25 styles of blogging

Here's one for those of you who think you can't write a blog, or who just go anonymously to write comments at those blogs you don't like. 25 basic styles of blogging . I do most of them--some several times a day! Life blogging. Piggyback blogging. Guest Blogs. Memes. Events. Book reviews. And so forth. I didn't know anyone was keeping track or naming these styles. Must be librarians.

I came across the More Things on a Stick web site while poking around the topic "digital storytelling." I'd like to explain why this is important in academe, but haven't been able to figure out why it is all the rage. There was a workshop at Ohio State this summer. A former colleague, Karen Diaz, has written a book on its use in libraries. I can't learn anything in 2-3 minutes, especially not on video.

My grandmother Mary was a scrapbooker in childhood--began with pretty postcards and advertisements probably before she could read and then moved on to clipping cute sayings, recipes, and stories and pasting them into the old account books of her father to save on paper. I used her scrapbooks to determine what magazines and newspapers a 19th century farm family read. I would love to be able to lift some and read great-grandfather's farm accounts, but whatever homemade glue she used is like cement. Then my mother kept a "commonplace book" for years in a small 3-ring notebook of items she liked and clipped out of magazines. After her death, my niece Julie photocopied it and so its poetry, cartoons and stories from the 1940s through the 1970s were shared with a wider audience of grandchildren.

And of course, I blog. Eleven, or is it twelve, blogs. But digital story telling? Now that sounds like all work and no fun, and not enough writing.