A blog, though built and maintained by a writer, is an unweildy and restless semiotic object. Once configured, named, and populated with a handful of texts, a blog’s complexity begins to facilitate all sorts of emergences. Writers have habits and preoccupations, blind spots and projects. And as a writer takes on the practice of blogging, he becomes a blogger. And as his entries proliferate, Barthes would suggest that the illusion…

One of the most recognizable attributes of blogs is their reverse chronological organization. More simply put, their content (also known as “entries” or “posts”). Bloggers post entries at any sort of frequency they wish. Some bloggers post several times daily. Others post only a few times a week or even less frequently. And most entries are relatively short, usually a couple hundred words, but not often pushing past a thousand….

(I just finished this rough version of a talk I gave on Roland Barthes this week at the Louisville Conference on Literature Since 1900. I want to share it. It’s relevant. About blogging. And I’m sort of a Roland Barthes fanboy lately. I would love to know your reactions. Feel free to share. That said…) Blogs, as a genre, don’t really have an origin. There is no first blog or…