1. Remediating Attention – Place Blogging

A year and half after Fred First begins blogging in July, 2002, he posts an entry entitled “About Place” in which he wonders how many others share his interest in place blogging:

What does it mean to have (and want to share) a “sense of place?” This sense of wanting to find or share one’s connectedness to his or her surroundings…urban, surburban or rural…finds expression in a quiet corner of the blogging world. I know of only two places where such “blogs about place” are identified and grouped (Bowen Island Journal and Rebecca Bloods Webloggia). But surely, in the varied posts of all the tens of thousands of bloggers across the globe, there are many, many entries that celebrate nature, beauty, natural and local human history, or culture attached to location. What is it that “place bloggers” hope to express? Why do readers come to read? Is there potential to grow a sense of community within this niche within the growing weblog-way of self-expression? (“About Place“)

At the time that First writes this, blogging is a new but recognizable genre, having had several years to take root in the public consciousness. However, he expresses the desire to define blogging more particularly to reflect the traits of his own blogging practices as well as others. First predicts that many others share a common rhetorical habit of writing about nature and place, and he is intent on finding ways connect with like-minded bloggers.

These bloggers begin to find each in part when Chris Corrigan of the blog Bowen Island Journal begins treating place as a way to categorize blogs. In December 2002, he creates a sidebar heading entitled “People Blogging Places” under which he lists several blogs that focus on place, including First’s Fragments from Floyd:

(“People Blogging Places”)

According to Corrigan, this way of categorizing blogs begins gaining visibility when blogger Flemming Funch posts an entry in January 2003 describing how Corrigan had introduced him to “geographic blogging.” He likens it to having a webcam focused on a place such that “you could always go and see how it looks there right now.” Soon after this, well-known blogger Rebecca Blood contributes to the emerging visibility of the genre by adding a category to her blog directory with the heading “weblogs of place,” under which she lists Bowen Island Journal and several other bloggers who would later become participants in the Ecotone circle of place bloggers:

(Blood, “webloggia”)

This modest attention from Blood and Funch is enough to enable several like-minded bloggers to find each other, and soon the idea of a more collective approach to place blogging begins to emerge.

In early May 2003, First begins to nurture this network of bloggers through an exchange of posts and comments, and on June 15 he takes the lead in suggesting the creation of a website for place bloggers. According to First, a collaborative post he wrote with fellow blogger Lisa Thompson a few weeks early titled “Now Showing: Sunset and Clouds” was a seminal moment: “The AHA! light went off for me and Thompson, and the idea of some kind of collaborative effort among ‘place bloggers’ began in my mind and hopes” (“History”). In a comment posted on Thompson’s entry, blogger Allan Hollander recognizes that these posts were the beginning of larger project to define place blogging: “I would love to see this category coalesce more as a genre. Working collaboratively like you and Thompson have done in your DuoBlog today is a good step towards this” (qtd. in Thompson, “5.9.2003”). First reports that he and others have begun to discuss the possibility of “promoting a greater visibility and stronger sense of community within blogs that are already (self- or outsider-) identified as ‘blogs about place’” (“About”). Blogger Beth Adams agrees with the “idea of having a central place where people who do this can post particular entries about ‘place,’” and she sees its potential to “increase the readership for these sorts of ruminations on nature and our place” (“Some Thoughts”). It is not long before these discussions, initially scattered among emails, posts, and comments, find a common forum in a wiki created by Hollander, soon to be called Ecotone: Writing About Place. From the beginning, the interest in forming an online community of place bloggers is tied self-consciously to the definition of genre. Early in their discussions, First reports that googling “place blogging” or “blogs about place” results in very few hits, and he observes that “of the ones with our meaning, they are all ours, many related to last week’s COV [post in Carnival of the Vanities]. This is a very new term and we may be able, really, to define it for the first time” (“Running Discussion”).

In their article “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog,” Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd suggest that the attempt to define place blogging is a rhetorical marker worth paying attention to: “When a type of discourse or communicative action acquires a common name within a given context or community, that’s a good sign that it is functioning as a genre.” Genre, in this sense, is more than just shared formal features of literary texts, as the term often denotes; rather, genre is more like a shared structure or context in which communication happens—something almost like a place. In Genre and the Invention of the Writer, Anis Bawarshi speaks of genre as “both a habit and a habitat—the conceptual habitat within which individuals perceive and experience a particular environment as well as the rhetorical habit through which they function within that environment” (84). Bawarshi compares genres to ecosystems, asserting that genres are not “merely passive backdrops for our actions or simply familiar tools we use to convey or categorize information; rather, genres function more like ecosystems, dynamic sites in which communicants rhetorically reproduce the very conditions within which they act” (80,82). Similarly, Charles Bazerman asserts,

Genres are not just forms. Genres are forms of life, ways of being. They are frames for social action. They are environments for learning. They are locations within which meaning is constructed. Genres shape the thoughts we form and the communications by which we interact. Genres are the familiar places we go to create intelligible communicative action with each other and the guideposts we use to explore the unfamiliar. (16)

For digital media scholar Janet Murray, the creation of new genres, particularly digital ones, is important for providing ways to manage our attention: “The invention of a genre … is the elaboration of a cognitive scaffold for shared knowledge creation,” an act that extends “the joint attentional scene that is the basis of all human culture.” In “Cyberinfrastructure as Cognitive Scaffolding: The Role of Genre Creation in Knowledge Making,” Murray argues that the work of “inventing and elaborating genre conventions allows us to focus our attention together; the invention of more coherent, expressive media genres goes hand in hand with the grasping and sharing and of more complex ideas about the world.” In this sense, genres are what Richard Lanham calls “attention structures,” mechanisms that help us make sense of the barrage of information that makes up our daily lives, mechanisms that, as scholar Rodney Jones points out, we need to provide “some way of knowing what to attend to and what not to attend to” (Lanham 21; Jones 52). Genres, then, are a particular kind of attention structure, a rhetorical one located in the interactions people have through and around texts.

The Ecotone community is interesting for the degree of self-consciousness with which they approach the formation of place blogging. Not only do the early writings of the Ecotone community represent the first articulation of “place blogging” as a term, they also provide a rich meta-commentary on why they started blogging individually and why the group formed. Discussion of how to define the online community—what to name it, how to organize the site, how to pick topics for collective blogging, how to categorize different blogs—become wrapped up with the question of what place blogging is. In the process they must both define place blogging in a way that distinguishes it from the dominant modes of blogging at the time and in a way that makes place blogging appeal to the widest range of people possible. Defining place blogging, then, is an evolutionary process rather than an act of ex nihilo creation, and tracing the path of this development reveals the particular ways the Ecotone community use blogging to connect with place. Moreover, when First describes a desire both to find and to share one’s relationship with place, he indicates that blogging is not simply a genre for expressing place sense once it is formed; its also generative in nature, part of the process of constructing a sense of place. This chapter details the way Ecotone bloggers come to define place blogging as a structure of attention meant to help individuals construct a deeper sense of place, and it traces how this definition evolves out of the cultural and generic conditions that make up this moment in web history.

Evolving Structures of Attention

The Ecotone group’s effort to define place blogging is only possible because they already know what blogging is. By this time blogging has hit the public consciousness: scholar Barclay Barrios declared 2003 the “Year of the Blog“ while in 2004 Merriam-Webster awarded blog “Word of the Year” honors and ABC news designated bloggers as People of the Year. A year earlier, two of the first book-length treatments of blogging appeared, The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog and an edited collection, We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs are Changing Our Culture, both by Rebecca Blood, one of the seminal voices in defining and popularizing blogging through her popular blog, Rebecca’s Pocket.

In Blood’s account of blogging history, the first weblogs were defined by the formula “links with commentary, updated frequently” and were created by internet enthusiasts as a record of their explorations of the rapidly burgeoning web. The rise of free and user-friendly blogging software like Blogger initiated a dramatic rise in the “short-form journal” which was less focused on the web and more on the author’s personal experiences and reflections, a shift from “filtering the web” to “filtering a single life” (We’ve Got Blog xi). But even as Blood delineates these two basic kinds of blogs, she also describes the ongoing diversification among the thousands of blogs in existence by September 2003: “topic-oriented weblogs, alternative viewpoints, astute examinations of the human condition as reflected by mainstream media, short-form journals, links to the weird, and free-form notebooks of ideas.” As the variety of blogs multiply, it becomes difficult to identify what blogs hold in common beyond a rather bland formal definition: “frequently updated webpage with dated entries, new ones placed at the top” (“Weblogs”). The fact that the Ecotone bloggers are already trying to redefine blogging for themselves testifies to the fact that the blog has always been “an infinitely malleable format,” as Blood observes (“Weblogs”). The ongoing adaptability of blogging leads Miller and Shepherd to suggest that it “may no longer be accurate to think of the blog as a single genre,” and it now may be less meaningful to discuss blogging in general than to examine distinct varieties of the genre, such as war blogging, political blogging, academic blogging, or—for the purposes of this study—place blogging.

Genres are not static collections of platonic formal characteristics but dynamic, evolutionary phenomena that help us examine the way patterns of discourse arise from particular cultural moments and evolve as cultural needs change. Carolyn Miller has defined genres as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations,” socially recognizable patterns that help people figure out how to communicate in particular cultural contexts (151). Because culture is always changing, genres are never static forms, leading Catherine Schryer to define genres as “stabilized-for-now or stabilized-enough sites of social and ideological action” (204). In contrast to the seeming fixity of older genres, online genres dramatize the dynamic, adaptive nature of genres by continuing to evolve with remarkable speed. Miller and Shepherd describe blogging as “an evolutionary product, arising from a dynamic, adaptive relationship between discourse and kairos,” and they consider blogging as a rare chance to witness a process akin to what evolutionary biologist call “speciation,” the development of a new species, or in this case, a new genre.

While it is significant in itself that Ecotone bloggers spend time and energy to articulate place blogging as a distinct term, it is important not to overstate the newness of place blogging. Digital genres as structures of attention are never new constructions; they are always rehabs that reuse and expand on past forms. In describing the relationship between new media and urban space, media scholar Stephen Graham explains,

far from being a complete and revolutionary break with the past, new media maintain many intimate connections with old media, technologies, practices and (electromechanical) infrastructures and spaces (telephone, broadcasting, electricity, highway, streets, airline, logistics systems, and so forth). Therefore, the so-called “information age” is best considered not as a revolution, but as a complex and subtle amalgam of new technologies and media fused on to, and “remediating,” old ones. (18-19)

Remediation is David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s term to describe the way new forms of media are always both new and old, always building off of and transforming older forms while never leaving them behind completely (see also Brooks et al. “Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching With Weblogs”). As Miller and Shepherd argue, we can only understand the cultural function of genres by identifying the “ancestral genres” whose “genes” get passed on to the new genre and continue to shape and constrain the rhetorical possibilities this new genre offers. They identify several main branches of the blogging family tree and outline the related genres that inform blogging:

“genres of political journalism: pamphlet or broadside, the editorial, and the opinion column,”
“journal and the diary, along with the newer electronic genres of the home page and the webcam,”
“genres of collecting and organizing information: clipping service or media monitoring service, commonplace book.”

If Miller and Shepherd are working to define blogging as a process of speciation, this study attempts to describe blogging in the “process of adaptive transformation,” one in which place bloggers adapt the genre of blogging to respond to more particular rhetorical exigencies. While place bloggers tend to incorporate many of the ancestral genres described above into their blogging practice, they also include several others to create a this localized adaptation of blogging.

Thus, while genres in digital networks are more pliable and fluid, this does not provide Ecotone members a carte blanche to define place blogging however they want to. Because of this connection with past forms of communication, genres are not neutral conduits of meaning or tools for accomplishing goals. While rhetors might use genres to act in culture, it is also true that genres act on those who use them. In other words, genre both creates the structure that enable us to say new things while at the same constraining and shaping the way we say them. The process of identifying traces of ancestral genres in emerging web genres can help us examine cultural change and the way people navigate their way through shifts in social conditions:

The appearance of a new genre is an event of great rhetorical interest because it means that the “stabilized-enough,” negotiated balance between innovation and decorum has broken down and a new one is under development. The imprints of ancestral genres can give us insight into what aspects of generic exigencies are no longer addressed, how the new stability is negotiated, how rhetoric accommodates change and accommodates us to change. (Miller and Shepherd)

In defining place blogging, the Ecotone group must negotiate between the existing conventions offered by blogging and the qualities of ancestral print genres; in doing so, they fashion place blogging as a structure of attention that reflects the influence of both.

The Problems of the Political

A couple of weeks after First and Thompson’s collaborative post, this emerging circle of place bloggers is given another opportunity for collective blogging and they use this to begin pushing away from mainstream blogging. On May 20th, 2003, Corrigan announces in his blog that “our little place blogging community has shown up on this week’s Carnival of the Vanities,” a blog carnival^v^ with a conservative political bent (“May 20, 2003”). At First’s request, Susanna^vi^ from Cut on the Bias, the host for that week, takes the unprecedented step of offering First and company a “place blogging” section in her post. Though political blogs are her “personal obsession,” Susanna welcomes the opportunity to feature something different since she acknowledges there are “so many blogs out there with beautiful, contemplative writing on other aspects of life (Susanna). First, like Corrigan, expresses the growing sense of community felt by the eight bloggers who have submitted examples of “writing of or about place”:

This group-blog happened as a result of some conversation that’s been going on twixt a half-dozen of us. Could be that in weeks to come, there will be a place where this little niche of the blogosphere can grow in scope and sense of community. It’s not ALL about politics, you know! Stay tuned! (“Heads-up”)

By asserting that blogging is not all about politics, First articulates what becomes a collective desire among the Ecotone bloggers to define place blogging as something different from one of the dominant forms of blogging at time: blogs about technology and blogs about politics. Hollander suggests that place blogging is “leading-edge” in moving toward a phase of the web were it will seem obvious to use blogging to connect with place:

As the blogosphere expands, people are going to want to find other things to talk about than just politics and technology, and weblogs as a means of expression will start to be used by regionally-minded individuals and groups. In California there are a zillion watershed-and-the-like oriented groups (e.g. Friends of the Navarro River), most of whom by now have their own web pages, so many that it would be a major job to try to catalog these, but few if any keep something resembling a weblog. Weblog-consciousness hasn’t hit these folks yet. But it will, in time. (“Running Discussion”)

As First puts it, developing the “niche” in the blogging world would “allow the enthusiastic participation of a lot of thoughtful bloggers who, like myself, feel marginalized by the strident tone of the pervasive warblogs and its relatives. We want to emphasize much more what we are moving toward, however, than what we are moving away from, I think you’ll agree” (“Running Discussion”).

The beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003 looms large in the cultural landscape in which Ecotone forms a few months later. Blood describes how the events of September 11, 2001 and the beginning of the Iraq war gave rise to strains of political blogging that remediated the newspaper editorial, generating vigorous debates about the merits of blogging as an alternative to or replacement for traditional journalism. “Warblogs” emerged after 9/11 as a means for people to respond to the attack and gather information related to the “War on Terror.” According to journalism scholar Stuart Allen, “these blogs devoted particular attention to the perceived shortcomings of the mainstream news media with regard to their responsibility to inform the public about possible risks, threats, and dangers” (107). Writing in 2002, journalist David Gallagher describes the rift that emerged between old guard bloggers and these newcomers, between the techies who played a prominent role in early blogs and designed the technologies that brought blogging to the masses, and the war bloggers whose blogs “quickly reached a level of public and media recognition that other blogs had never achieved.” As a consequence, Gallagher observes, “some latecomers now think Weblogs are inherently political,” an impression that irritated some blogging old-timers who felt “the diversity of Weblogs is being overshadowed by the attention-getting style of war blogs” (Gallagher). According to Glenn Reynolds, arguably the godfather of warbloggers, “the Weblog world before Sept. 11 was mostly inward-looking—mostly tech people talking about tech things” while “after 9/11 we got a whole generation of Weblogs that were outward-looking” and aimed toward a broader audience of readers (Reynolds). Reynolds portrays this shift as a change in attention, from one that used to be insular and irrelevant to one that is engaged with important public events and open to a wider range of people (Gallagher).

For the early Ecotone members, the war was one important context out of which their motivations for blogging emerge. Ecotone blogger Alison Kent marks the anniversary of starting her blog with reference to the beginning of the Iraq War: “Feathers of Hope Turns Three…A week and a bit after Cassandra Pages (it’s how I remember to look for this date, apart from the anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, which is mostly why we started blogging)….”(“Feathers”). In a comment, Miguel Arboleda (“Butuki”) remarks,

Congratulations! To both of you. I do want to say that I think it is largely do to both of you that a lot of us starting out at around that time found one another. Ecotone helped define our voices and the mood in which we wrote. It brought together a lot of people who were still groping around in the dark of both blogging and outrage against the war. (“Congratulations”)

While theses remarks suggest that the war was instrumental in spurring them to begin blogging, it does not necessarily motivate them to blog about the war directly. Rather, place blogging becomes a way of objecting to political events on the world stage by focusing their attention and energies in another direction.

While Ecotone members appreciate the visibility gained by their presence on Carnival of Vanities, several express reservations about being associated with what they see as a politically conservative circle of bloggers. Thompson describes her discomfort:

BTW, I had a total of nine visits from COV, probably one of them from myself checking the link. It was a bit disconcerting being in the company of so many war bloggers. No matter what we find ourselves doing, I think it would be great to continue posting to COV just so we keep our peaceful, placeful approach to life in front of people. Balance, ya know :-). (“Running Discussion”)

Their desire to remain outside the crossfire of American political debates surfaces more clearly when Rebecca Blood suggests a topic for collective blogging on “place and patriotism” related to the Fourth of July: “Does love of land strengthen love of country, or does it somehow soften your pride in your country and ideals, and connect you with something that seems more real or more permanent?” Kent responds,

Wow, Rebecca, nothing like throwing out a BIG one! I’m not sure you caught all the earlier discussion about trying to widen this to outside the US and even North America. A couple of the people I’m hoping will contribute won’t even know what the Fourth of July means, at least in the sense of what it seems to mean to most Americans. I know I hide somewhere every year till it’s over, having an innate fear of flag-waving. So I guess I wouldn’t be a good person to blog about its relationship to place, though others might. (“Potential”)

Adams suggests that a topic on “love of land/love of place” might be more politically neutral. She recounts reading passages from Elias Chacour’s We Belong to the Land, an account of Palestinians’ sense of place, when speaking on the Middle East conflict to a group of dairy farmers in upstate New York. Because he focuses on how a “place that has been farmed and tended and observed with love for generations becomes part of one’s blood and identity,” this proves an effective way to open up dialogue in what could otherwise be a politically charged discussion, allowing them to pay closer attention to the lived experience of place that goes deeper than political boundaries. Adams is open to keeping Blood’s suggestion on the list, but she would like to reframe it to “be broader and more inclusive for people writing from anywhere” (“Potential”).

Kent agrees with Adams’s approach, not just because it makes the topic more international and inclusive, but also because it promotes what she sees as a simple but radical notion:

That understanding people and their relationship to place/land will probably make you less likely to bomb them (and their land). This isn’t an intellectual understanding; it’s a sense of shared experience, as you mention about the dairy farmers (whose land looks and feels totally different from Palestine) who could instantly grasp the land/place connection with farmers halfway round the world. (“Potential”)

This “sense of shared experience” should be the frame for place blogging, Kent asserts, not politics as it has been typical of much blogging that that point. Instead, Kent along with the rest of the Ecotone group, shifts the emphasis away from politics to the representation of ordinary experience of place.

In doing so, Ecotone is pushing against the political emphasis of warblogs in part because this brand of blogging had come to dominate public perceptions of what blogging was. However, the debate between the “original” techie blogs and the new war blogs could be viewed as a squabble among participants in a common approach to blogging that Rebecca Blood first termed the “filter blog,” a blog that is mostly focused on content outside the author’s personal life. By contrast, the “personal journal” blog type has a more inward focus, emphasizing the author’s everyday personal experience. As Herring et al. put it, “the content of filters is external to the blogger (world events, online happenings, etc.), while the content of personal journals is internal (the blogger’s thoughts and internal workings)” (“Bridging” 2). Herring et al. argue that history of blogging has been written from the perspective of filter blogs, which garnered the most attention from mainstream media and which were typically authored by men. This history effaces the parallel history of journal blogs, originally known as online diaries, a strain of blogging that emerged just as early, if not earlier, than filter blogs, and was dominated by female authors.^vii^

In “Blogging in the Early Republic,” historian W. Caleb McDaniel argues that a similar misrepresentation happens when people make arguments about the historical precedents for blogging by pointing to prominent literary figures like Thomas Paine, Martin Luther, George Orwell. Such comparisons can lead to the wrong conclusion: “Treating these highly influential writers as analogues for bloggers serves a particular understanding of blogging as primarily political. Moreover, it perpetuates a picture of the blogosphere that is skewed toward elite and highly visible blogs.” Rather, McDaniel argues that a better comparison to make is between bloggers and relatively obscure and ordinary writers like Henry Clarke Wright, a antebellum reformer and “inveterate journal keeper” who wrote about events in his daily life.

This bias toward filter blogs is evident in how blogging detractors respond to blogging around this time. One of the most common strategies of criticism is to dismiss blogging as hack journalism, characterized by preponderance of opinionated rants with little or now journalistic research. Alex Beam dismisses the blogosphere as a “journalistic medium where no thought goes unpublished,” seeming to conflate the journal blog with the filter blog as a way of dismissing blogging as a whole (C1). Similarly, Gary Trudeau’s Doonsbury arouses the ire of many bloggers with a comic strip lampooning bloggers as impoverished, self-absorbed, and disaffected hacks who lack the talent to make it as real journalists. Journalist Howard Kurtz introduces blogging in a manner that subtly mocks what Blood celebrates as the empowerment of ordinary voices: “Welcome to the blogosphere, a rapidly expanding universe where legions of ordinary folks are launching Weblogs—blogs for short—with such titles as “Ramblings of a Blue-Collar Slob” and “The Brigade of Bellicose Women”—that feature lots of reader feedback” (C1).

Lurking beneath many attacks on blogging is a discomfort with the very ordinariness that seems to characterize much blogging practice. However, this ordinariness—average people writing about everyday life for small audiences—turns out to be what defines blogging in an importance sense and it is one aspect of the nascent blogging genre that Ecotone members are attempting recover in their definition of place blogging. Scholar Steve Himmer notes that for many critics of blogging, it is not just that blogs are “characterized by mundane, banal, sometimes embarrassing personal content ranging from what the author ate for lunch to specific health problems and sexual issues,” but it is also that this personal content is “frequently intermingled with commentary on politics or culture, making the personal, the public, and the political inseparable” (Himmer). In Himmer’s view, the tendency of blogs to “elevate the ordinary” represents one of its salient characteristics that both marks its distinctiveness as a form and makes it more resistance to commoditization. Seth Godin describes journal blogs that focus on personal content and everyday life as “cat blogs”—“blogs for and by and about the person blogging” and that are “about your cat and your dating travails and your boss and whatever you feel like sharing in your public diary.” Godin argues that unlike blogs that are designed to cultivate as many readers as possible, “the vast majority of people with a cat blog don’t need or want strangers to read it” (Godin). While these bloggers may actually want strangers to read their blog, they are not primarily motivated by the desire of growing a large audience.

If we plotted these bloggers on a graph with audience along the x axis and number of bloggers along the y axis, they would land squarely in what Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, calls the “Long Tail,” also referred to as a power law distribution in network theory. In is essay “Power Laws,” Clay Shirky describes how the Long Tail affects the statistical distribution of readers in blogging:

Blogs-as-mainstream-media—blogs with a larger readership that become “a broadcast outlet, distributing material without participating in conversations about it.”
Blogging Classic—“blogs published by one or a few people, for a moderately-sized audience, with whom the authors have a relatively engaged relationship.”
Blogs-as-dinner-conversation—“the long tail of weblogs with few readers.”

The long tail tends to be a “high trust” environment where bloggers value the ability to know commenters and interact with them on an ongoing basis (Driscoll). As Clay Shirky points out, fame necessarily places limitations on the ability of bloggers to know and interact with their readers: “the mere technological possibility of reply isn’t enough to overcome the human limits on attention” (Here Comes Everybody 93). While A-list bloggers like Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan might gain the most number of readers, one could argue that their position in the peak of the distribution graph represents only one segment of the broader experience of blogging. Shirky predicts that the difference between “A-list” bloggers and “long tail” bloggers will only increase:

The term ‘blog’ will fall into the middle distance, as “home page” and “portal” have, words that used to mean some concrete thing, but which were stretched by use past the point of meaning. This will happen when head and tail of the power law distribution become so different that we can’t think of J. Random Blogger and Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit as doing the same thing. (“Power Laws”)

The difference is in how attention is exchanged in these two different kinds of blogging—for the A-list blogger, readers give the blogger their attention the same way old media always used to while for long tail bloggers, attention can travel in both directions. By pushing away from the high profile political blogging characterized by war blogging and other political styles, Ecotone bloggers situate themselves in the “long tail” and affirm those qualities of blogging that encourage ordinary people to write about ordinary life.

The Affordances of Time

If filter blogs of the political variety are what Ecotone bloggers are moving away from, what they are moving toward becomes a matter of discussion. In choosing to align themselves with the personal journal style of blogging rather than filter blogs, the Ecotone bloggers establish a connection between blogging and ancestral genres such as the journal, diary, or logbook, all of which are organized chronologically and involve writing regularly. On the Ecotone wiki page “Place Blogging Description,” First characterizes some place blogging as “journaling in the context of the ‘where’” which highlights “personal space in place” and “reflections of one life (yours) passing through and being changed by place (weather, seasons, birth-death, aging, personal growth).” Corrigan’s list of place blogging traits begins with “logs of natural activity and cycles, including flora and fauna, geological and meteorological notes, sometimes with description, sometimes without.” These genres foreground chronological affordances—the forms are characterized by the regular accumulation of written material over time.

When Alison Kent and Alan Hollander begin Feathers of Hope in 2003, they recognize continuities between their emerging practice of blogging and their daily habit of keeping a print-based log book, a habit which had begun a few years earlier when they found themselves in a rustic house in the mountains nine miles from Santa Barbara. The beauty and isolation of this place led them to not only to begin sketching and writing poetry, but also to keep a daily log book in which they entered a short post detailing aspects of the weather, wildlife, and gardening in their immediate surroundings. “We knew this was going to be an intense experience and so we had to make some serious choices about what we were going to be doing,” Kent recounts. “The minute we said we wanted to live in this place we decided to keep a log book of the experience. We were really committed to the idea of keeping a daily entry about where we live” (Telephone interview).

After moving to Davis, CA, Kent and Hollander realize their need to orient themselves to a new (and less picturesque) place and they decide that “writing would be a good way to do it.” In March 2003, Hollander begins reading political blogs and decides he wants to begin keeping a blog, but he has not found anyone else writing about place. When they begin blogging together, they make a conscious choice to write about their bioregion as a central organizing topic (Telephone interview).

However, blogging about place does mean they stopped keeping a log book, which in Alison’s mind is a different experience. In her estimation, the blog invites a much broader range of topics, while the log book is fairly focused on short daily entries describing the immediate locale. The significant difference comes down to audience and geography:

While anyone is able and welcome to read our logbooks, nobody ever does, because they are physically bound, literally and figuratively, in our living room. Feathers of Hope extends the space that this shared activity has created and also the scope of our joint writing. The weblog is a place where I can write something—this, for instance—and know that at least fifteen, and probably many more, people than that will read it. One of them lives in Davis; another in Sweden; another few in England; another in Australia. Many are in North America. (“The Transformation”)

Place blogging remediates the log book in such a way that blogging feels like something new, and yet still feels familiar enough that Kent can say, “In my mind and in my heart it still feels very close to writing in a log book” (“The Transformation”).

While Kent and Hollander’s blogging remediates aspects of the naturalist’s log or field notebook, Corrigan suggests that place blogging just as easily shares affinities with the notebook of the ethnographer or journalist. As he describes it, place blogs sometimes are “notes on the particular character of a place, which may be purely sociological,” focusing on “the noosphere” rather than “the biosphere.” This view grows out of the exigencies that shaped his own blogging experience after moving from Ottawa, Ontario to Vancouver, BC:

In many ways this part of the country is like another world. Geographically I am as far away from my birthplace in Toronto as London is from Cairo. When I moved here I had a very strong sense on myself as an outsider, and the gift of this perspective is that I am able to see things here almost like an anthropologist. I am no longer a fish unaware of the water. My writing immediately began to take on the flavour of a participant-observer account of my life, and that perspective stays with me to this day. (“Place Blogging Description”)

Whether the material is nature or culture, place blogging finds its roots in part in those genres whose goal is to collect fragments of observations and information that the writer gathers over time, without necessarily crafting them into a finished whole or crafting meaningful connections between these fragments.

Ecotone contributor Lorianne DiSabato was a regular journal-keeper and essayist before she began blogging, and she points the connections between place blogging and both forms. As she describes it, her writing routine began each day after breakfast when she walked the dog and then returned home to write six pages by hand. Roughly every two weeks she composed an essay that she distributed to an email list of selected people. DiSabato turns to Thoreau as a predecessor in this movement from journal to essay:

Anyhow, it occurs to me that Thoreau didn’t keep a journal because he WAS famous; he became famous because he kept a journal, and mined those journals to write essays, and then made the effort to share those essays with a less-than-enthusiastic public. Somehow, Thoreau just kept writing even though virtually nobody bought his first (self-published) book, leaving him with a bookshelf full of unsold copies.\
No, Thoreau didn’t top the best-seller list, nor did he ever appear on Oprah. (Can you imagine THAT interaction!) Poor ol’ Hank just kept writing, writing, writing because his hero & close neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, asked him after his college graduation whether he kept a journal. “So today I start,” Thoreau wrote in his first entry. And the rest, as they say, is history…. (“Egotism”)

This routine began to evolve in to blogging late in December, 2003:

So here the experiment begins. After keeping a hand-written journal for years & years, now I’m trying to see whether I can “convert” that writing online. “Everyone’s doing it—why can’t I?” In reading lots of other blogs these past few weeks, I’ve found it to be an addictive and oddly delightful genre: so, can I do it? (“So here”)

This conversion involved a shift in audience from journaling for herself and writing essays for a limited audience to blog posts that combined elements of both journal and essay. The influence of essay writing is particularly visible in DiSabato’s blogging practice: each post reads like short essay representing the mind at work. In any given post, DiSabato weaves together photographs, personal experience, descriptions of places in her neighborhood, and philosophical reflections on life and place, taking what seems at first like disparate elements and weaving them together into a meaningful whole.

While the connections between journaling as a print genre and blogging might be obvious, the Ecotone blogger put particular stress on the importance of chronological affordances of blogging, the way the daily habit writing inherent in blogging provides an attention structure for paying attention to place over time. Hollander asserts that blogging is well-suited for writing about place because it facilitates attention to place over time, such that “the fragments from your posts will build up into quite a portrait of the place you have ties to” (“This is a related reply”). By turning to blogging as a way to engage with place, place bloggers remind us that place is as much a product of time as it is of space, and that it is not just a static set of spatial relationships but a complex arrangement of activities performed in a shared location over time. In philosopher Philip Brey’s definition, place is “an area or space that is a habitual site of human activity and/or is conceived of in this way by communities or individuals” (240). Landscape designer John Brinckerhoff Jackson asserts that the way we experience place is not something given simply by being in a place but is constructed through repeated action in a location: “A sense of place is something that we ourselves create in the course of time. It is the result of habit or custom … A sense of place is reinforced by what might be called a sense of recurring events” (5). Geographyer David Seamon describes how a sense of place is constructed through repeated, often rather mundane, interactions with particular locations—and people in those locations—over time. It is often the habitual patterns of embodied experience in places, the routines of everyday life that shape to our every day lives and enables use to make our way through much of our activities without having to give them much conscious attention (Seamon 158). Geographer Timothy Cresswell summarizes these process-oriented approaches to place as “constituted through reiterative social practice—place is made and remade on a daily basis.” In this view, “place provides a template for practice—an unstable stage for performance. Thinking of place as performed and practiced can help us think of place in radically open and non-essentialized ways where place is constantly struggled over and re-imagined in practical ways” (39).

Place bloggers are drawn to the affordances of blogging in large part because they are looking to create habits that help them construct a more meaningful sense of place. For many, moving to a new place means that they must self-consciously figure out where they are and create the habits of engaging with their location that allow a sense of place to emerge. In other cases, places around people change in ways that render them unfamiliar and illegible. If the power of the network is created in part through the “destruction of space by time,” as Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin suggest, place bloggers see blogging as a way to re-construct place by way of time, in particular, by the habits of rhetorical action the blogging as a form requires (14). In particular, nearness in time—the nearly daily frequency of blogging—becomes another way of constructing proximity in the network; playing on our seemingly innate tendency to speak of time spatial term, place bloggers see the regular engagement of place through blogging as a way to create connection and nearness.

The very chronological structure of blogging is central affordance that makes it attractive as a heuristic for writing about place. Several years after the Ecotone group, Lisa Williams would define place blogging for users of placeblogger.com in a way that foregrounds the importance of duration and time: “A placeblog is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time” suggesting that blogging helps foster habits of attention (“What’s a placeblog?”). While blogs are not unique among web-based forms in constantly changing, they make time a defining structural element by hard-coding the chronological organization of entries. In considering why place bloggers choose this form of networked expression to explore place, the chronological organization of blogs is significant. Eric Gordon and Gene Koo observe that “spatial metaphors” of networked online games like Second Life seem to make them “naturally suited to supporting location-aware groups” and indeed other forms of locative media and online mapping applications tend to foreground the spatial aspects of network locality (14). Instead, blogging as a medium foregrounds the temporal through relentless chronological organization.

The Resources of Nature

As the Ecotone community continues to develop their definition of place blogging, several members contribute to a wiki page called “Place Blogging Description” where they collect share their ideas in process. First and Corrigan each create lists of characteristics that could read as inventories of ancestral genres. Corrigan evokes the personal essay when he describes place blogs as “collections of stories of the writer’s engagement with a place, including the land and culture of a place,” and the ethnographer’s notebook when describes blogs as “notes on the particular character of a place” more generally. First points to local history as a way that bloggers explore “how your life is just so because of the history of where you live” (“Place Blogging Description”).

Both Corrigan and First mention genres that approach place by way of nature. Corrigan’s list of place blog qualities begins with “logs of natural activity and cycles, including flora and fauna, geological and meteorological notes, sometimes with description, sometimes without.” First’s list highlights ways of writing about the natural world that include natural history writing made up of “observations that promote understanding or reflect relationships with non-human species and habitats” and reflections on “how your activities or those of your community impact the living systems for good or ill.” He also includes landscape description, a “descriptive/immersive narrative of the landform that surrounds you” that involves “painting word pictures so those from other types of country can be vicariously in your woods, prairie, beach, mountaintop, etc)” (“Place Blogging Description”).

Corrigan adopts a quote from environmental writer Barry Lopez as the manifesto for his blog, but it also summarizes the emerging ethos of the Ecotone community:

Over time I have come to think of these three qualities—paying intimate attention; a storied relationship to a place rather than a solely sensory awareness of it; and living in some sort of ethical unity with a place—as a fundamental human defense against loneliness. If you’re intimate with a place, a place with whose history you’re familiar, and you establish an ethical conversation with it, the implication that follows is this: the place knows you’re there. It feels you. You will not be forgotten, cut off, abandoned.

Lopez goes on to ask, “How can a person obtain this? How can you occupy a place and also have it occupy you? How can you find such a reciprocity?” His answer is “to become vulnerable to a place” by opening one’s self up to place in a way that creates intimacy as it would in any relationship. The result for Lopez is the possibility of cultivating “a sense of belonging, a sense of not being isolated in the universe” (qtd. in Corrigan, “May 16, 2003”). Lopez is among the American nature writers who literary scholar Scott Slovic examines in his book Seeking Awareness in American Nature, in which he highlights the concern prominent environmental writers have with the perceptions of place and the process of cultivating attention to the natural world. Since Thoreau, the nature writing tradition has represented a strain of the American literary tradition in which the relationship between self and other has been of paramount interest. The nature writing tradition drew on the personal essay tradition in its representation of the mind at work, but it focused on exploring how individuals makes sense of who they are in the context of ecosystems, as part of one species among many. With the increasing awareness of a worldwide environmental crisis in the 1960s and 1970s, cultivating an individual awareness of one’s place in nature gained political urgency, as knowing where one was in a deeper sense became an ethical stance that prepared one for political action on behalf of threatened environments.

As Slovic has argued, nature writers have long used the genre as a mechanism for paying attention and for exploring an evolving relationship between oneself and one’s environment. According to Lawrence Buell, author of The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, “environmental literature launches itself from the presumption that we do not think about our surroundings, and our relation to them, as much as we ought to” (261). Paying attention to our environment, whether natural or human-made, does not seem to come naturally. Our tendency both in everyday life and literary texts is to treat the environment as little more than setting, as the rather non-descript background for our actions. Environmental texts are designed to raise our awareness toward that which we usually ignore:

Perhaps the commonest attraction of environmental writing is that it increases our feel for both places previously unknown and places know but never so deeply felt. The activation of place-sense that comes with this vicarious insidership is apt to subside quickly, however, unless it is repeatedly jogged. Whether from laziness or a desire for security, we tend to lapse into comfortable inattentiveness toward the details for our surroundings as we go about our daily business. (261)

If lack of awareness to place is the equivalent of casting place as simply a backdrop to one’s life, rather than a character, the environmental text aims to make place a character in one’s personal drama.

The tendency to draw on environmental non-fiction is a natural outgrowth for many Ecotone members, given their interests and occupations: First was trained as a biologist, DiSabato wrote a dissertation on American nature writing, Hollander and Kent are avid birdwatchers, Corrigan frequently quotes Lopez for the inspiration for his blogging, Chris Clarke, another Ecotone blogger, is a science writer. The influence of nature writing is already evident in the nascent stages of Ecotone at the end of April 2003, when Rebecca Blood had already referred to First and company as “modern day Thoreaus” (“The Weblog Handbook”).

This initial bent toward equating nature and place becomes more pronounced as the site develops. Visually, the site’s design suggests a “natural” ethos, with an earth-tone background color and a banner image depicting what appears to be a gravel road disappearing into the distance. The flat topography and the appearance of the dirt road suggest a rural setting, but the grass and bushes near the road appear uncultivated, reinforcing the natural feel of the scene and the site.

Screenshot of Ecotone wiki, July 2, 2003 revision.\
\
\

The site’s name further reinforces the natural ethos of the site:

Ecotone: term from ecology. A place where landscapes meet—like field with forest, or grassland with desert. The Ecotone is an area of increased richness and diversity where the two communities comingle. Here too are creatures unique to the Ecotone… the so-called ‘edge effect’. Here in the online Ecotone community, we hope to create an edge effect, bringing distinct and different places and communities together to enrich our world. Enjoy your visit. (“Choosing”)

After First posts his description on the wiki, Holland wonders if the “connotations of this term are too biological,” given what seems to be the agreed goal to make the site as inclusive and welcoming as possible to those “whose focus is the cultural aspects of place, rather than nature.” He wonders if the introductory text on the front page will make this clear enough to visitors (“Choosing”).

While the Ecotone group wants to avoid what they see as the narrowness of political discourse, they also express concern that in foregrounding environmental literature in their approach they may end up defining place too narrowly by equating it with “nature,” and they want to clarify that place blogging is made up of more than “just blogs from the ‘beautiful and unspoiled,’” as Adams puts it (“Some Thoughts”). As First articulates the problem, “we do run the risk of being misunderstood, as tree-huggers or Thoreauvian sissies or pith-helmeted bellybutton gazers, and more helpful discussion like this I think is the order of the day” (“Running Discussion”). Adams observes that place bloggers can easily be pigeonholed in much the same way she sometimes feels mischaracterized as a resident of Vermont: “Everybody assumes you’re about cows and white steeples and fall colors.” For place blogging to generate a wider audience, they will need to counteract the assumption that it is “rural and kind of retrograde—even scolding and rejecting of technology and ‘progress.’” Hollander agrees that it’s “really important not to confine ‘blogs about place’ to being mostly about nature.” In his view,

Blogs that write strongly about urban place certainly qualify, and seem just as unheralded in the blogosphere as our rural nature-oriented ones do. Snooping around on the Eatonweb Portal, I found examples ranging from a psychogeography of Portland, OR, to blogs about the Boston subway system and the London Underground. That’s good place-oriented stuff! (“Running Discussion”)

Early on in the project, this misperception becomes evident in causal conversations with bloggers who would otherwise seem likeminded in their interest in place. Adams gives the example of Nancy from Under The Fire Star who “is interested in our efforts but has been politely staying on the sidelines” because identifies as a “city” blogger and feels that she should find a group that shares this interest. Adams feels it would be a shame to lose her involvement, and suggest creating a broader list of categories such as “city” and “international” that would allow bloggers like Nancy to feel welcome (“Running Discussion”).

To address this perceived overemphasis on nature, Ecotone writers tap into those elements of the nature writing tradition that take seriously the ordinariness of the environment in whatever form it takes. Environmental writers are sensitive to the fact that most of our lives are shaped by the repeated encounters with the local, but the very repetitiveness that often enables us to feel rooted in a place also serves to dull our sense of what is there. For this reason we see writers like Thoreau describe having “traveled a good deal in Concord” and nature writer Jon Hanson Mitchell describes the need to explore the “undiscovered country of the nearby” (qtd. in Buell 262). Whether it is Aldo Leopold watching the “sky dance” of the woodcock every summer evening on his Wisconsin farm; Thoreau describing a battle of ants in the woods near Concord; Mary Austin noticing the reaction of Coyotes to changes in the moon and the desert animals huddled in every fence post shadow; or Annie Dillard professing, “I would like to get to know grasses and sedges—and care”—nature writers tend to be captivated by what we might easily think of as “ordinary nature.” While nature writing often pays tribute to the striking and sublime aspects of the natural world, they simply do not begin or end there. Rather, nature writing grows out of an author’s ability to see what is happening in a backyard patch of woods or a neighboring wetland, to awaken perception to the normally unnoticed aspects of the living surroundings, to know the environment in a way only earned through the repetition of ordinary encounters.

Watercolor of field landscape \
Allan Hollander (“Our Secret Kansas”)

Kent emphasizes this aspect of the nature writing tradition when she discusses her place blogging practice. While First and Thompson blog about what most would consider “picturesque” places, Kent describes Davis, a college town in the Central Valley of California, as a “cross between Berkeley and North Dakota”:

Agricultural land surrounds the house we rent, the guest house of a ranch house. Our landlord owns 40 acres of prime agricultural land which he leases to Campbell’s Soup. The wind blows all March and April; once the fields get plowed, that translates into a lot of dirt blowing around. The field immediately to our south is owned, somehow, by the Shriners, who have no compunction about getting it sprayed. Spraying, in this context, means application of pesticides by small plane, usually very early in the morning. (“Pondering”)

But she speaks with affection about the place she calls home, describing the progressive culture of food co-ops and bicycling, the chance she has to bike to work each day, and the enjoyment she finds in birdwatching on nearby Putah Creek.

Kent reinforces her point by referencing another generic resource when she recommends John Stilgoe’s book Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places, a guidebook for exploring ordinary landscapes. Kent describes how for Stilgoe exploring “takes on an almost sacramental quality” and how he takes his landscape history students at Harvard out to explore “non-picturesque places—abandoned railway tracks, for example,” encouraging them to examine “what these altered landscapes tell us about our past and our relationship with the landscape” (Kent, “Great Comments”). Stilgoe describes the book as “a straightforward guidebook to exploring,” a guidebook not to the new and exotic landscapes of leisure travel, but the ordinary, familiar landscapes that surround most Americans in their urban and suburban environments (17). By offering a guidebook to ordinary places, the implication is that we no longer understand the very places we should know best. Stilgoe describes his subject as “landscape, the built environment, ordinary spaces that surrounds the adult explorer,” places usually “not meant to be interpreted, to be read, to be understood,” and he asserts that “exploring ordinary landscape sharpens all the skills of landscape” (11). Like environmental nonfiction, Stilgoe’s guidebook to ordinary places models ways of paying attention to places. While the offers some information of particular places, its goal is to empower us as reader to explore our own places with a set of heuristics that help us see things we would not see otherwise.^viii^

Kent suggests that the Ecotone group should take a similar approach and ground their definitions of place blogging in the shared ordinariness of place:

Watercolor sketch of bird standing in water \
Alison Kent (“Coastal Migrations”)

Maybe it’s because I live in a place that is simply NOT spectacular, where it’s easy to overlook the overlookable (we were just out looking for grasshopper sparrows in some vernal pools, which may look to some just like weird depressions in a cow pasture, but which host entire ecosystems) that I want to encourage more and different people who write about “place” (even if they’re not sure that’s what they are doing) to join us. (“Running Discussion”)

Kent suggests that the appeal of the Ecotone project “will lie in explaining to those who ‘aren’t sure’ they blog about place that they really do.” If they can make it clear to potential participants that they all come to place from different angles—First through his rootedness in the Appalachians, Hollander as a geographer, Kent through “a poetry workshop focusing on the Putah Creek watershed”—then this might “trigger the corresponding ‘AHA! That happened to me too! Maybe I qualify!’” In Kent’s view, “it’s very exciting to me to think that this might get folks quite outside our cluster to think harder about place, even if only sporadically” (“Running Discussion”).

Defining place blogging as an aid for paying attention becomes a way to create more space to accommodate the variety of ways people approach place. After moving to Bowen Island, Corrigan begins to document his experience of this place through his blog and he becomes more aware of how blogging is helping deepening his relationship with Bowen Island:

As I have been writing about my life here, I am increasingly conscious of how blogging has brought a sharper awareness and attention to my life here. For me, blogging place is drawing attention to links in the elements that make up the landscape. As this blog has evolved, I have become acutely aware of the landscape that is forming in my mind and heart of who I am and what Bowen Island is as a place and what relationship exists between us. (“June 15”)

Corrigan asserts that the “links to the land” are formed by deliberate attention to place over time and that blogging is a medium that fosters such attention, a theme that that is restated often in the early Ecotone posts and discussion. Nancy from Under the Fire Star, describes an immediate connection she made between blogging and place-based writing: “When I first began to think about what I wanted to do with a blog, the thing that came to mind was to chronicle a particular life in this particular place.” While “people don’t really see the places where they live,” Nancy feels lucky to have her awareness of place heightened by her ex-pat vantage point in India:

Most people don’t really see the places where they live. I’m so lucky to have pulled up my roots and transplanted myself to a strange place. No matter how long I live here, it will always be somewhat exotic to me. I see it. Little things tickle me—or annoy me—every day. It keeps me on my toes. Because things are so interesting, peculiar, irritating, I want to share them with others. Look! Can you believe this? (“Blogging”)

For Nancy, place blogging is a way for her to document and share what she is seeing around her on a regular basis. For Adams, blogging is a tool that helps her achieve a “more constantly observant frame of mind”:

One thing I’ve been grateful for is that blogging about nature and my surroundings has made me get out more and turn on that mental recorder—that’s very welcome, from the perspective of this chair and desk, especially after the longest and most inhospitable winter I can remember. (“Some Thoughts”)

Following on these comments, Kent frames blogging as mechanism for seeing: “Place, as Beth Adams at Cassandra Pages points out, really does involve wearing a certain set of lenses. Mostly, it sort of means just opening your eyes” (“Great Comments”). Adams contends that careful cultivation of attention ought to be what place bloggers are known for:

If we want to be taken seriously as writers, thinkers, observers and recorders of place, I think that seriousness and attention are what need to be emphasized. Personally, I’d like to read someplace, “Some of the best writing and most innovative thinking on the web is being done by people who call themselves ‘place bloggers.’” (“Running Discussion”)

Ecotone bloggers, then, construct place blogging as not just a genre for representing place as a finished product but also as a heuristic for paying attention that provides the material for representation.

In the end, the group sticks with the name Ecotone, despite its natural connotations, because the “poetic richness” seems to outweigh any concerns they may have. As Corrigan puts it,

Ecotone is beautiful as a name for this endeavour. It conjurs up the blending of ecologies, the fact that our blogs kind of dwell on the edges of blogdom, the idea that we are connected in an ecology of blogging and the fact that we are making music here together, singing the tones of eco.

I will stamp my feet and protest in the strongest terms if we have to change it! But that’s just my opinion… 🙂 (“Choosing”)

Even Nancy from Under The Fire Star, who identifies as a city blogger, adds a supporting opinion to the discussion, as she finds the “the notion of boundaries between two things is very attractive” and she suggests the full site name that they eventually decide on: Ecotone: Writing About Place (“Choosing”).

In defining place blogging, then, Ecotone bloggers attempt to provide enough generic room to accommodate a wide variety of experiences and ideas about place. What ties them together in this formulation is the conviction that place blogging helps to foster a personal sense of place, to respond to the adage, “You can’t know who you are until you know where you are.” By pushing away from political blogging, they align themselves with the type of blogging that focuses on personal experience and affirms the value of ordinary life as the subject of one’s blog. By drawing environmental literature and nature writing, they affirm the value of seeing the self as intimately connected to place. And by taking advantage of the chronological affordances of both blogging and the journal/diary traditions, they are able to view place identity as something constructed over time through the habit of paying attention to where they are. In other words, place blogging is defined as a way for individuals to more effectively allocate attention place and in doing so construct a sense of self-in-place by way of the network. But as we will see in the next chapter, putting one’s self and one’s place into the network this way is not without consequences, requiring Ecotone bloggers to negotiate slightly differently relationships with both.