What a very busy couple of weeks! I am writing this at an Internet station in Westfield Mall, Chatswood, Sydney. Not much to say on the blogademic front I'm afraid. I am not here currently to work in that capacity, although I hope to be able to keep up with the work, and there are definitely publications in the pipeline. For those of you more interested in how things are going, may I refer you to our other blog, Exit Music.

At those blogging conference things I've been attending these past few months, there have been a plethora of interesting blog statistics. One crowd-pleaser is always when people blog. Lots of nice time series data and graphs showing there are a lot of people blogging late into the night. The inevitable questions concern the lining up of blog post times from different parts of the world, alignment of timezones with providers etc. There's never a question about fibbing.

Having recently begun our own personal blog, Amanda and I have discovered the joys of flexible blogging. You want to post every day, but you find yourself with a lot to say late one evening. Why not make one post now, then write another, set the timestamp forward a few hours, and lo and behold at the appointed time it shall appear. Get in late, why not knock up a quick post, set the time back to the day before and your readers next morning will never know. Don't want to get caught blogging at work? Then set all your posts to 5:01pm.

Now there is noise in all data, and I'm not saying that this is a big problem in such temporal analyses. However, I feel it should at least be discussed, it may be a phenomenon in itself.

That's a question applied often down the ages, but know we must seriously turn it to blogs. We've all seen blogs as books, but this year there are THREE shows at this years Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I first saw a poster for a show based on Baghdad Burning, "a young Iraqi's internet journal." Fair enough I thought, it's topical, could be poignant, it's a story people need to hear.

And then I read the BBC article about Blogger: Real Internet Diaries. This is a show from a producer who had previously never heard of blogs, but an old classmate pointed him to his. He and a friend had such fun "performing it for each other" (taking the piss more likes) that they decide to make a show out of blogs. They got agreement from ten british bloggers, and will be using their blogs, word for word. Now I'm not saying that these people's stories are no less worthy of telling, but it just seems like really lazy storytelling.

Day 1 - "Oh man, the Edinburgh Festival is coming up and we need a show. What are we going to do??"

Day 2 - "What are blogs? I've never heard of them...oh really...and people reveal EVERYTHING? What an odd concept. How funny."

Day 3 - "Wait a minute..."

Heck, maybe I'm not being very fair...it might good...but it just seems like cashing in on a trend to me.