the pastime of past time: inital observations

This cleverly-titled blog is the creation of Bryan Andrachuk, a Public History M.A. student at the University of Western Ontario. He initially started the blog, ironically, as an assignment for his Digital History class. He writes often about the process of blogging and his impressions of other blogs.

The objective of the class was to examine the nature of the internet and how it can be utilized in the field of Public History, and Andrachuk offers his thoughts of several websites on the subject. Some, like The National Council on Public History, are from long-established organizations that predate the world wide web by decades. Others, such as Digital History, are obviously products of the invention. The sheer volume of the websites and blogs devoted to this fairly specific subject matter reflects how exhaustive the resources are for any given topic.

But Andrachuk does not limit himself to websites centered around Public History, even though he rarely strays from the topic. He uses a wide away of sources, including national newspapers like The Globe and Mail and some of the more mainstream sites including imdb and wikipedia.

As I mentioned, Andrachuk pretty much sticks to the topic at hand. Unlike other blogs that seem to veer off into other directions, the pastime of past time is devoted almost solely to Public History, which is something I liked. Maybe I just haven't been able to appreciate where the other bloggers have been veering, but they tend to ramble way off course.

It's not surprising that Andrachuk is a graduate student. The majority of the blogs found on the blogroll are those created by other Public History students. Likewise, the link list is comprised primarily of history resources at UWO. The frequency of Andrachuk's posts also reflect his status as a student. During some months he will update his blog seven times, but in other months he will post only once. But because his posts usually contain a wealth of good information, I'm happy with quality over quantity.

the pastime of past time has a pretty simple format. There are few pictures or other elements found in other blogs, such as videos or ads. I do appreciate the word hyperlinks he provides and I've decided to do the same throughout my blog whenever possible (although it is a time-consuming process).

As I continue to examine other blogs, I will periodically come back to compare them to pastime and to each other.