No business like blog business...

Here's a first (for me), a movie company turning to a conservative blog for a screening with the promise of more to come. Bloggers getting mad props and perks instead of being a denigrated subculture? Who could have guessed?

ODDS AND ENDS including classmates' ideas

1. make what you will of this.
I especially like:
"Kinja is not aimed at early adopters. Users wanting to analyze patterns of meme propagation, and other sophisticated data, should try the excellent Technorati."

2. File this away for the class on vlogs. The Green Day thing has become a meme, I think.

3. GREAT QUESTION FROM JOE: Today's Profundity: Does a blogsite's environment shape how the inhabitants behave? Would blogger (A) writing on blog (B) sound a little different than blogger (A) would on blog (C)?

4. BRETT SAYS IT'S A MEGA-BLOG. IS IT? Now perhaps allow me to suggest a website which I regard as a blog, but many people do not. Aint It Cool News has been around since 1995 and is a fantastic read. AICN is really the pioneer of the megablog format with their enormous amount of contributors and bawdy talkbacks. During the Presidential election they even got political, with the two moderators fighting over their political views. Check it out.

5. MATT SUGGESTS: I was also curous about how easily it might be to create a meme of our own in order to track its life from birth to death. For example, we have about 15-20 people in our class. If each one of us could get 10 people to repeat a meme that we create on 10 different blog sites, that would be about 2,000 postings by us. Would this be enough to launch something sizable into the blogosphere that could get picked up and repeated by others? IDEA THAT COULD GET COLIN FIRED REDACTED!!!!!!!!! But this is essentially what Kyle Bunch, Jeremy Hermanns, and Greg Johns did with http://www.blogebrity.com/ and look what it’s actually turned into!

HERE IS A PUNY LITTLE EXAMPLE OF HOW A MEME CAN SPREAD FROM MY OWN PUNY LIFE:
American Politics Journal -- Quotes of Note for 2004"Can you imagine being potty-trained by Barbara Bush?" -- Colin McEnroe, WTIC,5/5/04 (second tip o' the hat to Jerome Doolittle) ...www.americanpolitics.com/quotes.html - 32k - Cached - Similar pages
BAD ATTITUDES: Why Didn’tI Come Up With That?... show host Colin McEnroe, meditating this afternoon on what made George W. Bush theman he is today: “Can you imagine being potty-trained by Barbara Bush?”. ... badattitudes.com/MT/archives/001439.html - 9k - Supplemental Result - Cached - Similar pages

Not required reading!

...but the fact that there is a blog about William Shatner's butt tells you something.

Some Slivy Tove Homework Advice on a Frumius Sunday

We're not going to want to spend the whole class on the mega-blogs, so do try to background yourself on memes and think about how they relate to blogs (and whether, somehow, our entire language is being replaced by words from "The Jaberwocky". )

I forgot to list this must-see megablog.
This is another blog for techies, but they also seem to have an interest in the humanities. Some of the entries -- names for things on Mars -- are compelling to a liberal arts creampuff like me. There is also another attempt to create a community, but not quite so Orwellian as Kos. And harder to figure out.
As usual, poke around. See if you can deduce anything about its history.

You may have trouble with Metafilter, which has a notoriously twitchy server.

If Huffington Post doesn't "feel like a blog," decide why not.

It don't meme a thing...Saturday edition

Oh!, before I get rolling, allow me to mention that one of our class blogs got a comment back from Sally! Also, I got a nice haircut. You will no longer have to be ashamed of your teacher.

The idea that bloggers sit around in their pajamas, even on refulgent September days, is a meme, and you should peruse those definitions and read the wikipedia entry on meme if you do nothing else. If you do something else, check out some of the other links in this posting, but, then, before you burn out completely, check out my man Clotaire Rapaille, who is not at all doing memes. I want to be this guy's intern some day. I think he helps me figure out what is missing from most memetics research and writing -- the human element. Most of what I read on memes is either:
-- really stupid
-- really mechanistic or
-- pointlessly esoteric.
I'd put in links for all of these, but I already have too many people pissed off at me.
It's as if, once the original idea was coined, nobody could figure out what to do next. It's like 300 Jesuses and 0 St. Pauls.
Susan Blackmore's book is the exception. Truly useful.
OK, then, this is kind of the JAMA of memes, but when I clicked on "Current issue," I got Latin, which frightened me and made me reexamine the coffee bag in my cupboard. Kenya AA psilocybin. Just as I thought.
Who else is doing memes? Surprise! Those cranky bastards at Kos, that's who. Why is that whole Kos thing so unikeable. I mean, "liberal Democrat" is practically my blood type, but there's a Dr. Evil quality over there. "Number One? Depressurize the meme tank. Let slip the monkey memes of war!"

I include the next thing ONLY because it was an attempt to connect blogs and memes, but, for the life of me, I can't figure out how it was supposed to work and, anyway, I'm pretty sure everyone connected to it is now dead, in sort of a mass "Day of the Condor"-style rub-out.

And then, there's this semi-successful attempt to identify the kind of meme you could maybe track, but I don't see any real evidence of an attempt to track any of them.

dudes!

I guess we had better read this.

up way too early

i found this strange blog at 5 a.m. this morning. it both amused and disturbed me. i cannot decide whether it's real.

i have also decided that blogology is nearly infinite. i mean, what is all this about? i don't have time to find out right now.

A woman of a certain age

Check out this slightly pissed off older woman. I love her. Go back to the beginning, when she gets the robot dog. You will love her too. She will be one of our proto-bloggers for this week.

Live from Old Lyme

Well, I would have been closer to live had not blogspot sort of crashed last night. I had just returned from what was billed as a "conversation" between me and Lowell Weicker in the auditorium of an Old Lyme church. Weicker and I have become, in recent years, something resembling friends, although we're not quite there yet. It's really hard for journalists and politicians who be completely calm around one another. But we like each other enough to have agreed to do this for a Deaniac group down there, and, amusingly, we arrived dressed nearly identically.
Anyway, during the Q&A, I noticed a guy in the back -- dressed rather differently from most of the rest of the Old Lyme crowd which was, come to think of it, also dressed like me and Weicker -- who looked less like the sort of person who Septembers along the lower Connecticut River and more like he might driven over from Ansonia.
And he had a fairly obstreperous question that involved the media not doing its job.
And his face had a somewhat sour cast, as though he spent a lot of time being pissed off about the state of things.
So, of course, he was a blogger.
Not only a blogger, he told me after the show, but a contributor to DailyKos. In fact, he told me, in kind of a "I know Springsteen" way, he and Kos exchange emails roughly twice a week.
And I told him excitedly about this class and how we're looking at Kos as some kind of frontier community attemping to impose order on itself blah blah blah and he clearly did not give a shit. He was mainly interested in what he was going to do next. (I have this increasing suspicion that some bloggers kind of get off on doing what I more or less did long before there was blogging: become mildly important without ever developing any social skills.)
And I had to resist the temptation to chloroform him and slip him into a specimen bag and beam him back here and pin him to a styrofoam board so that we could study him more closely, use the rectal probe on him, erase his memories and release him in a field at night.
Anyway, his big excitement stemmed from the way Weicker had been kind of dangling -- in the vaguest way -- the idea that he might run against Lieberman next year. I happen to know a little more about this, and it's not a completely insubstantial idea. Anyway, he's going to try to get something up on Kos about it today, so keep and eye peeled. It might be a chance for us to watch a meme get batted around a little.

New Haven weighs in

A few local thoughts about what a blog is ... and isn't.

Neither here nor there

This is just kind of supplementary reading. I considered assigning this guy but his blog is too young and he's too Irisih for the room. But if I had a sister, I'd be OK with her dating this nice young man.

Also, only in the blogosphere would we find a site devoted to a regular critique of tshirts.

Lastly, this seems to have been a primtive attempt to look at some of the meme-blog relationships we will be studying here.

From proto to pro

As part of this week's assignment, spend some time with the archives of Jason Kottke. Kottke has become a full-time blogger now, and it's not his newest stuff that interest me most. It's the early stirrings, the mid-period. What kinds of choices has he made as he moved from nobody to noticed? Does a blogger follow the same arc as a writer -- or some other content-driven artist -- as he or she makes his way towark been known?
I call your attention to:

Not comfortable
This is not a diary. A diary is a personal, private thing that I don't feel comfortable sharing with you. Alas, I've occasionally let this thing turn into a diary. I've also shared information about other people that wasn't appropriate. I've used notes to send messages to people "in the know".
Not anymore.
To that end, I've removed some material from here. Personal material that was (maybe) appropriate at the time, but as I look back on it, was not such a good idea. Some of you might protest, saying that I'm tampering with the past. It's not fair of me to go back and change my journal entries like that, right? It's not "fair" and "sporting". Well, fair or not, it's done.
 Oct 19, 1998

and

A weblog?
Is this a weblog? I don't think it is. It's more of a diary/jotpad for my thoughts. Sometimes I include links, sometimes not. If I don't link, how can this be a weblog?
Maybe it is a weblog, but I'd hate to be accused of following the trend of the moment. Why don't we just call it a list of Jason's ideas & commentary and leave it at that, OK?
 May 3, 1999

HOW TO DO YOUR HOMEWORK

I really want your blogs to be diaries about reading and analyzing the assigned work in the blogoshpere!!! If you want to write about another things, that's great, that's wonderful; but to satisfy the work requirements, your blogs should have observations and analysis that specifically reference the blogs we're discussing. So, from last week's assignment, you ought to have some specific comments about BoingBoing, DailyKos, dooce and one or two others of the top blogs. It doesn't have to be a ton, but enough to show me that you're reading and thinking.
And this week, you ought to be posting specific comments, first on DailyKos (again) and then on some of the proto-bloggers we're looking at.

The other assignment this week -- as you'll see in the syllabus -- is to begin tracking a meme. That means identifying an idea or a shred of thought that has a profile in the blog world and noting its progress. Not unlike what I did Thursday night with the picture of Bush asking to go to the bathroom. How does a meme like that one make its way around the blogs. How is it vetted?

The separate drinking fountains mentality

I love this post, not only because it is potentially significant for us, but also because it kind of illustrates the semi-paranoid, downtrodden attitude that seems to prevail in the blogosphere. This guy's website has some interesting stuff, in general, about how the blog business works, and, as you can see, he's part of one of these blog conglomerates.

Running the table

1. Let's start simple. If you believe Technorati, this is the most popular, by far, of the truly personal blogs. What are some things we can say about the structure and nature of dooce?

Fave text: These feelings of inadequacy were compounded by the fact that I started a new drug last week that for two days made me feel like a normal human being, so normal in fact that I thought something must have been wrong. Part of me feels like I’m not allowed to feel normal, and I called Jon in the middle of the day to say, “YOU PEOPLE FEEL LIKE THIS? IS THIS EVEN LEGAL?”

2. I have considerably less to say about the two gadget/gizmo sites although I think it's interesting that thing one is part of the Gawker media network, whereas thing two is part of a different blog media network. And I confess I don't quite grasp the nature of these networks yet. But they are somewhat rivalrous. You may have more than I to say about these sites.

3. We could spend the whole class trying to figure out jungle gym of Daily Kos, and we will dwell there for a while in our second class and come back to it, no doubt, several other times. But some of the "About Us" material seems significant, especially this:

THE DAILY KOS LINK POLICY
Link policy. As you can no doubt tell, I am extremely stingy on links.

As a marketing tactic, that's not very smart -- link exchanges are a great way to promote one's site. It's also not the best way to be a good blogosphere citizen -- I should be helping promote new up-and-coming blogs and playing nice with the established ones as well.

However, everything I do on this site I do for the benefit of my readers. I've always thought that a short blogroll was of more use to visitors than an endless list of random names, and for better or worse, that's the rule by which I now live.

While I have set the number of links on my blogroll in stone, its contents are constantly evolving. I generally include sites I visit at least several times a week, a list that changes over time. So I often add and delete sites accordingly. So how does a site get listed? Be noticed. Make a stir. Don't regurgitate the contents of a news story, but provide perspective or additional insight. Be clever, funny, original. Get away from the default templates. Get away from Blogspot. Create your own identity. Your own domain. Have attitude. Be self-confident. Participate in the comment boards at dKos or MyDD or Atrios or any number of other sites (a great way to demonstrate your writing acumen). Participate in group weblogs like Stand Down or the Political State Report. Don't be obnoxious or feel entitled to a link. Given my site's readership, have a heavy focus on elections and the political process. And while I appreciate any traffic you send my way, I don't care whether you link to me or not. Or how much traffic you send. Like I said already, I don't use my blogroll as a marketing tool.

And finally, realize that my refusal to add your site to my list isn't a rejection in any way. We desperately need to catch the Right in the Blogger Wars, and I am proud of each and every person who has the guts and initiative to start his or her own weblog. The progressive movement of the future will be built, in large part, on this digital foundation.

AND ANOTHER THING:
The FAQs give you a pretty good sense of the degree to which Kos has tried to create a mini-blogosphere within a blog, with rules and principles.
EXAMPLE
First and foremost, and I don't think this can be reiterated enough, a 1 or 2 line entry does NOT a diary make. And another thing - only TWO diary entries per day!
Got a poll or other link you'd like people to see? Use the open threads, that's what they're for.
Got a "breaking story" but got no details but you're going to burst if you don't mention it within the next 30 seconds? Use the open threads, or wait until you have more details to chronical for a proper diary entry. Alternatively, you could could stop in the IRC channel (#dailykos on efnet) and bounce ideas off folks there.
Some "soft rules"about writing diary entries...
Before writing a new diary entry, check out the "Recommended Diaries" on the main page. If it's a major issue (most recently Jeff Gannon, Ohio Election Fraud, or Dean as DNC chair), chances are there's an existing thread there that you can tack your new info on.
Use the search function to see if what you're about to write has already been posted.
Once you've written your diary, scroll through the most recent 4-5 pages or so of diary entries to see if someone's posted the same thing in the interim. It's amazing how many diary entries that are almost identical get posted within about 15 minutes of each other. If a similar diary exists, don't post yours. If you have some added info that they've omitted, add it as a comment to theirs. Lately, there's been an average of 25+ pages of diary entries in a 12 hour period - that's over 300 entries! One could honestly argue that at least 25% (often more) of them are 100% redundant.

from jeff jarvis at buzzmachine

I'm just quoting Jarvis verbatim here, but this strikes me as worthy of discussion.

Kevin at a blog about Wal-Mart reports that Wal-Mart now has a blog to pull together stories about helping Katrina’s victims. We could make fun of anything Wal-Mart does — everyone does — but in this crisis, I’ve heard rare and constant praise for the company (as in: if Walmart could get in there, why couldn’t the Army?). I have to say that this story seems just a bit too coincidental. And I was ready to look at the Katrina gift registry and — reflexively — wonder whether Walmart had just found another way to sell stuff. But read the end of that post and see what the company has given. So no snark. Wal-Mart is giving and blogging and making things happen, so good on them.


-->

the mysterious strength of boingboing

Why is this fascinating jumble so much more popular than other fascinating jumbles? I'm asking. I don't have a good answer. Maybe it's a repository of a lot of alternate realities, unfiltered by the megapowers. I like the idea that it offers up the work of "neo-gonzo journalists."
(...) We recently got video streaming working from one of our laptops. Some of the best hackers on the planet decided that our neo-gonzo journalism was worth some bandwidth, I’m pretty flattered and I hope I don’t let them down. I hope they’re ready to watch Joel and I cook food, build computer networks, scout antenna locations and otherwise talk about the current state of New Orleans.

also not for this week but a possible gold mine

This, courtesy of one of your classmates, is something we will have to plunge into later. OK, this is getting sick. I have to go for a hike. And a swim. And yoga. And a dinner party. I have a life, damn it!

blogfolie a deux?

This is more apropos of our upcoming class on personal bloggers, proto-bloggers; but what is up with this blog? It really looks like one of those blogs designed to be read only by one other person. Or maybe none. And she has stayed at it pretty faithfully for a while.

I've been a bad blogger

Failing to update! The unforgiveable sin.
So now it's sunny and crisp on a Sunday. I should be hiking. Instead I'm updating. I'm a blogger -- pasty and Vitamin E-deprived.
Just a little refinement of the assignment (sounds like I'm rapping):
We need a common set blogs to talk about, so I'm suggesting we start with the top 10 of the technorati top 100 blogs. I don't know about you but I grew obsessively absorbed into this
blog of post cards which turns out to further confound my proposition that blogs should be thought of in terms of text. (Is it really a blog, though?) Whatever it is, it makes me think that it would blow the mind of Sisela Bok who wrote an overarching philosophical book about secrets.
You might also wants to drop down a few places and sample a few in the next ten, if you have time. Especially two.
This guy is kind of a grizzled vet of the blogosphere and held in esteem by some.
And here is a blog that kind of combines preestablished celebrity with the meanderings of a personal pajama blogger. Dig it.
Extra credit: Conduct the following experiment using listerine.

Wall Street Journal this week

New Search Engines
Help Users Find Blogs

Users Say Google and Yahoo
Fail to Locate Latest Postings;
A Guide to the Top Sites
By VAUHINI VARA
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 7, 2005; Page D1

The race is on to become the Google of blogs.

Web logs, online diaries written and published by everyone from college students to big media companies, are being created and updated at an astonishing rate -- and established search companies such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. don't always catch them fast enough. Now, a handful of closely held upstarts such as Technorati Inc., Feedster Inc. and IceRocket.com LLC see an opportunity: Build a search engine that can track the information zipping through blogs, nearly in real time.


Search engine Technorati tracks about 16.5 million blogs.


The new sites are gaining traction with users looking to sample what people are talking about online, from the fallout from Hurricane Katrina to silly celebrity gossip. As free tools make it easier for even the most technophobic to publish online, there's a growing demand for services to sift through the clutter.

The new services, some of which are less than a year old, aren't without their glitches. The technology is still evolving and companies are still looking for the best way to track and sort blogs. Some services miss large numbers of blogs, while others pull up irrelevant sites.

Still, the tech-savvy are flocking to them. Julie Meloni, a 31-year-old Web designer in San Jose, Calif., often uses Google to find how-to guides for design tricks. But to learn what other Web designers are saying about a new development in the industry, she turns to Technorati to search blogs. "You can hear what the unofficial word is," she says. "You can watch the buzz happen."
Just a few years ago, the term "blog" didn't exist. Now, many people follow their postings as they would a favorite television show. Others turn to them for news. No one knows exactly how many blogs exist. But the number of them tracked by Technorati has doubled every five months or so to, most recently, about 16.5 million. The rapid proliferation has made it increasingly frustrating for Web users to find what they're looking for.

For those who want just a small taste of what prominent bloggers are saying, DayPop is a good place to go. It culls its search results from fewer than 60,000 blogs chosen by editors. That means it's likely to offer up relatively few links to well-known bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Dan Gillmor. Sites like Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket and BlogPulse scour far more blogs -- between 15 million and 20 million each -- so searches on those sites deliver far more results, often from obscure sources. While Technorati and BlogPulse focus exclusively on blogs, other sites -- Feedster and IceRocket included -- offer the option to bring in mainstream news sources.

Search results often vary widely between sites. A blog search yesterday afternoon for "William Rehnquist" and "John Roberts" returned more than 2,000 results on Feedster, with 85 posted that day. BlogPulse, meanwhile, offered 704 results, with just five from that day -- three from the same Web site. Technorati and IceRocket fell somewhere in between with 845 and 1,295 results, respectively, about 50 each posted that day. Of all the recently posted blog entries -- from sources ranging from confused college students to well-regarded political pundits -- few showed up on the first page of results for more than one search site.


The big general search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN do include blog pages in Web and news searches, but so far don't allow users to conduct blog-only searches. For news searches, the sites update their listings of articles several times an hour. But for Web searches, they build their indexes by sending automated Web crawlers scurrying through the Internet, taking snapshots of all the Web pages they visit. They then sort their results based heavily on relevance, using complex (and guarded) formulas that display results based, in part, on how popular a particular site is. The process means that the big sites don't always deliver the freshest Web search results. The day after MTV's annual Video Music Awards show, the first result in a Google search for "video music awards" was the official MTV Web site. The second result was a blog entry about gadgets toted by celebrities at last year's show. The third: A review of the awards show -- written three years ago. The blog search sites, meanwhile, offered links to chatty -- and timely -- gossip about stars' outfits and rambling acceptance speeches this year.

While Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search billions of Web pages, blog search sites typically focus on between 10 million and 20 million blogs. But, in many ways, the upstarts are as different from each other as they are from the giants. Technorati, for instance, relies mostly on a mechanism called "pinging" to monitor blogs. Most bloggers maintain their journals through blog publishing services like Blogger or LiveJournal, which have features that can automatically send out a "ping" to notify search services when a user's blog has been updated. David Sifry, chief executive of Technorati, says his company gets an edge from exclusive deals in which some blog-hosting companies ping Technorati before anyone else. After receiving a heads-up, Technorati visits the blog and updates its database.

Feedster monitors pings, too, but also sleuths for new entries on its own by automatically combing through news feeds, which are summaries of blog entries that can include just a few paragraphs. But the use of news feeds means that Feedster might miss a blog entry that mentions, say, Hurricane Katrina in the last paragraph. IceRocket relies a little less on pings, and more on automated Web crawlers, which surf from site to site looking for new entries. The crawlers can distinguish blogs from other Web pages because most blogs look the same, with chronologically arranged entries, separate headings for each one, and so on.

The new blog-search sites draw only a sliver of the visitors that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN do. Most of them didn't have enough traffic in July to register on the radar of Internet-tracking firm Nielsen/NetRatings. Technorati did, with 642,000 unique visitors. But its traffic still made up less than 1% of Google's visitors that month.

the first ever blogged syllabus?

This is an experiment. Obviously, the strengths of blogging a syllabus are that it can be easily changed and you can have quick reference without having to hunt through your desk to see what's coming next. I'm hoping that most if not all of the reading for this course will be online.
The subject matter for this seminar is so new and protean that I expect things to shift a bit as the semester progresses. Here, for now, is how I exect the term to go.
September 8. (Dis)orientation.
September 15. The blog universe. What's out there? How many things currently call themselves blogs? What are some of the obvious uses of blogs? Why is this happening?
Reading: All of the blog sites listed in my blog entries leading up to the first class. And click around avidly at all those sites. At Technorati, you should then visit the Top 10 sites. I will be posting a few other relevant items this week at this site.
September 22. First half of the class: The proto bloggers. Blogging was -- and perhaps still is -- a highly personal activity engaged in by rank amateurs. We'll read and discuss the blogs of five people doing it "the old way," plugged into no particular network of fellow ideologues. We'll discuss the curious human need for self expression and the transfer of what is private to what is public. Second half: Our first (but not last)look at the was the blogosphere shapes and sorts ideas. We'll try to figure out what the "meme of the week" was and how it rose to the top.
Sept. 29. Megablogs. Certain blogs are not the work of one person but of many. DailyKos, Huffington Post, Metafilter and Plastic are examples of community blogs. What sort of creatures are these? And do they represent the rise of some new kind of media?
Oct. 6. We'll continue the previous week's discussion with some reading and anaylsis of blogs by the pros. Some bloggers, such as as James Wolcott, were already famous. Others were at least drawing paychecks from the media entities that created their blogs. Still others have "turned pro" pretty fast -- think Wonkette. What does this do to the "profession of content-provider?" Is blogging evolving a class structure with elite, paid bloggers at the top? Or is the sheer profusion of amateurs willing to review a movie or break down a Senate race posing a threat to people who have traditionally made a living this way?
Oct. 13. The blogs where you live. How do blogs help people understand their communities? How is Connecticut enriched by its blogs?. (Local bloggers will visit this class.)
Oct. 20. The way we write. How is language used on blogs? Is it changing English usage and style? In what sense, if any, is a blog "literature?"
Oct. 27. No class. A good week for professor-student conferences.
Nov. 3. The public debate. This is certainly the most notorious role played by blogs: shaping public issues and shifting certain stories and ideas onto the mainstream radar screen. Are blogs actually transforming society by making it more "open source?"
Nov. 10. Specialties and special uses. Law. The arts. Medicine. Science. Yoga. Faith. How subcultures and interest groups find special uses for blogging.
Nov. 17. Audio, video, mobile. Blogs are moving beyond text. I'm not looking forward to this class, for some reason.
Nov. 24. No class.
Dec. 1. Reserved for something I haven't thought of so far. Otherwise, we'll use it for a really intense look at meme theory and how it works in the blogosphere.
Dec. 8. Glorious wrap-up.

REQUIREMENTS. It's pretty simple. Come to class. Participate in discussions. It's a big part of your grade. At seminars, we're all supposed to teach other. The other weekly duty is a blogging diary, a weekly journal of what you looked at and --briefly -- what you thought of it. At almost every class meeting, we will discuss the "meme of the week." I'll explain that as we go along. I'm going to push you to have your journal be an actual blog and ask if we can all link to each other. Although I'm getting a little dizzy thinking about that. I will also solicit a short paper, handed in at the end of the term, on some aspect of blogology. This is by far the least important of the three requirements.

just throwing a lot of stuff at you

Take a look
inside the mind of one blogger.
Also, please read the wikipedia entry for "blog." I'm thinking you all know how to get to wikipedia. As the syllabus will show, we'll have a conversation -- something wiki this way comes-- one night, especially wikipedia ...although wiki sites are not blogs...I think.

getting ahead of ourselves

We'll deal with vlogs or vogs, briefly, later in the term (and I'm kind of dreading it), but I snagged this vlogging site mainly because his manifesto or vogma or whatever he called it might contain a few ideas that would come up in our first class discussion. We have ask ourselves: "What is a blog"? Or maybe: "How many things are blogs?"

something to ponder

Does the newly edgy, chippy tone of journalists covering the huuricane reflect the influence of more impertinent bloggers?

blogology

Here is a blog by a blog expert who admits she's kind of burning out on blogging, but if you read around here, you'll find a few nuggets.

another site to check before first class

You need to hunt around this site. Click on the top 100 blogs and the site's own weblog and anything else you can find. If you're like me, you'll encounter some terms that baffle you.

visit this site before first class

This is not exactly a blog about blogs. It's a little more far-ranging than that,
but this guy Jay Rosen is one of the first people to look at blogs in a scholarly, analytical way, so you need to spend some time with him. Click around, before our first class.