Welcome to This blog will eat itself, a blog about blogs and bloggers, by bloggers, and for bloggers.

I am beginning my research for my Master's thesis, in which I will discuss blogs, their relationship with traditional diaries, and their affect on society (including privacy, communication, and research). In what better medium to collect my findings than a blog? Here, I will post my research findings, news, links, and other interesting information about blogs. Most importantly to my thesis, I will blog for the first time. After all, how can I write about that which I do not know and expect to be taken seriously?

My hope is that this blog will serve not only as a research repository for my thesis, but also as a little experiment to show how a blog's community of writers and readers transforms the act of research. As I post my findings, news, links, and other interesting information about blogs, I invite you to post your own comments, questions, theories, and findings. You, the reader, will become a contributor and will help to steer our conversation (within the bounds of my thesis). You will not be doing my homework for me; rather, you will be participating in a feedback loop that will shape our conversation with every new posting.

I want to write about blogs because although I am no expert on blogs, I read a handful on a daily basis (listed on this site). My sister blogs, and I live with a blogger, whose two siblings also blog. Reading blogs has become as big a part of my online reality as Googling and ignoring pop-up ads.

My thesis will compare traditional diaries with blogs, using Pepys diary/blog as a framework. I'll be discussing communication and hypertext theory such as Jay David Bolter's theory about hypertext and the remediation of print. I'll also talk about personal web pages from the early days of the World Wide Web and how they morphed into today's blogs.

For discussion, I'll be posing such questions as:

How are people using blogs? What kinds of blogs are out there?

Does blogging become less legitimate when everyone does it?

Just how much privacy does a blogger give away? Is it more than just her life story? Are corporations trolling blogs to gather personal, read consumer, information? Does a blogger give up the right to her consumer privacy when she willingly gives away her personal narrative?

How does the mutability of the Web affect how much privacy a blogger willingly gives up? Does the knowledge that Web pages become inaccessible to the public rather quickly help bloggers reveal all, knowing that their own blogs will eventually become inaccessible?

But first, I'll post a list of links I've been collecting for a few months now.

More about me: I'm working on my Master of Science in Professional and Technical Communication (MSPTC) at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and am hoping to graduate in May 2004.

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