Rhetoric of Blogging

As an update to my former blogging-rhetoric posts, I believe that the audience of my blogs has changed over the course of the semester.  Initially, I tried to balance between writing for my future students, my future self, my teacher, and my colleagues.  However, now I only post blogs meant for my teacher to read, and I only post blog comments for my peer to read.  This change has happened for a couple of reasons.  First, I do not find the material in this course to be as relevant to my future needs as I originally thought.  Thus, I do not need to write to my future self or my future students.  Next, viewing the number of times my blog has been viewed by classmates throughout the semester has affected who I write to.  Since I am relatively far down on the blog list, I am victim to what is known as voter's fatigue.  This is the theory that people are likely to choose someone (vote for someone) near the top of a list than at the bottom.  Similarly, classmates, when choosing who to blog to, are less likely to respond to someone's blog at the bottom of the list.  Hence, not a lot of classmates have visited my blog.  Thus, through collecting and reviewing this data throughout the semester, I have decided to not address my blog posts to my classmates.  As a result, my only audience is my teacher.  It is interesting how the number of audiences a speaker has to take into account can change over a small period.

I only post blog comments for my peers to read because they are the most likely person to read my comments.  While a student most likely has an email sent to them for every comment, I doubt that the teacher would read every comment, particularly since he does not receive any notification of when a comment is created.  Overall, I learned that the rhetoric of blogging can change over time based on new information and findings.