Happy (belated) Birthday, BROG!

Just over two years ago (February 12, 2003, to be precise) the BROG project met for the first time. Its original members were Sabrina Bonus, Lois Scheidt, Elijah Wright, and myself. Inspired by Diane Squire, who was into blogs before most people in SLIS had heard of them, we got together to do one simple study -- a content analysis of random blogs, in order to characterize the emergent weblog genre. (See Diane's article about it in SLIS News from Spring 2003 -- Yes that IS a frog -- photoshopped -- on Lois's shoulder.) It was low-hanging fruit at a time when almost no serious scholarship on blogs existed. Since then, blog scholarship -- and blogging -- have expanded. And we've acquired a taste for the fruit, and are willing to climb higher to find it -- to the point of hand-coding nearly 6000 blogs for a link analysis study last year, just to be able to characterize with confidence one small corner of the blogosphere. Two years later, the BROG project lives on, an informal but durable collaboration with more research ideas than we have the time and resources to develop, even with our present expanded membership. Who would have thought we'd still be at it? :-)