Seems parts of my research time (the time when I ordinarily write essays, book chapters, conference papers) is being swallowed in the carnival that is the mediafactory networked media blogs. Sitting at home this morning editing some work, quick check of my Feedly subscriptions and 211 unread blog posts. This is good, but also raises a common problem of what we call ‘scale’ online. For example, while it is a good idea for people to be able to ask questions, in a lecture scenario of 120 students and 50 minutes the scale doesn’t work, there simply isn’t the capacity for everyone’s questions. Similarly online it might be nice to reply to people who contact you, at a certain point this becomes too large a task. This is why people who ‘get’ the network invent things like Twitter, which scales elegantly. It is one to many with some possibility of direct communication but it isn’t premised on it specifically. In our case, at the moment, I write into and around your blogs as a way of providing feedback, promoting the role of blogging as knowledge making and learning, and to ‘shape’ our understanding of things. But it doesn’t scale. 120 students writing this much means it is not a model (where a teacher reads and responds) that is sustainable. It is, though, a good model for a brief intensive time to kick start come hot house something. Be interesting to try to change this after the blogs are assessed, for instance working out a way to get you to write more specifically to each other’s posts?