Friday, August 25, 2006

Research Blogs in Business Writing

I'm writing in this blog again as my students in business and administrative writing are creating blogs in which they will research business-related topics of their choice.

Research blogs have interested me for some time. While the blog genre began as a public form of the diary or journal (think of the many facebook or myspace blogs), the genre has been adapted by writers for other purposes:

Politics: http://www.dailykos.com/ http://www.drudgereport.com/

General News: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/ http://www.topix.net/news/blogs

Specialized News: http://www.religionnewsblog.com/ http://slashdot.org/

I think blogs are particularly useful as spaces in which to review and think about research. Some examples of this use of the genre:

http://locus.cwrl.utexas.edu/spinuzzi/?q=blog/2

http://people.clarkson.edu/~johndan/datacloud/

http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/

The following entry describes how one person has seen blogging change the way he researches information:

http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/06/21.html