Shhh! The audience is listening

Christian Crumlish

Let's all be on our best behavior. Christopher (Back to Iraq) Allbritton is teaching a digital journalism course at NYU this semester and recently assigned the class to read a few blogs during the current week and comment on them.

It's rather humbling and instructive to get feedback from people just jumping into the blog in midstream. For instance, my link to Andrew Grumet's OPML similarity engine yesterday struck one student as being too much like an ad, probably because of the cheesy cliche´d headline I put on it (or because I chose to use our feed as an example of the service?).

Now that I've acknowledged that I know they're reading (I saw the incoming link in my referrer logs over the weekend), will this spoil the experiment? Will we get lost in a self-referential recursive infinite regress? They've already noticed that blogging-about-blogging is an inherently limiting format (hence my other blogs, my coauthors, and so on), but they'll just have to trust me that there does seem to be an audience for these links and comments.

They also think Joi Ito is a woman and I wonder if that has to do with website design, communication style, or something else entirely.