a. The Internet Theory & Research seminar requires each student to lead a full session of the class. Which means two and a half hours. Typically, students end up guiding the discussion along through pre-assigned readings.
b. Today was Blogs and Wikis Day. I ended up tinkering with the reading list with my professor, and we ended up with:

• O’Reilly, Tim. What is Web 2.0?
• Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail.
• Miller, Carolyn, and Dawn Shepherd. Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog
• Efimova, Lilia, and Stephanie Hendrick. In search for a virtual settlement: An exploration of weblog community boundaries.
• Bryant, Susan, et al. Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of Participation in a Collaborative Online Encyclopedia.
• Stvilia, Besiki, et al. Information Quality Discussions in Wikipedia.

c. Even though I submitted the readings last Tuesday, for whatever reason they weren't made available to the rest of the class on our WebCT site until this morning. Which meant that nobody was prepared to discuss them at 3 this afternoon.
d. So I lectured for nearly two hours on various aspects of blogs as well as attendant research issues and approaches. I had prepared notes on the readings, but left them at my desk when I moved up to the podium. It turned out I didn't need them. We stayed on track and when people were able to participate they did so. My professor offered a lot of helpful commentary as we went along. Eventually we did some in-class exercises to wrap up the session. (Meaning we worked on analysis of Feministe, Dooce, and The Valve.)
e. I had absolutely no idea I could do that for that length of time in front of a graduate crowd.
f. But it feels really good to find out that I can.
g. Of course, it makes all the difference to have a subject that you’ve been thinking about for several years and a very supportive crowd to work in front of.