Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Xanga or not?

I said before that there may be a move afoot to block Xanga. I heard some loud complaints and some understanding. Here is the question that I have for those who have bothered to check my new blog. Is Xanga a worse place of blogging? I think the answer to that is sort of. Xanga does seem to me to be a worse sort of blog. My theme from it hints at what I think about it, I state boldly at the top of the page that I wont talk about deep inner feelings and hot girls friend and parent hate. Why does Xanga foster this?
You cannot search it without paying. This makes it a fine form of entertainment, but a bad place to have public discourse. Public discource needs to be in front of the whole world. The school should be about encouraging all sorts of public discourse and not block it in general. But Xanga makes for institutional gossip. That is something school should not encourage. That is why I think that it is OK to block Xanga, and not other blogging sites that are ore public.

2 comments:

Bob K said...

Do you think that, aside from searching, there is something inherantly inferior about Xanga? I do like the ability to subscribe on Xanga but the interface just seems like it is more prone to the type of "hot girl friend" posts that you (and I) dislike so much.

Would blogspot simply turn into Xanga if all the same people started their own blogs there?

bethany said...

I'll echo my dad's thought. You can't simply move the stuff you were doing on xanga to blogspot and expect it to be better, but it seems that blogspot does foster that kind of public discourse, while xanga fosters gossip. Not to say that these things couldn't both happen in the other venue. I find an easy genre definition by keeping one of each. My xanga is stuff that happened to me, my blogspot is stuff that I think.