It's a Wide and Wonderful Blogosphere.

Recently, Sir Barry Jowett got a call from someone in Tamania inquiring about his pink hat. Sir Barry is the CEO of Nanjing's Oxford English Academy and Kongzi Academy. I have seen him with a hat only once-- two years ago, and the hat was mine. I snapped Barry's picture in connection with a humorous office incident. The image has been up on the web ever since.


It's a good picture, I think, and the accompanying text describes Barry as the polite, decent and conscientious man that he is. But from time to time, Barry has good-naturedly threatened to start a blog of his own, so he can post pictures of me when I haven't combed my hair. It would be easy enough to do. Private idiosyncrasies become public on blogs.

Blog entries pop up when a name is entered into Google. I often point out to students that sites such as Blogspot, Myspace, and Facebook are not limited and local; the web is truly world wide. Sometimes, we treat blogs as round robin letters for a select group of our friends, imagining that no one will want to read about us. Potentially at least, blogs have a global audience, and people read what we write for all sorts of reasons.