This blog is closing. I'll leave it as it is--fragmentary and chaotic a bunch of loose ends. A pool of associations and a contemporary witness that is. A journal that is journaling itself--punctiformally, not systematically, but by the empty spaces in between as well as by its nodes.

It's the right time. I ve passed midterm exam.

This blog is nearly full. [ 'sblog as abbreviation of 'this sblog' I think is what I currently would answer.]
I meanwhile have become familiar with where I continue. A little content is already there. Wordpress indeed offers a number of advantages in regards of twoday's free blog service as in the very first place there is that entries can multiply be categorized.

Who are the unknown subscribers?

Someone did it. I'm hit number seven. I knew this would happen.

Coincidentally I yesterday refound the sentence.
I now wonder which was first--google or this linklist.

Once its there, the screenshot nicely visualizes an important aspect of how I happened to settle in the anthropological blogsphere: I was linked to and I was categorized.

(Or shall I better say, my blog was linked to?)

Bridge/tunnel hybrid that is said to be somewhere between Sweden and Denmark.

via cynical-c

Reconstruction Vol. 6, No. 4, 2006 Theories/Practices of Blogging, guestedited by Michael Benton and Lauren Elkin, contains a variety of articles that are interesting not only in regards of contents but also in regards of how to academically write about blogs and blogging.

I love to especially point you to Thivai Abhor's editorial Thoughts on Blogging by a Poorly Masked Academic:

"<1> My first attempt at blogging was the creation of Dialogic. I was working as an adjunct in 2004 at the University of Kentucky and developing original media literacy projects and assignments online. I had heard reports that universities might start claiming that course work developed on their servers would be technically the property of the university that owned the server. The precarious nature of adjunct life makes us susceptible to rumor, so I began to search for a new, cheap, relatively unmonitored forum to develop course work and to archive the wealth of information I was finding online. My first post though clearly shows that I desired much more than an academic worksite. Within the week I realized that Dialogic would need to be separate from my academic life so that I could feel free to write and think without fear. I developed a trickster-figure pseudonym derived from a disturbing novel by Kathy Acker that appealed to my existential alienation and playful questioning. I conceived of Dialogic as a place where I could ask questions, challenge ideas, and, yes, mock the absurd/ridiculous.

<2> In 2005 there were a slew of media reports about professionals having their blogger personas revealed publicly with the result of the blogger being fired. The blogger community began to ask the question "why blog?" and what are the risks for some. At the same time there was a cultural backlash against blogging. Corporate media-produced popular culture began to reflect a mocking and dismissive portrayal of the average blogger. It was not uncommon to hear dismissive jokes in academia about blogging being a neurotic or masturbatory activity. My wife (now ex-) even begged me to delete all evidence of Dialogic so that it wouldn’t damage my chances of getting a tenure-track position at a "good" university. At the same time I was receiving positive responses from progressive teachers who recognized the benefits of the medium as a teaching and archival tool (I had 4 course blogs by then and each of my writing students would create their own blog). Many of my students continued to maintain their blogs after the courses ended and I helped some of them develop their writing and get published. I was impressed with the sense of response-ability that was translated from the blog to their essay-writing. Perhaps, most profoundly, for me personally, I was beginning to reach beyond my local region on a daily basis, talking to other questing intellectuals, developing a very loose-based community of bloggers, sharing ideas and asking questions. With all of this going on, the question of "why we blog" was on my mind, and so I approached the editors at Reconstruction with the idea of doing an issue on The Theories/Practices of Blogging.

<3> I worked on this issue for nearly two years. I wanted it to have an international perspective to give it a fuller sense of the diverse geographical and cultural voices in the blogosphere. I contacted over 500 blogs about contributing to the "Why We Blog" section. I worked with many of the essay authors for over a year developing and revising their essays. We are very proud of this issue and we hope that it will provide a glimpse into "Why We Blog." [...]"

via Dialogic.

I have made out my first invoice for academic consultancy on the improvement of a qualitative research setting and an in-house evaluation on quantitative test method in an evaluation-of-websites project.

In 2005 when I created the blog I had not thought much about its title. It accidentally happened at late night. I was not even thinking of an own blog but needed to register at twodays to be able to leave a comment in another twodays blog. The software then asked me whether I wanted to create an own blog and so did I.
When people asked me for the s' meaning I noticed my responses change over the time: It doesn' t really mean anything to me. By another google search I moreover had found 'sblog' being the name of a SourceForge.net project, which way back in early 2005 almost made up google's hit page number one completely. So always when being asked I did my duty, pointed to sBlog, and usually said that my choice was an unintended theft or so.

I was tracing back a referrerlink the other night when I found sblog's representation on google has dramatically changed.
While in early 2005 I could not find myself at all by search word 'sblog' on google, that night my blog appeared as hit number seven and tonight I even have climbed up one hit higher. (Right below btw Dr.Web's, according to which 'sblog' means "nicht weniger und nicht mehr als ein S(pam)Blog ohne echte Inhalte mit dem Zweck Umsätze über Partner- oder Anzeigenprogramme zu generieren.")

Now I wouldn't mind being close the top of google's page one as such if there wasn't the very title google has granted me.

It looks like I had created that description myself, but you won't find that sentence in here. I ve never written on "anthropological theory from Bremen, Germany" nor have I ever confessed to that claim.
How come it generated exactly that phrase?
Why didn't it choose other (frequent) terms from the text and combined them, creating something silly, or funny at least. I dont know--theres a bunch of possibilities once having begun to ponder upon how such engines may work.
But no. It did the worst thing possible. It granted me an academically absurd exageration.
Murphy's Law v.2.0 Cyber, really.