Hi Jenny
I do follow Sue Marsh's blog; her writing has definitely influenced my decision to start looking at disability. The Spartacus report was a brilliant thing to see; I think it's pretty much the poster-child for how social media can be used in activism. Do you follow @incurablehippie on twitter at all? She blogs for Where's The Benefit? and The F-Word, and is a great source of links and inspiration.
One of my favourite research-orientated blogs is Petra Boynton's - http://www.drpetra.co.uk/blog/ - she doesn't focus on disability at all, rather on sex/uality and media, but I've taken her approach very much as a model of how I'd like to write my own blog; written for an interested audience rather than an academic one, with a critical approach and a sense of humour. She's also brilliant to follow on twitter, where her interests are much wider.
As far as blogs go, the ones I've collected off emails here have been (apologies if you did see some of these; I can never tell which messages go to everyone)
http://disabilityandhumanrights.com/
http://sportableism.wordpress.com/
http://athletesfirst.ca/
http://thesmallplaces.blogspot.co.uk/
http://www.dalereardon.com.au/
http://disstud.blogspot.co.uk/
http://blobolobolob.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/blogging-against-disablism-day-2012.html
http://neverthateasy.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/happy-arbitrary-day.html
One of the issues I'm thinking on (it's not much of a coherent thought right now) as far as blogging goes is the divide between "serious" and "not serious"; it seem to be that there's a lot of resistance to blogging in academia in the same way there's the resistance to blogging as "proper news" from mainstream media - it possibly comes from the same root, or the idea of the specialist vs amateur in terms of knowledge. That said, some universities and individuals are embracing social media a lot quicker - sometimes without really engaging; one of the problems I've found is that having a blog or twitter is expected, in a tick-the-box PR sense. This then leads to a lack of actual engagement, and a loss of interest - twitter especially, people expect personality, and conversational engagement rather than a series of links; sometimes, being An Institution on twitter counts against you - there's a lot of skepticism about PR accounts that spills over onto others. That said, I think the usefullness of online media in terms of reaching an audience and getting into conversation with people you don't know in "real life" is worth much more; it balances the negatives. Mark Carrigan's blog on this area is particularly interesting - http://markcarrigan.net and is definitely influencing my thinking!
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