Me? Spread? I just made the link...folks who click on those links cause the spread (well, and the crawling bots who shoulder search engine infamy), yes? Anyway, much cooler folks were referring to Livejournal before I did. I'd include links, but then I'd be responsible for spreading. So 1) sorry about that and 2) every link I ever made to your LJ blog has been stricken from the sites I keep.

no apologies needed, sug. & hey, if people want to read that random magpie-collecting, they're welcome to--i think it's kinda cool. i'm just all hyper-audience-aware after the conversations we've been having lately, & think i should at least maintain some sort of "serious" presence... at least, whether it's warranted or not, i feel in some ways obligated to, which i suppose dovetails well with wanting to learn more about how this medium works anyway.

but thank you, i think? "stricken" sounds so...heavy black marker on a court record. i've never thought this much about the implications of the visibility of bits of text in my life.

I suppose this works a bit differrently when we take up blogging in a class situation. Before I started blogging, I thought quite a lot about audience and who might read and what that might mean to me. And during the early months of keeping a blog, I was just a bit data-obsessed. I wanted to know what kinds of information I could track about visitors, search queries that brought up my site, time spent (both with commenters and with folks who didn't leave comments), and the hard-to-separate variable of spam-bots or other search-bots who were querying the server. I still watch the data/stats from time to time, but I'm less driven by it. In the early months, it was a sign of audience life (?!) so when the metered vists spiked, I *felt* a bit of hard-to-explain excitement, self-push, maybe even thrill.

"audience life" together with all that data-gathering (bots!) conjures images for me of blogworld in a petri dish.

(this is a side-effect of going to geek-magnet high school where petri dishes were part of my formative experience, i'm sure, but it creates interest (scary?) parallels to all this talk about science vs. art...)