After perusing the history blogosphere and history carnival and reading Mark Grimsley’s article on Custer and the Art of Blogging as well as Shannon Howard’s article championing blogging, I am really convinced of the benefit and necessity of a blog for a historian. While I understand that blogging can be “shameless self-promotion” as Grimsley hints, I feel that it is also very humbling. As a blogger, you put your ideas and thoughts out on display for not only your friends, family, and colleagues to read but for the entire world. Once an idea is put into words, people easily have the means to critique it and rip it apart. These often humbling criticisms and suggestions are invaluable. Few deny the positive results that come from having others input on their work and blogging enables more people than ever to read it. I would never send a paper through the mail or even over email to many people I know, but they will happily access it online and can comment right in the web browser. Shannon Howard makes this point in her article. She also argues that by posting your ideas in the public sphere with a timestamp actually helps protect them too. This was something that I believe more firmly after last week’s readings on and discussion of copyright.
The History Carnival site seems like a wonderful site to make an initial posting on a large idea. I would think that if one posted a brief article, almost like a proposal, with some initial research that would help claim the topic as your purview as well as open it up to a huge and interested audience for input. I believe that this class has opened us up to a just blossoming world of history blogging, and we have a rare opportunity to participate in the early stages of what I believe will become a mainstay of the history community and education. It seems that there are a number of very young historians who have made good names for themselves blogging, and as a twenty-something myself, this encourages me to get out there and blog often.
Besides the typical blog that we have been exposed to thus far, the Pepys Diary website is a fascinating use of the blog. User contributions make the journal a warehouse of historical information. As wikipedia and similar sites grow in popularity and in quality of information they offer, Pepys Diary has taken the lead. The one criticism that I had of the website is that I did not like how links opened up in the same window as opposed to opening a new one. By clicking on a link to read more information about a character in the diary, I lost my spot reading and had to navigate backwards to return to the main text as opposed to just minimizing or exiting the window with the supplemental information. Did anyone else find this annoying? The idea of user contributions to the historical diary I think is ingenious. It allows people to share what is often rather esoteric knowledge and explore their own areas of historic interest. In addition, I feel that personal accounts are always a much easier way to get people involved in history. By reading a real person’s diary and learning about a historical world through his eyes, readers can realize the beauty and enticement of history and historical research. Pepys Diary is yet another example of how user input to a site is an invaluable but often overlooked tool.