In preparation for an upcoming presentation at the 2009 EDUCAUSE ELI annual conference, I’ve been noodling away at this question that may seem rather pointless or obvious. I’ve been at this very same blog since April 2003, so maybe it is “just what I do here”.

cc licensed flickr photo by Earl – What I Saw 2.0

In the past, somewhere I’d muttered about it being a verb AND a noun (c.f. “a dessert and a floor wax”). I am not looking to wallow in definitions, but wanting to parse out once tendency to think of blogging as something you do in blog software and maybe another to think of it more broadly as “personal publishing”. The scene gets muddier as we see people doing blog-like things in Facebook, tiny bits in twitter, and all of it recast resyndicated remixed in places like FriendFeed, Tumblr, etc. I always like to pull out the fringe concept, now pretty old, of “comment blogging” someone who publishes in the comment space of other blog sites.

And while this blog started in 2003- I think the manual web site I spun by hand our of raw HTML in 2000 is pretty much a blog. Or blogging. Or both.

So like the young child’s basic questioning at Passover (did you know by the way there are more than 300 language translations of the four questions??) I am just playing with this question.

I have had this germ of an idea for a while as I had tried a number of times this year to post longer, blog like captions in my flickr photos. Might this be called “slow flickr-ing?” And I wanted to see if there were ways to do blog-like publishing in things that are not blogs.

And what follows are four examples.