed would have pertinent information for me, but that’s not really a solution at all. I think the only way I could’ve corrected this issue would be to change the way I selected my research blogs in the first place. Rather than picking them on merit, I should’ve selected a set of blogs that demonstrated a degree of topical similarity (i.e. had similar areas of coverage).

This is, at best, a catch-22; choosing blogs that were homogenous in their coverage would not have adequately represented the different facets of the environmental blogosphere, but only one segment of it. Maybe a segmented approach is the best I can hope for when attempting an issues analysis.

Before I move on to the next part of my essay, I should also address the issue of accountability with regard to blogging. Since the project began I have, to the best of my ability, made my methodology transparent for readers. I felt that this was important for my blogging, since blogs often are criticized for being inaccurate or opinionated. I felt that it was important for my readers to know how I came to my conclusions, every step of the way. It was also imperative that I include links to each of the articles I used when running an issue analysis on the research blogs. I feel that this was one area where Green Con was tremendously successful. Even this self-evaluation is a component in the accountability and transparency of my project.

Most of my conclusions for the project were ongoing during January, and were posted in my blog, so to close my essay I want to talk a bit about my aspirations for Green Con. Establishing a network and building a readership base has been very rewarding for me. I also think the research that I conducted through Green Con has broadened my understanding of the issues underlying environmentalism. For example, I knew nothing about cellulosic ethanol, nor the problems that ethanol production was causing for food prices worldwide.

For the aforementioned reasons, I’ve decided to continue Green Con, albeit in a different format. Two weeks ago, I realized that what I was writing about on my blog would also make a great introduction to the realm of environmental blogging, for those who were unfamiliar with it.

I now want to take part in the same conversation that I attempted to summarize on this blog; I want to serve as a gateway, because I think it takes very little effort on the part of the individual to reduce energy consumption and make green lifestyle changes, and maybe knowing where to look will make all the difference.

Finally, I’d like to thank everyone that has helped me with this project, especially my advisor, Brett Werner. I’d also like to thank the Will Steger Foundation for giving me an opportunity to write an action story for them, Focus the Nation and Northfield.org for linking me to their websites, and everyone who took a bit of time to visit my site!