Networking on the Network

I was pretty excited when I logged in today after Easter weekend away from the computer and saw that Wendy and Laura had commented on a couple of my blog entries.

Wendy pointed to the importance of aggregators in creating community using blogs, and I agree that aggregators certainly help, but they might comprise just one technological affordance in the constellation of these affordances.

This was my impression after seeing Brian Lamb et al.’s Breeze presentation (it’s long, but you can watch a bit at a time). It’s a good intro on blogs,aggregators, trackbacks (Doug has enabled this feature since March 7th), wikis, social bookmarks, etc. Trackbacks, for example, notify the author of the blog you mention in your blog. I think that might help develop new contacts in the community, too.

I’ll try to introduce the blogs I read regularly using Bloglines in the next while. Brian’s is one of them, partly because he’s a friend of a friend of mine in Vancouver (another Wendy), and he is a good person from whom to find out about other graduate student blogs, such as Suzanna’s research blog.

So, I engage in networking on the network, so to speak. I’ve benefitted a lot by learning from the research experiences of Clare, Bruce, Wendy, and Laura because I feel a relative newbie compared to these researchers. I came across a really great resource on becoming a academic by Phil Agre recently social bookmarked by Jill Walker on del.icio.us that might interest other grad students or new faculty.