I found Nishant's comments fascinating, since I've always found blogs — 
and earlier discussion groups — to be composed of people most of whom 
never meet physically and yet create a real community of interest in 
e-space. I've seen intensely personal blogs in which it's clear that 
the participants want to discuss intimate ideas and problems without 
disclosing their identity.

Have any others come upon such LJ meets?

George

George P. Landow
Professor of English and the History of Art
Brown University

www.landow.com


On Jun 12, 2005, at 10:36 AM, Nishant Shah wrote:

> Hi Sue,
>  One of my most active blogs is at www.livejournal.com where I belong 
> to several region based communities that function online. While the 
> nature of the blogging tools that livejournal offers is indeed more 
> conducive to formation of communities, it is the functions that these 
> communities develop for themselves that I find very exciting. 
> Especially in the Bangalore community 
> (http://www.livejournal.com/community/bangalore) there is this notion 
> of 'LJ meet' which is extremely popular and is often discussed about 
> and hosted. An Lj meet basically means somebody calling for a meeting 
> of all the bloggers on livejournal to come together at a particular 
> meet in order to interact, discuss or just have fun for an evening. We 
> have had a couple of blogwalks where people - a bunch of very 
> enthusiastic bloggers - decided to go ahead and walk a stretch of a 
> road in the morning, photographing, talking discussing.
>
>  While the academic interest in the speicificities of bloggin is low 
> in such meetings, there is a lot of blog talk that hapens as people 
> come up with interesting ideas of what is a good blog, what are the 
> good blogs to be read, and give opinions that matter.
>
>  I am not very sure how relevant this is to blogwalk per se, but I 
> would be interested in knowing if other bloggers on seperate platforms 
> have often met up in these ways and especially interested in knowing 
> what are the kind of places that they occupy? Do these meets feel like 
> an extended flash mob sometimes, especially when organised around an 
> agenda?
>
>  Just throwing up some thoughts
>
>  Nishant
>
> On 6/12/05, Sue Thomas <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> http://blogwalk.mediapedagogy.com/
>>
>> It looks like an excellent idea and very enjoyable too.
>>
>> Idea
>> BlogWalk is a series of face-to-face meetings aimed to bring together 
>> weblog
>> researchers and practitioners for in-depth conversations about their 
>> work,
>> possible trends, and visions. The format we strive for is an 
>> intellectual
>> Salon where minds can meet and inspire each other in direct 
>> conversation.
>>
>> Purpose
>> The intention is to complement BlogTalk with smaller scale 
>> opportunities to
>> meet and to talk. The idea was in the air for a few months already, 
>> but we
>> couldn't start working on it. Then one late evening Sebastian Fiedler 
>> came
>> up with this great name and it went rolling. Walk means that we will 
>> be
>> "walking" around places and have fun there. It also means that 
>> meetings will
>> include walking in and out of pubs and nice places to eat because 
>> everyone
>> knows that drinks and good food fuel conversations. Note: this fun 
>> side is
>> about complementing hard reflective work together and not replacing 
>> it :)
>>
>> What BlogWalk tries NOT to be
>> BlogWalk Salons are no mini-conferences. We don't have keynote 
>> speakers,
>> presentations, vendors, and so forth. There is no distinction between
>> presenters and audience; we expect every participant to contribute to 
>> the
>> conversation.
>>
>> How to participate
>> Participation is by invitation only though we strongly encourage 
>> people to
>> get in contact if they think they should be part of a particular 
>> BlogWalk
>> Salon. We are not trying to build an exclusive club here. BlogWalk
>> participation will always depend on the topic. Participation in one 
>> Salon
>> does not automatically entitle anyone to be invited to the next.
>>
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>
>
> -- 
> Nishant says
> Tell me something about yourself.
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