I’ll be presenting Thursday evening to the Berkman Blog Group. It’s kind of an honor, since I really don’t see myself as one. I associate with bloggers, I befriend them, I research their methods… and I hope they don’t mind if they accept me as different. (Just as Larry Craig is not gay, and Richard Nixon was not a crook, I am not a blogger. Somewhere somebody hasn’t written a treatise on identity denialism.)

I’m a… slogger.

There’s obviously a certain cachet to being a blogger– you’re immediately connected to a world of other bloggers. But the community of bloggers is still tight-knit enough that they’re very defensive about what it means to be one. And that’s what drives cheerleaders and critics alike to use a broad brush  Take Mark Cuban, who appears to be both cheerleader and critic. He’s deliberately barred journalists identifying themselves as bloggers from his locker room. In the end he shares the same prejudices that old-school journalists have.

For the Berkman Center’s purpose I suppose their definition it’s closer to “people who experiment with new media structures.” I believe I fit that bill. I just experiment with deconstructing the blogs.

My initial experiment four years ago was to break the front-page reverse-chronological layout in personal publishing. That’s what you see here. The content is faceted. Browsing the archives illustrates it well. It even brings new light to historical blog archives.