I particularly value blogging because of the visibility of older content. Facebook and Twitter don’t make it easy for you to contextualize links pointing to something relevant you posted a month or a year or decade ago.

It may seem right to ask, after so many years: what is left to discuss about blogging? We all know what it is. We all know what it does. What used to be the Blog Special Interest Group (SIG), then the Blogs and Wikis SIG, then the Emerging Social Software SIG at the College Conference on Composition and Communication (CCCC), is now gone—no longer emerging. Blogs are old, and the social side of them has shifted so significantly to other media, that blogs could now be seen as social media only in their potential for social structure, with actual social interaction now taking place on Twitter or Tumblr or the next new thing.

And yet, it is worth examining such a versatile, chameleon-like tool now that we think we know it well. Once past the how-to, the why-to can emerge. As part of the “why,” I need a webtext that tells why blogging is so good for us, that “us” being academics who think about things a lot and even make connections between their scholarly lives and the classroom. –Lanette Cadle PraxisWiki.