weblog museum

the below pictures are part of a collection. the purple one, my dad's original (i believe) is the source of about a half-dozen others, including the orange one, so my first goal is to find them all and make them a logo more or less for my weblog museum.

what has happened is that a whole array of esl weblogs have become endangered by google's willingness to eliminate any set of weblogs that isn't logged in to regularly. i can understand their move, yet what it means is the possible destruction of a very interesting trove of weblogs. some are already gone though, if i'm careful, i might be able to catalog the web archive's record of them. in fact that may be the best fate for all of them, as most of the authors/creators have forgotten about them and probably don't care.

what interests me is that weblogs were used for a variety of purposes, so it was a time of experimentation in purpose and finding out what they were best at. in the esl field we concentrated on using them to get our students to write for public consumption, and we explained that even though the actual number of readers would be very low, it would at least include all of us and therefore, they were in effect speaking in public. there were a number of purposes we used them for.

i will report more here on the development of the museum. part of my plan is to make a logo and put it on all those ancient weblogs (you can find many of them in the template of this one), so that random hits that they get may lead to a museum-goer experiencing any or all of the more interesting of weblogs of that era. If they are united by their mere connection to each other it will begin to resemble a museum, and will possibly include links to other early experiments in weblog use. i have a friend, for example, who made a weblog for webheads (tech users) of early days at each of many tesol conventions. because he shared authorship with me, i could probably post this logo on each one and attract tesol professionals from that era who are wading through his old work.

a lot of this is fading quickly into the hazy past, and, with my passing, can expect to be forgotten altogether. a little organization, however, will at least prevent that from happening.