Research Essentials

I’ve recently been creating new blogs on Blogger. I use both wordpress and blogger, swapping from one to the other depending on my mood at the time. Recently, Blogger has been my preferred choice.

I just created a new blog in Blogger: The Connected Peasant. In doing so, I realised I had quite a few blogs that had fallen into disuse, so I started to go through them.

One of these which took me aback was a blog by Steve Godwin, A researcher’s experience in Education. I am a “guest blogger” on this blog which means I can make blog posts but not do anything else to the blog, like change it’s layout or remove it.

Steve, sadly, died last year. I was in “tidy up” mode, so I wondered what to do about this dormant blog which was listed along with all my other blogs. I thought that maybe I should email the Blogger support centre and ask them to unlink me from it. But before I did so, I went back and re-read it.

It was like hearing Steve speaking again. I realised that maybe I didn’t want to be unlinked from it and that perhaps archiving such blogs is not necessarily the right thing to do. I don’t know what the best thing to do with the virtual traces left on the internet by people when they die, but I’m certainly not going to request any changes to this one.

By Gill