Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

This weeks blogger is Kate Foy from Australia! Yeah!

Name: Kate Foy
Screen Name: Dramagirl
Personal Blog/s: http://katefoy.com - http://actorsgreenroom.net - http://expressiveplus.com/
Social Networks: 
Twitter (Dramagirl)
Facebook (Kate Foy)
Tumblr (Dramagirl)
Seesmic (Dramagirl)
Delicious (Dramagirl and Expressive Plus). I also play in other spots (Jaiku, use Digg and 12Seconds) but less so. The networks above seem to work just fine.
Current Employment: Freelance consultant and creative arts professional.
Location/country: Toowoomba, Australia.

What is your reason/motivation for blogging? What is it that you find yourself blogging about, mostly the same stuff or does it vary?

My blog's byline contains the word 'adventures', perhaps it should be 'playing about’. I am enthusiastic about online communication and its potential ... in education, and social interaction. So I blog about this playing about and my findings. Other kids in the playground swap their toys with me online and so we continue. Playing is a good metaphor for the enjoyment I get from blogging. In a (recently) former professional life I enjoyed what we academics called a community of practice. My work was read by more people in one day and 'peer-reviewed' through commentary than ever happened in a published journal article ... the 'heritage publishing' of academe with its rigidity, long timelines, and exclusiveness got on my nerves.

What style of blogging do you do, short and regular, or not so regular but long, other? And is your blogging just text or do you also use audio or video?

Of late it's been short and intensive via social media micro-blogging platforms ... Twitter, Facebook, Seesmic and so on. I know that strictly speaking these are not considered to be blogging, but the nature, style and rhythm of commentary and conversation at the heart of blogging is changing through these platforms. At least mine is. What I'm finding is that the more regular, longer, word-based posts of a year ago, even posts from earlier this year, are being replaced by interim social-networking commentary out of which I develop less regular, but I hope more focussed reflections which are then blogged. I use video on Seesmic a lot although my experiments in encouraging commentary in my blogs using Seesmic have been resisted by and large by readers ... horses for courses. Of course video 'blogging' or conversations are all you can do on Seesmic. I like it a lot and think that video blogging is an inevitable next step along the way especially as the proliferation of plugins for mobile phones make this possible.

How Kate became a Geek Girl Blogger:

My fairy godmother gave me the gift of enthusiasm and curiosity. I'm an arts graduate with a few degrees up my sleeve, and so writing became a habit early on. It's now a way of life. When I 'found' the WWW in the mid-1990s ... I was an academic at the time ... I thought I had discovered a treasure trove. The potential to reach out, research stuff and write about it was just awesome ... really in the true sense of this much-overused word right now.

Blogging came to me in the early-mid 2000s when the word floated into my consciousness. I'm a Mac user, so inevitably I used the iWeb interface to get my first humble efforts out there, and really it was for me ... more in the nature of a journal or diary to which I could add photos, links and so on .  As more accessible blogging platforms like Blogger and then the mighty Wordpress came along, I began using them to drag my students (most kicking and screaming) into sharing their work, into having that conversation that blogging is all about, with one another and with me. Now these experiments became reflective journals with critical commentary appended. The next step into searching for like-minded colleagues, others etc., seemed to happen without any effort. The magnet attracts the iron-filings out there.

I've used other blogs as marketing aids ... for a Shakespeare Festival I developed in 2004 and as a way to put my 'research' together into one place. Blogs work in so many different ways. My mucking about keeps rolling along and I've learned a heck of a lot along the way.

Thanks for reading our latest GGB survey…

If you are a Geek Girl Blogger, or know that you probably are one even if you don’t consider yourself to be one, and you’d like to be featured in our series, then please contact us and we’ll get back to you. We’re currently on the lookout for some new GGB’s so don’t hesitate if you’re interested. We’d love to feature you!

aManda