neylon

I loved Mark Grimsley’s blog. It made me realize some uses of blogging that I had not considered before. His series on “Custer and the Art of Blogging” points out that having a presence on the web can not only help fight writer’s block, but it can also help open opportunities for historians professionally. Grimsley mentioned jobs that he got from people who found him on the web. While Grimsley and others mention that this is less formal writing, it brings up the same concern for me that I have had since I began blogging for this course. Where exactly is the line of formality in writing on blogs? Or, how informal can you be in writing, when it is easy for someone to find you online and judge you and your scholarship based on something that is somewhat informal?

The Diary of Samuel Pepys is a great idea for how to use a blog format. At first I wasn’t sure what I was dealing with, whether it was a fictional story with links to real history, but when I looked at the “about” page, I realized that it was a real person’s diary from the 1600s, that is being uploaded one day at a time to the internet. This is an amazingly creative way to use the internet to publish history, in a way that would be interesting to a lot of people.

Wikipedia is an interesting problem. While the concept is an interesting one, and Rosenzweig’s article, “Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” to be published in June 2006, complicates my ideas of the site, I still have issues. While much of what I read was not up to professional historians’ standards, it was not necessarily bad history. I edited the entry on the Gettysburg National Military Park. I had a lot of issues with it, not because it was all completely wrong, but because I knew that it left out a lot of history, and made a few minor mistakes. Maybe I am the one with the problem…