Ivan (The Trouble With) Tribble has quite a following. If you have forgotten or never read it, Ivan is a psuedonym for someone who thinks blogging is a bad practice for professor wanna bes (See Bloggers Need Not Apply from the July 8, 2005 Chronicle of Higher Education– at least they had the savvy to leave this one public).
I think I had composed something vitriolic and trashed it w/o posting. To me, Ivan wants to keep his hand securely stowed in the sand and do education as usual.
But here is what is neat– if you follow the who links to Ivan features of Bloglines Citations, you will wade through perhaps 500 blogged responses, a wide spectrum of opinions weighing in on “Ivan”. Will this attention bring him into the light or will he continue to write in disguise? What will be his next target? How many agree? Do not? What new ideas emerge? What modes of argument are used? Abused? There are all kinds of social learning activities nestled in this one thin slice of web activity.
More importantly, do we turn enough people on to this layer of functionality in Bloglines? as well as the corresponding tools from Technorati and PubSub? There is a lot to be said by looking at the patterns of communcation on the web- seeing who responds to a specific posting is a neat way of taking the highway of serendipity to finding new blog voices, of taking a pulse on the sphere, of increasing our connectedness.
A Blog thanks to Academic Commons for pointing out the Bloglines reaction to Ivan.
