ColinMcEnroe

Frankly

2008-09-28T13:54:00.001-07:00

Is Frank Rich making some good points or just framing the narrative in the most anti-McCain manner possible? Germane to this week: the idea that the HuffPo's Armies of the Night fact check claims about the campaign shutting down.

There was no suspension of his campaign. His surrogates
and ads
remained on television. Huffington Post bloggers, working the phones, couldn’t
find a
single McCain campaign office that had gone on hiatus. This “suspension”
ruse was an exact replay of McCain’s self-righteous “suspension” of the G.O.P.
convention as Hurricane Gustav arrived on Labor Day. “We will put aside our
political hats and put on our American hats,” he declared
then, solemnly pledging that conventioneers would help those in need. But as
anyone in the Twin Cities could see, the assembled put on their party hats
instead, piling into the lobbyists’ bacchanals earlier than scheduled, albeit on
the down-low.
Much of the press paid lip service to McCain’s new “suspension”
as it had to its prototype. In truth, the only campaign activity McCain did drop
was a Wednesday evening taping with David Letterman. Don’t mess with Dave.
Picking up where the “The View” left off in speaking truth to power, the
uncharacteristically furious host
hammered the absent McCain on and off for 40 minutes, repeatedly observing
that the cancellation “didn’t smell right.”
In a journalistic coup de grâce
worthy of “60 Minutes,” Letterman went on to unmask his no-show guest as a liar.
McCain had phoned himself that afternoon to say he was “getting on a plane
immediately” to deal with the grave situation in Washington, Letterman told the
audience. Then he
showed video of McCain being touched up by a makeup artist while awaiting an
interview by Couric that same evening at another CBS studio in New York.
It’s not hard to guess why McCain had blown off Letterman for Couric at the
last minute. The McCain campaign’s high anxiety about the disastrous
Couric-Palin sit-down was skyrocketing as advance excerpts flooded the Internet.
By offering his own interview to Couric for the same night, McCain hoped (in
vain) to dilute Palin’s primacy on the “CBS Evening News.”
Letterman’s most
mordant laughs on Wednesday came when he riffed about McCain’s campaign
“suspension”: “Do you suspend your campaign? No, because that makes me think
maybe there will be other things down the road, like if he’s in the White House,
he might just suspend being president. I mean, we’ve got a guy like that
now!”

Undernews?

2008-07-24T10:37:00.000-07:00

If you click on the Slate links in this post, you will see Mickey Kaus mention the "under-news." I think we know, in a general way, what he means, but exactly what is -- and isn't -- the under-news. On the day of this writing, the Google NEWS serach engine does not seem to pull up Politico-com articles. You have to get them, I think, from a general web search. But that, in a mechanistic way, is an interesting statement. And it may not matter, because Politico articles are headed into the MSM anyway. But then there will be another Politico, outside the campfire.

Do the Dems rule the 'net?

2008-07-24T10:31:00.000-07:00

This Politico article raises relevant questions about whether the GOP trails in new media. But how much of an impact do, for instance, TPM and HuffPo really make?

Wrong Blog, Probably

2006-03-26T14:15:00.000-08:00

THIS BLOG IS CURRENTLY INACTIVE

The blog you are looking for is here.

The truth...

2005-12-09T10:36:00.000-08:00

So yesterday, as I got ready for class, Alison sent me this email:
"Maybe Professor [Pet name redacted] can tell them how he feels about them. Not generalities and conclusions about the class, what they've accomplished, "go forth and conquer", etc etc.

How he feels. About them. Open."

She knows, of course, how I feel about this class. But I didn't tell you. Because that would be too weird.
Whatever this class was to you, any of you, it was even more to me. You were a gift, and each of you was so necessary to the others, which is really what a seminar should be. I'll never get a class this great again, ever. You changed the way I think (and feel!) about more subjects than just blogging. OK, that's as open as I can be. It should have come out last night, but I figure: I''m here to teach you, not gush all over you.
But thank you.

AND........

2005-12-08T10:38:00.000-08:00

with all of eric's johnny cash stuff, can we tie in, somehow, to the anniversary of the death of john lennon?

I'm warning you ...

2005-12-08T10:25:00.001-08:00

"There's no crying in blog class."
Tom Hanks

These are just some notes, some talking points for tonight's class.
I want to return to the ideas of Marshall McLuhan who figured a lot of this stuff out before he started rapping and changed his name to Eminem.
Note: Most of the stuff about him and PTC are pasted in from other sources.

McLuhan: One unforeseen consequence of print was the fragmentation of society. McLuhan argued that readers would now read in private, and so be alienated from others. "Printing, a ditto device, confirmed and extended the new visual stress. It created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and in isolation from others" (McLuhan, 1967, p. 50). Interestingly, McLuhan saw electronic media as a return to collective ways of perceiving the world. His "global village" theory posited the ability of electronic media to unify and retribalize the human race. What McLuhan did not live to see, but perhaps foresaw, was the merging of text and electronic mass media in this new media called the Internet.

McLuhan's philosophy "was influenced by the work of the Catholic philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who believed that the use of electricity extends the central nervous system" (Wolf, 1996, p. 125). According to Wolf, "McLuhan's mysticism sometimes led him to hope, as had Teilhard, that electronic civilization would prove a spiritual leap forward and put humankind in closer contact with God" (p. 125). Wolf went on to write that McLuhan later reversed himself, calling the electronic universe, "an unholy impostor,...'a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ'" (p. 125).
Chardin coined the term "noosphere" -- an evolving network of human culture, connection, knowledge and interdependence [16]. He saw the earth as a positively evolving organism

most of this is from a wired article:
Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived. He believed this vast thinking membrane would ultimately coalesce into "the living unity of a single tissue" containing our collective thoughts and experiences. In his magnum opus, The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard wrote, "Is this not like some great body which is being born - with its limbs, its nervous system, its perceptive organs, its memory - the body in fact of that great living Thing which had to come to fulfill the ambitions aroused in the reflective being by the newly acquired consciousness?"
"What Teilhard was saying here can easily be summed up in a few words," says John Perry Barlow. "The point of all evolution up to this stage is the creation of a collective organism of Mind." Marshall McLuhan was drawn to the concept of the noosphere. Teilhard's description of this electromagnetic phenomenon became a touchstone for McLuhan's theories of the global "electric culture." In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan quotes Teilhard: "What, in fact, do we see happening in the modern paroxysm? It has been stated over and over again. Through the discovery yesterday of the railway, the motor car and the aeroplane, the physical influence of each man, formerly restricted to a few miles, now extends to hundreds of leagues or more. Better still: thanks to the prodigious biological event represented by the discovery of electromagnetic waves, each individual finds himself henceforth (actively and passively) simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every corner of the earth." This simultaneous quality, McLuhan believed, "provides our lives again with a tribal base." But this time around, the tribe comes together on a global playing field. We stand today at the beginning of Teilhard's third phase of evolution, the moment at which the world is covered with the incandescent glow of consciousness. Teilhard characterized this as "evolution becoming conscious of itself." The Net, that great collectivizer of minds, is the primary tool for our emergence into the third phase. "With cyberspace, we are, in effect, hard-wiring the collective consciousness," says Barlow. In introducing the idea of tangential energy - the energy of consciousness - as a primary factor in evolution, Teilhard opened the door for a new level of meaning. The history of the world, he wrote, "would thus appear no longer as an interlocking succession of structural types replacing one another, but as an ascension of inner sap spreading out in a forest of consolidated instincts." This could very well be what the Net is doing - consolidating our instincts - so that consciousness can continue to develop.
these mcluhan headings were selected by a cat named Larry Press

The medium is the message. (7)
we're all over that shit. but MM said media are pretty neutral.
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us
yo holly, whassup?
As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. (5)
In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. (47)
dude, this is truer than he and pierre even KNEW
Each new impact (technology) shifts the ratios among all the senses. (64)
this is interesting -- i mean, what shift is going on here?
A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state of being well filled with data. (22)
Departmental sovereignties (in universities) have melted away as rapidly as national sovereignties under conditions of electric speed. (36)
Because: electricity decentralizes: rhetoric isn't something you do in one place, for example?
Instead of saving work, (electrical "labor-saving") devices permit everybody to do his own work. What the nineteenth century had delegated to servants and housemaids we now do for ourselves (footnote 7). (36)
i wasn't that interested in this one. maybe you are
And a technological extension of our bodies designed to alleviate physical stress can bring on psychic stress that may be much worse. (67)
no duh!!!!! and he had never MET Brett
An Indian is the servomechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of his clock. (46)
I don't know. this one just makes me think of the robot on Mystery Science theater
""It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV."
The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs. (65)
i think we saw this
Radio changed the form of the news story as much as it altered the film image in talkies. (53)
The crossings or hybridizations of the media release great new force and energy as by fission or fusion. (48)
The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. ... The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses. (55)
thus endeth stuff from the book of marshall

HAH!!!!!!!

i told you this was performance
http://beigerecords.com/cory/Performance/ps1_2005.html

i think i can explain why this, via kottke, is relevant:

Great profile by Michael Lewis of Mike Leach, Texas Tech's football coach. Leach "believes that both failure and success slow players down, unless they will themselves not to slow down." 'When they fail, they become frustrated. When they have success, they want to become the thinking-man's football team.'" Must-read article if you're even a casual football fan. Here's another article on Leach from the SJ Merc.Update: Steven Levitt and the Freakonomist commenters weigh in on Lewis' article. (thx, michael) #

Pangiuseppe said...
I'm with you. I'd go a little further into the positive, though, and applaud what a great, populist open marketplace of thoughts and opinions and art expressions and lonely-heart connections the blogospher can be, and is. Requires a good bit of patient sifting, but there is almost always something worth discovering every time I sit down and get sucked into a couple hours of this! - Joe

rashmi sinha
Since I cannot remember what other blogs I saw, let me just talk about Metafilter. It was fascinating that so many people with different voices, and opinions could be in the same space and loosely coordinate to find "the best of the Web". I think it was through Metafilter that I came across many of the early individual blogs.
The more I read blogs, the more fascinated I was by the writing style — the informal, honest writing in the first person voice. In academia, you get used to reading and writing a certain way. Its more formal, jargony, mostly not in the first person voice. I had never really got the hang of academic writing. In fact, that was one of things I did not like about academia. The personal voice on blogs appealed to me so much more. It allowed the story to come through.
DOC SEARLS
It's not mainstream, and most people aren't reading blogs yet. But race car driving, farming and espressos aren't mainstream either, and all matter to our culture.
I don't see blogging as a medium. In fact, I don't see the Net or the Web as media, either. Rather they are places, or spaces, where people gather to do business, to talk, and to make culture. Just like we do in real-world markets.
There are serious metaphorical reasons for this description. The fact that we understand everything metaphorically is what makes the matter serious.
Folks in Hollywood, broadcasting and publishing conceive their goods as "content" that moves through pipes that run from producers to consumers. It's a top-down few-to-many conceptualization, which, if applied to the Net, allow it to be regulated severely by the big media's lobbyists and puppet legislators.
By conceiving the Net as a place, a commons, something you go "on" rather than "through," we can save it from draconian regulation and preserve it as an environment where speech and markets are equally free.
So if blogging isn't a medium, what is it?
A practice. Specifically, a personal practice of journalism in the literal sense of that word. Every blog is a journal. The number of blogs, which keeps going up (now in the millions), is redefining journalism rapidly, and unavoidably.
Blogs are real voices of real people. Applied by business, they leave the marketers of the world out of a job. You can't job out your own voice. You can't leave it up to some department.

AMY GAHRAN
First of all, I don't think weblogs are a transitory media phase. I think they're here to stay, because the Internet is here to stay. I think blogs are an inevitable outgrowth of the Internet. They've become a valuable way for people to connect with each other, and to hear what individuals have to say. We might not always call them blogs, and their format and the tools used to create them will undoubtedly evolve.
Looking back to the past, blogs have a lot in common with the political pamphleteering of the American Revolutionary War era. Back then, people who owned the presses (or who were good buddies with printers) were the ones who got their opinions published. People would echo and debate each other via pamphlets. It was expensive and relatively inefficient compare to blogs, but the idea was the same. Dan Bricklin said it all best in 2001: http://www.bricklin.com/pamphleteers.htm -- there, he was talking about "personal Web sites," but everything he said rings even more true for blogs.
Here's the thing -- despite the way most traditional mass media downplay the concept and importance of opinionated, self-published, amateur blogs, people do want to know what other people think. We've all been punditized and marketed within an inch of our intellectual lives via mass media. We've all been controlled by information gatekeepers more than we probably care to admit.

2005-12-07T07:19:00.001-08:00

Sir Eric on Johnny Cash and blogging:
(You might not agree about some of his final points but they would make for one hell of a discussion. Frankly, I see Brett as kind of the Roy Orbison of blogging.)

So what about the other two and half hours that I threw away this weekend? Maybe more applicable to last week's discussion than this, early on in that Johnny Cash biopic, Cash's older brother Jack (looking forward to a future in the pulpit) says: "how can you help people if you can't tell them the right story?". Woohoo! That was about as much as my geeky little heart could take (keep in mind that this book about rabbits is one of my favorites), and so I hunkered down for a welcome lesson in the power of "myth".To what avail? Other than trotting out that old indominatible-human-spirit trope, Walk the Line made me feel like being part of the human race isn't such a bad thing sometimes, but more because of everyone in the movie who wasn't Johnny Cash. At any rate, the film was beautiful to look at, it sounded great, Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon were phenomenal... time and money well spent (all neglected-responsibilities considered). If blogs are art, I want to start seeing stuff with this impact in the blogosphere. But Cash is the anti-blogger in a lot of ways (most of which I don't think I quite understand). It has to do with subtlety on the one hand, and sincerity on the other. These things just don't translate so well into the blogosphere. Welcome to our whiz-bang post-ironic times.

Wow

2005-12-07T07:08:00.000-08:00

Last class blues, part 3

2005-12-04T11:22:00.000-08:00

One thing I will ask you to do is to read some of Rebecca Blood's interviews with bloggers. Long ago, we read the Heather Armstrong interview. At the end of each one, you can skip back, back, back.

Last class blues, part 2

2005-12-04T11:07:00.000-08:00

This is way too down-to-earth to constitute anything more than a small part of our final discussion. Nonetheless, you probably saw this wikipedia freak-out. And that makes me think we could talk again about the rules (should there be any in a frontierland?) and the status of information in the blogosphere, a subject dear to the heart of John.

But this class likes to think deep, outside-the-lines thoughts. So play a little of His Royal Badness and think about crazy stuff we could talk about.

Last class blues, part 1

2005-12-04T10:31:00.000-08:00

I have a long-standing fascination with Myers Briggs personality types as a means of explaining human behavior, and lately I've been dwelling a lot on the distinction between those governed by the thinking side of the axis and those ruled more by feeling.

This brings me to the interesting moment in our penultimate class, when things got a little het up over the subject of the intrinsic merit of blogs and blogging. And, implicitly, the future of blogging.
Not surprisingly, the person who has access to a more vivid palette of feelings thought there had been quite a contretemps, whereas the guy with a high T factor was blissfully unaware that anything had happened. I find that intriguing because they sort of represent two faces of blogging. Brett is sort of the new generation of emo bloggers, and Marc is such close kin to the early, thought-oriented tech bloggers that he unconsciously picked a template closely resembling that of Jason Kottke, one of the guys who tried to cross the bridge from T to F, from early- to middle-periond blogging.

I mention this because, obviously, one topic we should discuss this week is indeed the future of blogging, and I wonder if this dichotomy is in fact part of it.

Thoughts? Feelings?

(I'm going to assign some more reading, but not much, because I assume you're all working on papers, except Marc, who turned his in about three weeks ago. Hah!)

Vernon Street Swarm

2005-12-01T10:07:00.000-08:00

While driving back from the tire store (sigh) I caught myself thinking about the class and what it would be like as an extended family and then I caught myself thinking about thinking about that, which I think is what Metacognition means. It's a word people keep using in their blogs. The guys at the tire store were unfamiliar with it. I think it might be a "rhetoric thing."

I decided Elin had to be the hub, one of (Dave, Jeff, Holly, Brett, the baby brother, spoiled rotten!) five siblings. Thanksgiving is always at Elin's house. Anyway, I developed a whole model of the class as kind of an Elin-centric family, and I figured out what everyone's role was, although some were difficult. And the ages might not add up right. Could Eric possibly be Elin's oldest (somewhat rejecting-of-her-values) child, from her disastrous youthful first marriage to Joe, although she and Joe are now good friends, time having passed? (Their other kid, JP, worked very hard at getting them to reconcile, while internalizing her own suffering.) It was loads of fun. Picture Dave as Elin's fun-loving but in-and-out-of-scrapes brother, periodically running through the front door, jamming a wad of cash into Elin's hands, barking "Hide this!" and then running out the back door.

The whole exercise struck me as ridiculous until I realized, it's sort of one of the points of tonight's discussion.

I think...

2005-12-01T06:58:00.000-08:00

I might have nailed down "the personal thing."

ITA?????

2005-11-30T07:15:00.000-08:00

I think the meta-uber-echt-ur theme really is "Is This (blogging, the class, your blogs) Anything?"

Keep reading each other.

Marc and Chris have some interesting stuff. Follow their links.

Wow

2005-11-30T06:23:00.000-08:00

It looks like we'll have an amazing class if we can just recreate and get out into the middle of the room some of the material on your blogs, particularly the way you comment to one another. There seem to be a lot of amazing comments cycling among Brett, Elin, Joe, John, Holly, Bill (whom am I missing?). To say nothing of some of the people visiting you.

Eric the Fearless, as is his custom, has leapt into the crevasse to battle the Balrogs of mind and soul.

our blogs, ourselves

2005-11-30T06:02:00.000-08:00

Even though she STILL hasn't learned to make her links work, Patti has nailed down a couple of this week's themes for class.
They have to do with our own experiences writing (and engineering!) blogs -- how did being a writer change being a student? -- and with our experiences interacting with other bloggers.

Here's Patti:

I took David Smith's comment to Colin to heart, "Personalized blogs are like lazy children... they may not be accomplishing much in the real world, but you hope they are osmotically gathering (emitting) some world-wisdom that will pay off some day, and at least today they aren't hating you." I have worked my blog around and around --trying to please an audience, my class and my professor. I decided with two more classes left that I would please myself and if I decide to retain and continue the blog it will be mine and mine alone. I may not have accomplished much through the blog but through others blogs I have learned so much.Here's a link to something that has crossed my mind, puzzling me these past few months--
I fixed the goddamned link for "swarm logic". Has this theory come true through "Blogging On"? Have 15 or so naive students become more tuned in to the blogosphere through our interaction within it rather than through watching it from afar? Some have willingly become a part of this ant hill, some of us have moved forward to our own ant hill while yet others have settled comfortably within a predisposed "frontier" place. I am still uncertain of where my particular place is--but I know one thing for certain--I will never be alone there--and neither will you!

Papoulis on "the personal"

2005-11-28T05:21:00.000-08:00

My generous and talented colleague Prof. Irene Papoulis offers these observations on the personal nature of blog-writing. (I think they're very apt, especially as we consider, again, that blog-writing seems to involve a sensation of "performance" not present in other kinds of writing.)

I suppose your post today is tongue in cheek. But it makes me think about what personal means. People sometimes think that the only way to be "personal" is to tell stories aboutwhat happened to them or what they're feeling. (Not that I have anything against that--I teach personal-essay writing classes all the time and have thought a lot about the nature of the personal, and about why people, especially academics, denigrate what they scornfully call "confessional," etc.) But one thing that's great about your public self is the apparent honesty and even brazenness you bring to whatever it is you're looking at, including so much that isn't personal in the conventional sense. (I guess some people need to be more like that, some less. You seem to know what it means not to be like that, which gives your brazenness a kind of personal awareness that makes it seem less brazen, and maybe that's part of why it works.) So I'm just writing to say you already are quite personal. Not that your being more autobiographical or confessional on your blog wouldn't be interesting. I'm sure it would.

More ... or less...on the assignment

2005-11-27T18:17:00.000-08:00

Who would have thought that Aldon would have limned the connection between blogging and
Beckett? Sorry. Wrong Beckett.

Here is what Aldon, mistaking me for an organized professor, has said: "Colin’s students have a great exercise for the coming week. Colin writes, “I don't know EXACTLY what the theme is, just what I want you to read and think about, until we DO know what the theme is”. Well, perhaps that gets to some of it. It is about Emergence. The human condition is to read and think until we do know what the theme is. It is what we do while waiting, and blogs are yet another place where we read, write and think, while waiting. "

Yes! That's exactly what I was thinking. Yeah, that's the ticket.

I would also like to revisit, this week, the whole question of "the personal" in blogs, to say nothing of impudent Brett's final grade.

I mean...

2005-11-26T10:08:00.000-08:00

Is it clear from the below that I don't know EXACTLY what the theme is, just what I want you to read and think about, until we DO know what the theme is?

An idea emerges

2005-11-26T09:13:00.000-08:00

OK. I think we're getting close to something.
(Didn't Letterman's writers used to do a feature called "Is This Anything?")
The trick is to make sure we don't wind up repeating stuff we've already done. But Aldon asks
an old question in a new way.

And I'll ask it in yet another way. Blogging is sort of the opposite of the proto-koan about the tree falling in the forest with nobody there to hear it. Blogging is an activity that appears isolative but is rather the opposite. It's shouting in a forest that has a thousand eyes and ears.

The artist's journey is meant to be lonely. Think of Sondheim's song Finishing the Hat, which by the way turns out to be the name of someone's blog. (Of course it does.)

But each blog artist meets his or her community while producing art, often of a deeply personal nature. (Please read this blog a bit.) So communities form. And the lonely job of the artist is somehow incorporated into the life of a tribe. Check this post from the same blog which echoes Elin's Thanksgiving blog-angst.

Aldon also cited this blogger whose raison détre seems to be the lighting of candles of community against the darkness of alone-ness. Look over her blog. The link I offered was just one example.

So what does all this hallooing in the canyons of cyberspace add up to? One answer can be had by reading all the class blogs, especially your comments to one another, especially about burning issues.

Is blogging changing the nature of communication? (and is it clear that when I embed a link, I really want you to read a lot of the site, especially, in this case, this, again?

LAST TWO CLASSES -- AN INVITATION

2005-11-25T05:56:00.000-08:00

Because of the remarkable nature of this course -- teaching about a literary, journalistic, anthropological, social form as it emerges -- I'm going to invite you to suggest ways in which we might spend our final two sessions. Dec. 1 is fast approaching, so if I don't hear anything cool in the next 24 hours -- or by 11 a.m. Saturday -- I'll post an assignment, a theme, etc.

But it might be interesting to be wiki, as opposed to hierarchical -- while still maintaining my power of life and death over you.

I do, however, wanna ride hard down the home stretch. You are blog warriors. Never forget that.

The NOTES

2005-11-17T09:55:00.000-08:00

these are just my handy reference notes for class
pay no atrtention to them
they're just i can walk in paperless.

From eric
It is an English-to-Hindi-to-English translation of the Hokey-Pokey.
"You place your entire being insideYou place your entire being outsideYou place your entire being inside and vibrate your entire being everywhereYou do the hokey pokey and revolve your being in a circleThat is the complete essense of everything."

So we’ll watch this, kind of to get us in the mood.

annie

a framework for discussing something: (the arrival of my cable guys)

constructive media

freshness
rocketboom

imitation
fake RB

I would give her a job.

nyc blogger

Holly :Is Writing a Curiosity of the Past?The written word has survived over thousands of years, having come about from the basic human needs for communication, creating order, and preserving knowledge. Writing is culture's shining achievment. From the actual beginnings of the written word somewhere around 3100 BCE with the Sumerians, the Canaanites, and the creation of the first alphabet; the need for law and order, the 'discovery' of a universal god; the advent of the Torah and other sacred texts; archeology and the Bible - all of these things constitute and include the major characteristics of civilization.But with the more modern advent of the phonograh, telephone, television, video, instant text messaging, etc., are language arts in writing only one stage of our evolution? Five thousand plus years of evidence would prove a formidable foe, without question, but that doesn't mean the visual arts are no less powerful.Vlogs, born out of the written blog, might be the next logical step in a sort of evolutionary process of methods of communicational technology. Video representation tends to appeal more to people's emotions than to logical reasoning, and therein lies its own inherent problem. A society that runs on sheer emotion is terribly easy to manipulate. Emotion can be a very good thing, but there must be a balance between emotion and logic.With vlogging, and video, viewers don't need to make an effort to pose critical questions while they watch. And later reflection might not be forthcoming because once something is out of sight, it is often also out of mind. Media moguls and big business take advantage of this by pounding out the same brief message repetitively - whatever it is that they want the viewer to believe is what is communicated and all the thinking has already been done for you. Studies show that video representation comes at a cost of less comprehension when they are not supplemented by written text. Understanding is diminished and decisions based on knowledge absorbed via video is often not good enough when it comes to making vital decisions. Children, however, embrace the video format culture. It is immediate, requires a short attention span, and allows for the open-and-shut comprehension and thought process that accompanies traditional learning, reading, and writing. Used together, though, both can do certain things very well and learning can advance with the help of each one as long as people create time to think. As adults we know this. As children, we do not. Children today don't have the advantage of experiencing both and learning critical thinking because it's all being done for them. We are creating an "arcade-experience society," and I'm not so sure that's a good thing. With all of that said and done, I think vlogging is something that requires little perfection and even less thinking. It seems to me that vlogging is spontaneous - perhaps even impulsive. Many of the vlogs I looked at for class were downright silly. As entertainment they're fine. As detailed sources of legitimate information they are sorely lacking.

Erin -- on authenticity
Like with television, there are some vloggers that are there for entertianment, some that aim to inform, and others that strive to do a little of both. I felt as though in a lot of the blogs we read, particularly in some of the political ones, the writing was not always top notch and the "facts" the bloggers were presenting were not always well researched. We all seem to have distrusted many of the bloggers we've read for this reason. We didn't want to trust important information on things like current events from uncredited, unknown, unpaid sources. Introducing video eliminates some this problem to a certain extent when it comes to sharing information. It's easier to believe what you see than it is to believe what you read. Of course you can't trust everything (even Amanda of Rocket Boom didn't trust the video of the Mini Cooper robot she posted earlier this week), but I generally don't feel as distrusstful when watching blogs. When your face is actually on the screen and people can hear your voice, it's harder to hide. You lose some of that annonymnity that regular blogging offers.

Vlogs (sounds dirty)
Vlogs are creepy! They run totally counter to everything we have learned about blogging. We aren't dealing with disembodied people anymore. We now get to see and hear the people behind the opinions who we so readily trash. Enter, the man. I feel like I know him now so I am less inclined to weild my opinion so freely and make blanketed generalizations. Furthermore, here I am sitting with my labtop on my lab, in my cozy pink laura ashley vomitted in room and this guy is looking me in the eye telling me his opinions on vlogs. Totally breaking down the 3rd wall here. They are also harder to keep track of. you can skim words and pretty much get the content within the first two keystrokes of blatant republican or liberalism but you need to actually listen here. Vlogs are certainly not for the boring day at the office types who want some quick news. They are also not for the i spend all my time in the library types, like this girl, right here, because when you do actually get the thing to play, they don't play with volume/fellow patrons of the libes get mad when they do. So instead, now i have these guys in my bedroom. Jerry is currently getting me intimately acquainted with the blisters on his hand. He seems to have all the same mindless comments to make that most of the other bloggers we have, ie, "i go into a bar and i meet a girl" but becuase he litters it with interesting visuals, his tale is a lot more interesting-although it certainly makes me feel more awkward. He's actually quite painful, but in that indy film sort of way that makes you uncomfortable to watch yet you can't end it. Is it funny? My fave comment on his vlog being, "you need a girlfriend and no, your mother won't do." What if comments could be vloged. Wouldn't it be neat if you could record your comments and post them on other people's vlogs and then you would essentially be having a disconnected conversation. Talk about tripy! Rocketboom chick, Amanda says (once again, right to my face) that "I get some pretty crappy comments and to have some fun, I like to visualize the commenters"-now, she wouldn't have to. Although I think this would change the face of what people were saying. It's harder assuming a fake identity or a character when you're totally putting yourself out there. Does that alter what people are willing to say? It hasn't yet, but it seems that the genre is so different that generally people aren't saying, "Hi. I'm Will and here's why I don't like Bush"I also look at vlogers a lot more than bloggers. It seems to take a lot more time and effort so what's the general motivation? If it's fame it's certainly a very specific, less anonomyous sort of fame. I mean, Amanda Rocketboom has costume changes and everything. Does she have a tonuge ring (totally irrelevant). She's like a diet tina fey. Her comment from the "angry republican character is" i watch your show every day and i can't stand it but i can't help but keep watching becuase i keep hoping you'll change." it seems that this attitude fuels a lot of people-but weren't we saying in class that most of the gents reading blogs are looking into like minded blogs? It's different here though with vlogs because things have so much more flava! You are so much less limited to format. This Minnesota chick is also creepy. Are there no normal people who vlog? I guess they'd be just as boring as normal bloggers. Or maybe I'm just hypersensitive becuase it's late at night. Are these people using vlogs to get their cinematic "talents" out there just the way that amateur writers use blogs? some of this stuff is quite good. Has anyone been discovered yet?

Marc: the capitalist I know a couple for kids who have set up a tent, downtown, and they sell first run movies for $7.00. The movies have been filmed, usually opening night, with hand held cameras. Sometimes they have movies that have yet to open in Hartford, I saw "Get Rich or Die Trying" two weeks before it was at the Crown. After the first 30 seconds I cannot tell the difference between the product from these entrepreneurs and what I get at Blockbuster. Their business is booming. After looking at vlogs I can see the Napster style business model emerging. The faster the Internet becomes, the more people that get connected, the more people will get into vlogging. The more people in vlogging means bigger and better vlogs; therefore more corporate involvement.Believe it or not, Apple is leading the way for vloggers to eventually proliferate. Fans of iTunes represent an unstoppable force. Who wants to keep all those CDs if you can carry around 1,000 songs on an iPod and easily expand that library through the Internet? Not many I suspect. Nor is this growing army of Internet-savvy users going to stop at music. Not too far in the future an iVideo and perhaps an iTome, for downloading literature and audiobooks, respectively, will be available.Already, I can hear the distant wail of writers and producers and directors. But they better get used to it. People now expect to pick and choose. They have been doing it close to a decade with online versions of newspapers and magazines. Resistance will only embolden more pirates in Napster-like attempts to outflank the news and entertainment Establishment. What evidence shows that all the lawsuits have slowed music pirating? Sales continue to plummet, about 25% this year alone and the music industry rightfully blames illegal downloading.Hollywood is already starting to delve into the vlogging world. Famous producers and directors are starting their own vlogs and what will follow, ala David Lynch, will be vlogs for a fee. If the rich charge a fee, the poor will circumvent that fee and try to deliver it for a smaller fee, or, for free to the masses. The law says we can cut and paste without fear or reprisal so copying video will be an industry in itself. I only wish I could figure out the angle so I could make the money.

what are the mefeedia people TRYING to advance? what do they love? what is the philosophy?
Sometimes, it’s just about the cats
josh

vogmaa manifesto [ in no particular order ]
a vog respects bandwidth
a vog is not streaming video (this is not the reinvention of television)
a vog uses performative video and/or audio
a vog is personal
a vog uses available technology
a vog experiments with writerly video and audio
a vog lies between writing and the televisual
a vog explores the proximate distance of words and moving media
a vog is dziga vertov with a mac and a modem
what the vogma guy thinks of the ipod
Video iPod
Filed under: Vogging Theory, Vogging Tools — @ 12:06 pm
Well, it happened. Lots of commentary, excitement in parts of the videoblogging community. Lets rake the coals, read the tea leaves, or whatever it is one says.
They will sell very well.
Eventually most people will realise that most of the time they just use their iPod for sound, and only very occassionally for video.
There will be a small group of videoblogging afficiandos who use it a lot for video, these will be a tiny minority.
This will happen because things like portable sound devices (we’ve had them ever since the transistor radio) work very well - we can easily do other things while listening to sound.
In the same period we have pretty much always had some form of portable TV - you often will see (hear) people at a picnic listening to a sporting broadcast, very very few are watching it on their portable TV (the attention economies are too different).In other words portable sound has always worked, portable televisual has not.
Podcasts (whether video or audio) are a step backwards because they break all the networked aspects that make the blog part of audio or videoblogging of interest and value:
You lose the context of the post, eg post title, date, time, and any accompanying text such as trackbacks, comments, links (are we inventing a new rich media language or are we just wannabe TV stars?)
You lose any possibility of connections between parts (the basic logic of blogs) since the iPod is network deaf and
The player supports zero interactivity (can you click on the link in the movie?)
It enforces the academy aspect ratio (4:3) for content
· So now we can all walk around with baby TV sets in our pockets to watch self contained episodic moments, bit like having a portable VCR that includes your library.
· A bit like a Walkman where the iPod represents a qualitative change because it now includes your archive
· The ability to carry your archive with you is the one innovation.
· Promotion of appropriate microcontent might be another, but it will all aspire to be a show reel and land you that job you always wanted making real movies.
Media that confuses portability with new forms misses the opportunity to invent something more than a genre.
Jerry – creating a “ pod” of appreciators

OK, so it was cooler than I might have guessed

2005-11-16T17:39:00.000-08:00

This, this is the man. Watch his amazing handling of light and focus and music on the most recent posting. And then watch his "hard day." This is an artist getting very real! In a way that would have been virtually impossible before this medium existed!!! (No, I am NOT drunk or high.) And he perfectly combines randomness (a trope) with many of the other blog tropes.

And after you watch a bit more of his art, try watching his blogito ergo sum. Although it's really sum, ergo blogito.

Also, this is a pretty funny and heartbreaking riff on quotidian alienation and estrangement. It's soooo wrong, but we've all been there. It's sort of de Chirico, married to Charlie Chaplin. Wait. You could say that about Beckett, too. Make sure you read some of the comments on this. They're crucial

This is not quite as essential.
OK, at 5 minutes it's LONG, but but I've paid $8.50 to see movies that did not blend humor, action and pedestrian safety so artfully.

MOST IMPORTANT VIDEO PLAYING TIP:
If it halts, press the pause button, then press play. (Thank you, Aldon.)

Emergency!!!

2005-11-16T16:23:00.000-08:00

Well, not really, but I urgently want you to browse
this amazing site which is considering many of the things we consider but is way ahead of us on a lot of stuff.
Especially look at this article which I think might open up our consideration of Vlogs, not just in terms of what they are but how they function "socially" and also whether they -- like other stuff we've considered -- represent a revolution in people freely sharing "ïnformation" (in the broadest sense of the word, in ways that used to be controlled by owners of media pipelines. Dig? I mean, is "Rocket Boom," just kind of SNL stripped from its corporate moorings? And didn't the MSM make that possible by letting SNL become such thin, puny gruel?

And this one just kind of asks that question in a different context.

Help Each Other

2005-11-16T03:53:00.000-08:00

Anyone have any tips on getting videos to play? Some of you are having problems.

More vlogs!!!!!!

2005-11-15T17:58:00.001-08:00

This looks pretty comprehensive. He contacted us on a comment thread.

also

2005-11-15T17:58:00.000-08:00

We gotta talk about moblogs.

More Vlogs

2005-11-13T19:49:00.000-08:00

I can see Bora is right. Rocket Boom is the Mercedes Benz of the genre. And here is a mainstream media report on RB.
Poke around on We Are The Media too.

Vlogs!

2005-11-12T09:39:00.000-08:00

What are they? A definition!

I know almost nothing about all this. But I can already tell it's a booming form with lots of sites that kind of organize things.
This is one..

Here are a few early samples, but some of you may have much better ideas than I. Please post. And explore!!!

Bath Tub Yoga

Carl Weaver

A New York City Vlogger

Keep on keeping on

2005-11-09T10:44:00.000-08:00

Reminder: we're at the Tap tomorrow night!!!!

So the asssignment keeps expanding. Check out each other's suggestions in the comments thread. You folks came up with some cool stuff.
for my part, I'm enchanted with this woman even though I don't understand half of what she talks about. (She watches her site meter, so if you read her, she'll know.)

And here's a local prayerful link.

ok so...

2005-11-07T16:28:00.000-08:00

Check out the comments on my previous post and go to those places too. Check out the Jewish blog Brett recommends. Let's let the blogoshpere teach us, as it apparently wants to.
If anybody esle has any specialty blogs worth noting, please post them as comments.

Brights Lights, Big City

2005-11-05T09:38:00.000-08:00

This week we move -- possibly ill-advisedly -- to the back room of the Wood'n Tap on Sisson Avenue in Hartford.
This is what the syllabus says we should be doing:
Nov. 10. Specialties and special uses. Law. The arts. Medicine. Science. Yoga. Faith. How subcultures and interest groups find special uses for blogging.
But I think that's almost too big a topic. I'd like us to start off, anyway, reading blogs about faith -- all kinds of religious pursuits (inluding semi-sprititual stuff like yoga). If you've seen anything interesting, post some recommendatios or email them to me.
First starters, dip your toe in the world of Christian blogs:
do this serious one

this not-so-serious one

this impish one

and a more serious one

Also, click around and use some of the blog-studying blogs. See if you can figure how big a movement, on the internet, this is.

WIKI YOU!

2005-11-03T09:14:00.000-08:00

these are just notes for tonight's class and wsill subsequently be taken down. pay no attention if you are not in the class or even if you are

i sort of tried to wiki you. that is take your stuff an arrange some of it together, as notes for class. we'll see.

THIS POST BY BRETT IS A TROPE OR IDIOM OF MODERN LIFE, DRIVEN MORE I THINK BY CELL PHONES...the constant revision of expectations of self in absentia
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15891208

AND HERE'S BILL TRYING TO REVISE ME
Another reason I'm glad to reach this week is that I think we're going to get a fully involved McE. It's clear that he's really involved in the so-called "Public Debate" so maybe we get some blood-and guts, a little fire in this weeks class.. Later

I'm mad as hell and i can't take it anymore THE END OF REPRESSED ANGER

standardization makes things easy -AND THAT INCLUDES NEWS

THIS IS FROM MARC. i have the same question. is it just my imagination or are the right blogs meaner?
The "blogging from the right" is exactly the reason I cannot read the majority of the conservative blogs. I cannot even read them. Moonbat Central is a perfect example. They think we are all idiots and need them to sort out the truth. Instead of just giving opinion they feel the need to have to translate what the other side is about. Moonbat Central is the group blog for David Horowitz's searchable, online database of the organized left. This is an actual page they use. It is just too "out there" for me. The Conservative Outpost is not even a post...it is like a threat of war.

IS JEFF RIGHT? IS THERE NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THIS AND PROPAGANDA?
I was reminded of a topic that I've recently covered with my Speech & Communication class that is incredibly appropos when viewing the Daou Report:
Propaganda.
I realize that most of the blogs I've read, and using the word 'most' is not hyperbole, are laden with some sort of propaganda. Not the kind of stuff that would make Hitler grin, much more innocuous than that, but present nonetheless. For those unaware with the true meaning of the word, propaganda is, by definition, "a method of persuasion that discourages people from thinking for themselves." How true, how true.

THIS IS JOAL AND IT MADE ME WONDER WHY BLOGDOM SEEMS SO MUCH A PARADISE FALLEN IN THIS CONTEXT: It's not debate. I'm not even sure it's argument. The vast majority of these blogs cater exclusively to either the left or the right. They make little effort to engage in discussion with their political opposites. They're idealogues. Their writing belies their perception of politics as a zero-sum game. All that matters is beating the other guy. This should not be new to anyone. It's cliche by now.
This liberal blogger, in criticizing the undue influence of the religious right over the current administration, refers to Bush's political "base" as Al Qaeda. Yes, I get the joke. Al Qaeda means "The Base" in Arabic. This does not mean you can carelessly make analogies between your political opponents and mass murderers.
In this post, H-Bomb, talks about what he percieves as the decision of the Democractic Party to "officially" become anti-war. He doesn't even seem to think it's a bad thing. For him it's only relevant in that he believes it will help Republicans get elected.
I don't know if these blogs shape the public debate so much as reflect it. Maybe the country is so sharply divided poltically and geographically that everyone is used to preaching to the gospel, which reflects in our blogs. This is, of course, a generalization, but I don't think it's an unfair one. Most prominent political blogs seem not so much focused on convincing someone that a particular position is right or wrong so much as riling up the emotions of those already committed to one side or the other.

BRETT ON ARGUMENTATION'
The truth about political debate on bloc is that there isn't any. People read blocs to reassure themselves that their point of view is correct and don't bother adding anything to the debate. If they are against something that a bloc has posted, they will only say nasty things and ignore other peoples comments An excellent example is a comment written by someone named Raven:"WHERE'S CINDY SHEEHAN? Go to this link and click "listen to broadcase" to hear her pathetic "speech" to an empty room filled with TWO foreign journalists. This is utterly pathetic. Now I know why you Democrats dumped this moron."This comment does not further any debate. It is a nasty, self righteous comment that is only meant to derail any serious debate. Blogs are filled with these kinds of nasty comments, it's the reason why many bloggers refuse comments.The truth is, when we feel as if we are anonymous, we get nasty and our base instincts come out in full force. We say all those nasty and stupid things that we normally filter out of conversation. The bloc world is an anonymous entity filled with comments by people who are writing out of furious anger and emotion, rather than logic.In an essay I wrote last year for rhetoric class, I argued that logic has no argument without emotion. Blogging has now convinced me that they rely on each other, and without a logical component, an emotional argument will fall flat. Most comments on blogs are emotional and lack any logical component.However, given that point, I will concede that certain blogs rearrange information to seem fresh. Firedoglake does an excellent job of taking news stories and adding their own commentary. But there is nothing added and nothing new to what they are saying. They are merely commenting on the comments. And now, I am commenting on the comments of the comments. How pathetic is that?

eric on innovation:Here's one thing blogs can do that MSM never could.

Chris : I thought the Daou Report has good intentions with the way it's structured by offering blogs from the "right" and "left". However, is it just me or does it seem as though neither side fosters an actual debate? Then again, how could they when each blog aims to propel the reader to one side of an argument or the other; all while using information provided by other sources (some of which you've probably already read!)? The apparent goal of all this: "I'm right, they're wrong". I keep thinking to myself: Where's the in-between though? Should it really be this "black" and "white" in the blogsophere?
It has gotten to the point where some bloggers are immediately gorging on what's directly in front of them, intending to be the first to throw it up on the web. Yeah, to them it may look like something new when they do this; to the viewers, a bit different than what they have seen in the past. Regardless, it's still all the same "food". Ultimately, some of these viewers feed on this information and spit it out again. Thus, the cycle is perpetuated.

BRETT The Daou Report has that effect on me. I wonder how I ever considered a blog without considering this blog. It is a fantastic read.In Socrates' well known dialogue Phaedrus, Plato discusses the necessity to have a dialogue rather than a lecture. In Socrates' time, famous lecturers would walk between towns delivering rousing speeches on issues. Socrates says "the only way to know truth is to not know truth, and therein find truth embedded in conversings with others." Most bloggers believe they know the truth already, and spout it constantly from their overly fattened, drunk on fame, heads. They are the idiotic lecturers Socrates discusses. They do not further any truth.However, The Daou Report is more of a conversation. For it is not one lucid opinion on a matter, but a hundred different lucid opinions. It is a marketplace of ideas, and not some trolls agreeing with each other and swearing if they don't. The Daou Report is quick, easy to read and insightful. It offers an amazing array of opinions that a reader can easily peruse through and make up their own mind. Propaganda does not live at The Daou Report; ideas do.Take for example, the current scooter craze out of Washington (personally I use a scooter to glide through the halls of work, but that's a different matter). The Daou Report has some insightful opinions for both sides regarding this matter. The double column effect creates a virtual debate feeling, as if the two sides were conversing at this point. Some excellent back and forth dialogue is happening on this page:"And they’re supposed to be the national security party. If you want ethics in government, don’t vote Republican. If you want to trust your government not to leak classified information to journalists for political gain, certainly don’t vote for Republicans.... " (Oliver Willis, left)"Scooter Libby has been indicted on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice. That sounds bad, but compared to what White House insiders had feared, it’s really no big deal. Libby has resigned. The indictments do not play into Joe Wilson’s outsized ego as the “leaking the name of an undercover agent” isn’t covered under the indictment. Simply put, there was no crime there." (Ankle Biting Pundits, right)I'm excited by The Daou Report because it argues in a fantastic manner. It is not some journalistic hack who needs to yell and scream about stuff, it's a well composed and thought out process, which gives equal measure to any opinions. If only more blogs followed this model

MATT ON DAOU:First, he posts the US Constitution on his site with no explanation as to why it’s there. Reference material? It’s posting comes across as a bit self-rightous to me considering the lack of explanation or clear meaning. Sort of a “you should read this, moron” statement, at least to me. He also posts his site code. Also odd to me. In fact, on his menu bar, Daou has chosen to list the home page, the About page, the US Constiution, a Contact page, and tow pages of code. An odd assortment in my mind, with some clearly more important than others.I’m also interested in why he calls his postings (Triangle Parts 1 and 2 and The Ethics of Iraq) essays. Aren’t they really just long, well written blog posts? He invites comments on them after all.

BILL ON THE NATURE OF FREEDOM -- I THINK THIS IS A BIG TOPIC
Forbes Magazine has as it's cover article on the Nov. 14 issue "The Attack of the Blogs". To make sure you don't miss the bias of this "balanced" view, the introductory sub-headline reads "Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies , libel, and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo."The poster child that Daniel Lyons uses for "victim" in his article is Gregory Halpern, whose company, Circle Group Holdings, was hyped from $2 to $8.50 per share.Halpern did this by posting pictures of himself online with famous people , including Steve Forbes. He was then "victimized" by a blogger who, with some allies, attacked Circle Group with a mixture of accurate and inaccurate "information" , resulting in the stock dropping below $1 per share and wiping out Halpern's instant $90 million dollar fortune. I could sympathize with his plight, except that (1) it seems unlikely that if the company had any real, measurable value sophisticated investors would not recognize it and run the stock back up after the false blogs were exposed and (2)Halpern's response to the attack was to hire "Financial Wire"(Gayle Essary) to blog back, not on facts but on a very personal level. So much for the high road.The article contained several interesting tidbits, however. Steven Downs, an executive at Ingersoll-Rand, complained,"A blogger can make any statement, about anybody, and you can't control it". Downs found this to be a "difficult thing". I think it's the whole point of a democratic system. You're living in America, Downs.Lyons, the article's writer, has a slew of suggestions for fighting back against bloggers. These iclude "build a blog swarm", "bash back", "attack the host (service provider)", and "sue the blogger". Don't you just love it when a idealist takes the high road?

pack journalism: eric
Here's one bit I found particularly interesting:
Note that this model is absolutely mute as to why one blog might be preferred over another. Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference for quality), perhaps people want the recommendations of others (a preference for marketing), perhaps there is value in reading the same blogs as your friends (a preference for "solidarity goods", things best enjoyed by a group).
It could be all three, or some other effect entirely, and it could be different for different readers and different writers. What matters is that any tendency towards agreement in diverse and free systems, however small and for whatever reason, can create power law distributions.It seems to wish away the real substance of the problem. That is to say, power law describes that preferences in the blogosphere exist in a way that is socially ubiquitous, but what I really want to know is why things turn out this way (exactly what __ is saying this model can't/won't tell us). In other words: people are sheep. Why are people sheep? Beats me.

JOHN ON, KIND OF, EVERYTHING:While impressed with many aspects of Daou Report yesterday, I wanted to explore more of Salon to help gain insight into the role such sites are playing in the shaping of public debate. What I observed in other site features, especially the blog box, leads me to more firmly believe that this type of blogging is having a profound impact on public debate by allowing many of the previously voiceless to exert significant pressure on the agenda-setting process and bring immediacy to the vetting of information. But to anyone who thinks that by "open sourcing" blogging is bringing greater transparency to the process, I would suggest that transparency can be an illusion and critical thinking is as necessary as ever.Even Daou, who invites submissions, warns he cannot use everything. So, what criteria is applied -- besides the 12-hour rule? Could he choose the more ludicrous right-wing posts for the purpose of favorable comparisons? I don't really see evidence of that, but I certainly like to proceed with caution. Even most blogs with their frequent and undisguised links to other sources appear to be completely above board in making their points, but often there is little attempt to track a meme to its original source -- if known. So, I see transparency to a point but we all still need to focus to see to the core.So, by helping to drive the political agenda and by driving immediacy like it's never been driven before, blogs have changed the process for good. But I don't think blogs will become as dominant a source of information as many postulate. Right now, many political/public policy blogs are really singing to their own choirs. Yes, the mainstream media is just outside listening closely, but I doubt the congregation is going to draw from any other sects. To a certain extent, this type of blogging is a direct outgrowth of the political extremism that has grown so dramatically in the last 15 years, as a result of gerrymandering, etc. To these constituents, a medium that wholeheartedly supports their agendas is, oh, so gratifying. Those blogs that appear to evenly offer up a real conversation and debate of the issues are, in my view, either veiling their true agendas or never going to be as popular as the more openly partisan.

Elin (this is more a comment on speed of blogs, i think): When the Today Show broke the story about Harriet Miers withdrawing her nomination this morning, they of course pulled in a resident "expert" news wonk, Howard Fineman of Newsweek. To be honest, I'm not familiar with Mr. Fineman or his work, and I'm sure he is a fine man. What caught my ear was that as he was discussing the withdrawal, he said, "As I said online yesterday, we strongly suspected this was coming...."

MARC ON SPEED
"There are two ways that blogs could enhance public debate:-- they could broaden it to include other subjects not on the mainstream radar screen." If blogs enhanced...then they would then become the Internet! Blogs are not to broaden. Blogs are the ultimate in Guerilla Political Science/Guerilla Marketing. Plot, hit, and get out. There is no time for thinking about the mainstream...the key is to think about the minute...you want to "matter" for just a moment. In relation to the blogosphere, Harriet Miers is not just in the rear view mirror, she is in the rear view mirror of the F-16 that flew by yesterday. Blogs do not give one "15 minutes" of fame they work in "15 nanosecond" blocks. The World Wide Web is for deepening the existing debate.

bora sent this to holly but the thing about the link would interest eric:
http://ambivablog.typepad.com/ambivablog/2005/02/an_anthropologi.html

WIKI:

BRETT:In his article "Galaxy Quest: Wikipedia is a real-life Hitchhiker's Guide: huge, nerdy, and imprecise," Paul Boutin attacks this problem with Wikipedia head on, comparing it to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:"Like the Guide's lengthy entries on drinking, Wikipedia mirrors the interests of its writers rather than its readers. You'll find more on Slashdot than The New Yorker. The entry for Cory Doctorow is three times as long as the one for E.L. Doctorow. Film buffs have yet to post a page on Through a Glass Darkly; they're too busy tweaking the seven-part entry on Tron."So it goes. While the initial nerdiness of blogging is being supplanted by common folks just wanting to write, Wikipedia is not changing. Those of us who are writing in the blog world because we want to write will not catch the encyclopedic editing fever. Wikipedia will remain the sole outpost of the original inhabitors of the internet, and while that may not be a bad thing, it certainly means Wikipedia will not continue to grow and be innovative. Rather than being Douglas Adams' glorious Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, it will be more an Encyclopedia Galactica. And if you got that reference, you're probably off to revise an article on the mating habits of cockateels.

Elin I just spent some time cruising around Wikipedia and Flu Wiki. While I tend to get very cynical when I read the political stuff, I'm feeling a little verklempt about the wiki stuff. It's seems like a world motivated by mostly "pure" intentions. When I consider the time and energy it takes to maintain a site like that, and to think that people do it for no other reason than a desire to pass along info...well, I am moved.Look at Flu Wiki. From what I can see, its purpose is to inform and motivate. While motivating is "political" in some sense, the whole import of the wiki sites is different than other sites (are these blogs??), especially when they are contrasted with the Salon-type stuff.

holly's brain on wiki
The Wisdom of CrowdsIn what has been called "a radical experiment in trust," Wikipedia, Flickr, and sites like these apply the notion that entries can be added by any web user, edited by any other, and so collectively produce a most efficient method of checks and balances. This represents a profound change in content creation. It has been termed folksonomy and is described as "a style of collaborative categorization of sites using freely chosen associations that the brain itself uses." By relying on code as defined by Clotaire Rapaille, if we allow for retrieval along natural axes, we overlap associations. On the web, this initiates a sort of "viral marketing," or recommendations proliferated directly from one user to another. And according to Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, Inc., network effects from user contributions are the key to market domination.A blog is a live web page and its dynamic is driven by its links. These links become the architecture of participation - an open source community - whereby the users add immeasurable value to the delivery of information.The blogosphere is equivalent to a global brain. So the question becomes "What makes some ideas and thoughts proliferate, and not others?" Well, to answer at least part of that question, we can again refer to Rapaille's 'Cultural Code.' Every culture has a set of beliefs - a mental category - which is basically the first set of mental connections we make. They are the first imprints we gain into our social worlds. Eventually, this system becomes unconscious, and is employed throughout our lives. So the information that spreads - that we spread - has gravitational cores of set principles and practices that, tied together, form a sort of solar system that represents in some way some or all of those principles at varying degrees from that core system.Are blogs transforming society by making it more 'open source?' I would surmise that yes, bloggers now constitute a world in which those who were once only part of the audience have now become part of the people who decide what's important. The interactivity of the blogosphere has its own filtering system, too, and this now becomes a two-fold problem for the mainstream media. There now exists more competition for immediate information, editing it, and reporting it. It's almost as if no hard boundaries exist - and that opens up a whole lot of 'source' and a whole lot of 'freedom'... definately a potentially frightening proposition.

what makes Chris verklempt:

While perusing through Salon.com I was drawn to the "Coummunity" section so I decided to investigate before jumping right into Daou. I immediately received information pertaining to The Well and Table Talk -- both are very cool.
My first thought as I read through them: I feel as though I'm a part of a holistic community rather than trying to be accepted into "one or the other". More importantly, the comments are what prompted the debate, rather than just the blog itself...what a concept!

brett to holly:
Is the blogosphere then forcing news stories to emerge and disappear quickly. I seem to remember a time when news stories and scandals would linger for weeks and months. Now they disappear in days. When was the last time we heard of the disappearance of that poor girl in Aruba (Natalee)? The residue of the internet is forcing news programs to move quickly between stories to find the next big scandal/murder/kidnapping, etc.

JP on WIKIIn theory, I think this is an amazing site. I love the idea of a community of thinkers all working together, challenging one another, working towards a common goal. The site and process of Wikis are built upon the idea that two heads are better than one, and so on, which often proves to be highly effective. I am curious and intrigued to see how this concept plays out when attempting to proactively solve the problem of a wide spread public health epidemic. On one hand, this may be the most efficient way to work out a very sensitive and difficult problem, on the other, when do too many cooks spoil the broth? This concept of community has definitely been successful in other areas, such as the Wikipedia, which has resulted in an extremely interesting and well rounded resource. FluWiki has definitely been successful in the information gathering and sharing portion of their goal. I learned more about influenza in the twenty or so minutes I spent reading their site than I have in 23 years of getting the flu. The site is definitely easy to navigate as well, which is a huge plus for some one like myself who comes to the table with virtually no information. What remains to be seen is how successful they will be at developing a potentially successful strategy to 1) prevent and 2) handle a nation health epidemic, and unfortunately we have no way of knowing that at this point. That said, their intentions certainly are noble and for everyone's sake, it would be pretty amazing if a community of strangers was/is able to come together to share information, ideas and strategies and solve a major issue of our times. If they could be successful with on FluWiki, what else could they solve? It is a pretty exciting possibility.

JOHN :the Flu Wiki, which may seem at a glance like a jumble of information but which really shows a cyber-community coming together to truly broaden a discussion. There is no need to do focus groups or surveys to determine what content is most meaningful to users because the users are in the driver's seat. The content here is so rich and multi-dimensional, from discussion forums and brainstorming hubs to expert predictions and factual charts.What's going on, it seems to me, is an attempt to exert influence, if not control, over the flow of information and on a potential crisis itself. Ever distrustful of official sources, certainly since the armed feds tried to hunt down ET, we can share information and resources as a community of similarly focused verminophobes. The need to share and tap into conventional wisdom is as old as folk or home remedies themselves. Here it satisfies the yearnings of vast communities more connected by Internet networks than by shared property lines. The experts are here, too, but this collaborative project has produced an amazingly diverse resource.

brie: on a different kind of shareable information:
One of the postings said, "In the cover article of this month's Forbes, the mag exposes blogs as "the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective." This helps to get to the heart of some of this weeks issues. While I don't agree with this statement necessarily, blogs do have a tendency to perpetuate rumors that are taken as truth which explains their bad rap in shaping identities of people. It's a lot easier for someone like me, who isn't very informed, to read a bloggers opinion of a political figure and to take that as truth and make that my own opinion. Yes, it's ignorant, but if you're looking for quick cocktail party banter on why Bush is a screw up, it's a lot quicker to quote a blog than it is to read a newspaper that claims (claim being the operative) to be neautral.

BACKGROUND: A report last week by Advertising Age Editor at LargeBradley Johnson noted that about 35 million workers -- or one in fourpeople in the U.S. labor force -- spend an average of 3.5 hours, or 9%,of each work day reading blogs. This blogification of workplace time isno minor concern -- the total losses across the national work force areestimated to be the equivalent of 551,000 years of paid time that isbeing spent on blogs via the employer's own computer systems. Anotherimportant point was that the time spent reading blogs on the job was inaddition to the time already spent surfing the Web in personal pursuits.The debate appears to be one of reasonable limits. At what point, or atwhat length of time, does the use of company assets for personalactivities become unreasonable? And is the problem likely to become aneven greater one as more and more TV content goes online, becomingeasily accessible from one's office computer? Do employers need to findne!w ways to police their computer systems?> THIS WEEK'S QUESTION: Should employers allow their staff to read blogsin the workplace?> VOTE & COMMENT for possible publication in next week's print editionof Advertising Age at http://www.adage.com/poll.cms

JOAL ON OBAMA ON DIVISIVENESS
was going to post this a long time ago, but I never got around to it. It seem appropriate now. The following is something Barack Obama posted on Daily Kos a while back.
There is one way, over the long haul, to guarantee the appointment of judges that are sensitive to issues of social justice, and that is to win the right to appoint them by recapturing the presidency and the Senate. And I don't believe we get there by vilifying good allies, with a lifetime record of battling for progressive causes, over one vote or position. I am convinced that, our mutual frustrations and strongly-held beliefs notwithstanding, the strategy driving much of Democratic advocacy, and the tone of much of our rhetoric, is an impediment to creating a workable progressive majority in this country.
According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists - a storyline often reflected in comments on this blog - we are up against a sharply partisan, radically conservative, take-no-prisoners Republican party. They have beaten us twice by energizing their base with red meat rhetoric and single-minded devotion and discipline to their agenda. In order to beat them, it is necessary for Democrats to get some backbone, give as good as they get, brook no compromise, drive out Democrats who are interested in "appeasing" the right wing, and enforce a more clearly progressive agenda. The country, finally knowing what we stand for and seeing a sharp contrast, will rally to our side and thereby usher in a new progressive era.

Is blogdom getting stodgy?

2005-11-03T09:10:00.000-08:00

In the paper about blog diversity and "power laws,"there was rfeverence to a blog called "diveintomark" which the blogger turns out to have shut down because he decided blogging was no longer anything special.

And this:

Addendum: #David Sifry, creator of the Technorati.com, has created the Technorati Interesting Newcomers List, in part spurred by this article. The list is designed to flag people with low overall link numbers, but who have done something to merit a sharp increase in links, as a way of making the system more dynamic.

no longer exists.

R U As Bored As I M?

2005-11-02T05:01:00.000-08:00

I continue to find the "public debate"blogs a bit of a chore. Remember Timothy Crouse's characterization of "pack journalism?" Now we have pack blogagalism, with a whole bunch of bloggers chasing the same scrap or two of insight

However, at the level of rhetoric, they may be doing some ineresting things.

And then Aldon, watching from on high, urges us to think about the means by which diversity can be maintained, possibly outside the scope of A-list blogs. Also, thank you Aldon, we have to think about how blogs are read, not just how they are written.

Lastly, it's almost always a mistake, I am discovering, to think of blogs as self-contained narrative, instead of as networks. Note the similarity of the chart there to the thing I keep drawing, obsessively, like a minor X-Files character, on the board.

Blogs and the Forum

2005-10-31T18:42:00.000-08:00

There are two ways that blogs could enhance public debate:
-- they could broaden it to include other subjects not on the mainstream radar screen.
-- they could deepen the existing debate, with more vivid language, improved research and fresh insight on the small menu of topics under consideration.

Very few blogs, it seems to me, do the former. Yes, metafilter and plastic occasionally push forward an interesting new topic.
But the blogs we're seeing this week try only to do the latter. Why is that? And does it "work"?

Blogs that drive the debate, maybe

2005-10-31T18:39:00.000-08:00

The New York Times, on this week's assignment. Let's check some of these blogs.

It's a fair bet that, given a political scandal of a certain scale, the usual blogs - DailyKos, AmericaBlog, Instapundit and Wonkette - will draw traffic and links. Make it a media scandal, like Dan Rather's "60 Minutes" fiasco or Jayson Blair's fabrications at The New York Times, and other sites might bubble to the top: Romenesko or perhaps Gawker for a snideways view of things. And why not? As in any other medium, branding matters, and these sites have proven their mettle in scandals past.
But the blogosphere is expanding at a rate of 70,000 sites a day, according to Technorati, the blog search portal, which now tracks activity on more than 20 million blogs in real time - and the right bit of news can always catapult new sites into the limelight.
Ariana Huffington's relentless drubbing of Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter, drove the relatively new HuffingtonPost.com high into Technorati's rankings. Her site's popularity continued right through Friday's indictment of I. Lewis Libby, the White House staff member accused of making false statements during an investigation into the leak of a Central Intelligence Agency operative's name. At day's end, roughly 20 new links per hour were being made to HuffingtonPost.com.
"I would say that's a pretty significant blogometric pressure," said David L. Sifry, the chief executive of Technorati.
The White House leak scandal has put some other sites on the map even though they lack Ms. Huffington's name recognition. Steven C. Clemons, a fellow at the New America Foundation, drew a fair amount of cross-linking to his blog, the Washington Note (thewashingtonnote.com), with reliable coverage throughout the affair. So too did the group blog FireDogLake (firedoglake.blogspot.com), which drew nearly 200 comments in just 90 minutes after a post about the news conference held by the special prosecutor in the leak case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, Friday afternoon. And with some original reporting on the affair last week, the JustOneMinute blog, run by Tom Maguire (justoneminute.typepad.com), was identified by Technorati as an "aggregation point" for chatter on the topic.
"This is kind of like a look into the global subconscious," Mr. Sifry said, "when you can expose what people are looking for."
Alas, competition for attention on the

back to work!!!!!!!

2005-10-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

This is what we have scheduled:
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?"

Just for starters: Jump on salon -- use the day pass, it's easy -- and read the Daou report, which shows you both Lib and con blogs, which is important for our work this week. Read Daou -- and obviously the recommended blogs -- every day fro now untuil class day.
Then, also, jump on Slate's blog feature and look down at the scrollable menu that let's you read previous "Today's blogs." Read a bunch of those. It'll give you a nice feel.

Lastly, I think the "open source" aspect of all this is important, so this might be one of the weeks we really look at the "wiki" pheonomenon.

So refresh your understanding of the most famous wiki.

And then check out this attempt to turn the wiki method loose on a big problem.

Lasty, keep reading here every day. I'm sort of back with a vengeance. Also, if you need face time this week, early mornings will be good for me. Like, what time does Tisane open? I could go there most mornings.

Papers

2005-10-27T06:53:00.000-07:00

Your final papers should be around 10 to 20 pages. I tend to be more interested in thought than research. Mind you, I'm mot interested in unsupported thought. Back up what you say with evidence. But huge, heavily footnoted research projects are probably not necessary. There are, on the other hand, a lot of opportunities to do orginal research by interviewing the key players.

Those of you you have been rocking out on your homework blogs and in class should not worry much about the papers, except as a way to bump from high pass to distinction.
Those of you who have been lagging a bit might want to use a home run paper to get yourself back in the game.

Do you need help with topics? I'm available. I plan to re-immerse in course-related stuff over the weekend, so email me or post comments to this blog.

Office Time?

2005-10-26T17:38:00.000-07:00

I'll be in Milla Riggio's office tomorrow, second floor of the English building. I'm meeting one of you at 11. I could be there for any one else, either before or after, but I gotta get out of there by 1.

man, i'm tired

2005-10-20T19:57:00.000-07:00

So I went and ate dinner at the bar of the corner pug, and now i'm taking down the notes and leaving up this very germane thing I mentioned.

Oh! One of the Three Bull guys now leaves comments on my Courant blog. I feel so validated!

some help

2005-10-19T17:52:00.000-07:00

Our friend Bill Heald recommends Hullaballoo. "Hullabaloo is amazing sometimes. Intelligent, well written, etc. Great stuff."
And Uggabugga. "Often extremely clever in the use of charts and visual aides. Kickass."
And Mike Daisey. "Find me a more fun, diverse, personal blog than this. Very special, in my view."

aldon rocks

2005-10-19T17:30:00.000-07:00

he may not get brett's humor, but he's awesome.
check him out in the comment thread.

coffee lady

2005-10-19T17:28:00.000-07:00

i think our favorite coffee lady might come to class, but she does not drive.
any of her fans want to volunteer to pick her up? email me or comment.

while i was sleeping....

2005-10-18T19:39:00.000-07:00

True, I went away for my birthday. True, I got away from blogs for a couple of days and didn't bring my laptop to the Cape. True, when I got back, my high-speed was down and has not yet come back up.
BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN WE ARE ALL GONNA PUNT THIS WEEK!!!!!!!!!!
I have, however, an ugly feeling that that is what is happening. You had better develop some good theories about writing style in the blogosphere. And some examples.
Share some of your favorite blog writers. Or really bad ones if you can use them to make a point about literary style.
And come on, Rhetoric Veterans! How are words chosen here, and with what goal?????

New reading

2005-10-14T05:42:00.000-07:00

You guys rocked last night!
At least, I thought you did.

OK, this is the week we really focus on words, on rhetoric, on writing style. Does the blogosphere have its own writing aesthetic? Is that aesthetic seeping in and possibly corrupting (or animating!) other writing? What kinds of tropes and literary tendencies are you picking up. Who are the stylistic innovators? What kinds of freedom takes hold of a writer who doesn't really have to worry about readers?

Go back and read some of the web-writing you've liked. If there are other writers you've stumbled across who merit our attention, let me know, in your blogs or in an email.

And read these:
big rep as a strong writer

buncha crazy innovators...what they up to?

interesting interplay of text and photo

not sure WHO this is

clearly attempting literature

let's go back and read her again more closely ... maybe she'll come to class

ok, this is weird

Prototype

2005-10-13T06:27:00.000-07:00

If you go over to my blogroll and click on MeMo Delendus Est, you will see the beta version of my new blog.

Whoa

2005-10-12T03:29:00.000-07:00

A little worried about Sam. He's not in a good place these days.

A more personal CT blogger

2005-10-10T15:50:00.000-07:00

I know some of you prefer the bloggers who write from the gut. So here's one.

oh wait

2005-10-09T08:52:00.000-07:00

perhaps it is linkable.

poifect timing

2005-10-09T08:44:00.000-07:00

Sunday's NY Times Connecticut section (usually not linkable, alas) has a big story on CT blogs, just in time for our class.
It mentions this one which speaks a little bit less to politics and more to actual "place," an issue raised by Brett, among others.

Guest blogger

2005-10-08T12:20:00.000-07:00

This blogging dude will visit our class this week.
And others too, perhaps.

A sense of where you are

2005-10-08T11:57:00.000-07:00

That was actually the title of a Bill Bradley book about basketball.

This week we'll look at what blogs do (and do not do) to create, deepen and enrich our "sense of place." The blogosphere stretches from here to Tibet, and that indeed is part of its thrillingness.
But we also (may) crave more understanding of where we live, especially in a time when people dart from work to bedroom communities and don't always drink very deeply from the quintessence of their environs. OK, that was a stupid phrase, but I just created my first ever Itunes account, and I'm kind of wacked out from that process. I mean, why didn't I just set up a crack accountwhile I was at it? Do I wanna listen to Jay-Z or Joni Mitchell?

Here are some questions to ponder:
Do CT blogs present a different reality (or set of alternative truths) from what you get in the mainstream media? In your daily coursing through life?
To CT have any kind of "voice"that differs from what you might find in, say, Beaumont, TX?
What's missing? What AREN'T the CT blogs doing that they could be? (This is the biggest question.)

Here are a few must-reads, but share any others you find. Brownie points to those of you who find fascinating CT blogs.

Here's a robotically refreshing state blog catch-all. Poke around in it.

I try to make sure we read alternatives to my own perspective, which this is.

Don't just read this, the best and most far-ranging political blog, but also check out his links.

I stumbled on this person, and wonder if there is more of this kind of thing.

I think we all agreed this was the best blog title.

There are several blogs that are just about one town. This was one, and I was kind of amused by its long goodbye, but dig back and see what they were trying to do.

filthy lucre : from the Paid Content website

2005-10-06T14:47:00.000-07:00

Exclusive: Weblogs Inc Being Bought Out By America Online: [by Rafat Ali] As usual, you read it here first: Weblogs Inc, the blog media company founded by Jason Calacanis (pictured at We Media conference today) and Brian Alvey, is being bought by America Online, paidContent.org has learned from multiple sources. The deal is done and should be announced this week...(Updated: it might be announced tomorrow AM now.) Among the other companies Weblogs Inc talked to included the usual suspects: News Corp, Yahoo and MSN... This is a very quick exit: the company was founded about two years ago, and took some money from Mark Cuban a year down the line. For Calacanis, this is his second company being sold in a space of about two years...his original company Rising Tide Studios was first sold to Wicks Business Information, which in itself was bought out by Dow Jones. The company's blogs have had an exponential trajectory, with sites like Engadget, Autoblog, BloggingBaby, and others. In total, the company has about 130 bloggers, with about 15 full time employees, from what I know. AOL intends to keep the company/blogs separate from its site, much in the vein of what is happening with other blog and Web 2.0 companies being bought. But this is perhaps the first pure content-related company being bought out in the blog/ Web 2.0 space...or at least of this scale. For AOL, this is head first into the blog media revolution, so to speak Calacanis, who was at the We Media conference today where I was, refused comment; I did spot him with an AOL tote bag. Staci adds: How much will Weblogs Inc. cost AOL? One estimate I heard today was roughly $20 million as an earn-out -- to get it all, Weblogs Inc. would have to meet certain goals. But I've also heard talk of Flickr-like numbers, which would make it closer to $30-35 million range. Certainly to Weblogs' execs advantage to have people thinking towards the higher end. Weblogs Inc. revenues are running at $1 million-plus annually from Google AdSense alone, according to numbers jubilantly released by Calacanis on his own blog; during a panel last week he said the company was bringing in $2 million a year. With that in mind, either of those numbers would be a generous multiple.Not sure if the acquisition includes the proprietary software used to run it all. Blogsmith LLC was announced in August with Gordon Gould as CEO and Razor magazine as the first outside client but the url redirects to the Weblogs Inc. front page. (Update: an astute reader notes that Razor shuttered last month.) Related: Our coverage of Weblogs Inc. over the last two years: -- Weblogs Inc: The About.com of Trade Blogs? -- Dis*Content: A New Weblog Media Project In the Works -- Enhanced Silicon: Venture Reporter Bought Out -- Weblogs Inc Hires Editor in Chief and VP Marketing -- Weblogs Inc. Makes Cameo Appearance At Google Analyst Day -- The Business of Blogging -- Weblogs Inc. Starts Global Expansion With Engadget Chinese [by rafat] [Oct. 5, 05] AOL Comments (8) TrackBack (7)

Putting his finger on a meme

2005-10-06T14:37:00.000-07:00

Without realizing it, I have started to believe this.

Notes for Tonight

2005-10-06T09:02:00.000-07:00

these are mainly for me to flash up on the screen, when i get lost, which, as we know, is often.

1. The lecter principle: we cover (or obsess about) what we see, hence the intrest of bloggers (and all other content creators) in their immediate "Worlds". This is why blogs can and do become self-referential. and why hopics like St. Judy and the NY Times pay-to-read policy became objects of obsession.

2. La Wonkette: My issues: creation of a persona and corporate maintenance of a code
How many of you found this? -- play clip from fox.
http://www.theanticmuse.com/

But, as entertaining as it may be, what goes on here stretches the bounds of what blogging means to me, and it looks so much like a professional (if loud and crazy) job. First of all, there's a big-time performance persona being shown here, not a blogging voice. Also, there's so much volume of stuff here it has to be done by a staff. And there doesn't seem to be any real and obvious encouragement of interaction. What there is plenty of is ads, across the top and elsewhere

3. Who is Roger Ailes? .
Joe: His own short brackets of comment have improved from the frequently schoolboy stupid talk in the early days. But you gotta love that he picked his format and stuck with it. Wonder who he was (and is) really writing for?As a pop-culture Luddite, I really don't know who 'the other' Roger Ailes is (no lie); is his blog voice lots different than his other voice?

http://blog.democrats.com/node/3451
http://www.justabovesunset.com/id788.html

P.S. Brett was not fooled

I loved Ailes catching this one:

His Glorious Career
Little Mickey Kaus is fascinated by the fact that Hillary Clinton failed the District of Columbia bar examination. No doubt Senator Clinton's legal career isn't as long and hugely successful as some, but she can take consolation in the fact that she became a United States Senator and popular best-selling author rather than a talentless hack who recycles the reporting of others in a tedious weblog.

3. Wolcott. your thoughts?

First, you see his name in huge capital letters, "JAMES WOLCOTT" (next to a caricature). Next, below his name, your eyes immediately are drawn down and to the right where you see "About James Wolcott" and "Write to Wolcott" (these are in white letters against a red background...for added visibility). So far that's three. Next, your eyes find there way back to the left side of the blog where, yet again, you see "James Wolcott is a Vanity Fair Contributing Editor". Finally, as your eyes begin to scroll down towards the actual entry you see "JAMESWOLCOTT.COM" sandwiched in between "October 2004" and "December 2004". Finally, just in case you thought this post was by an anonymous author, it states the title of the blog and "POSTED BY JAMES WOLCOTT" to dismiss such a heinous thought.
Ok, so that's a grand total of six times you see his name before you even begin to read the actual entry! Wait. Shit...I forgot about the little white poodle. To the right of the page you see "BY JAMES WOLCOTT" in big red letters underneath the words "HIT PARADE". In this advertisement displaying the front cover of his book, yet again, his name is clearly visible: JAMES WOLCOTT. Ok, so that's a total of eight times! That's a lot...and when I say "a lot" what I really mean is a bit excessive.

And if that is what I am looking for, why am I searching the blogisphere? Honestly, I became extremely bored with Wolcott's blog, if you can even call it that, because instead of using it as an opportunity to branch out and speak out without the constraints a publication places on you, he is using it as endless column space.

In the case of Wolcott, he clearly does not admire brevity (helping to out forth a know-it-all image), but manages to attract readers in other ways. Specifically, he understands (like no other blogger that I’ve seen) how important a title can be to attracting a reader. Examples of his titles include:Once More into the Chicken CoopPigeon PoopMe Tarzan, You HagelThe Squawk at the Chicken HawkAbacus of Death

I was reassured to find that JW doesn’t suffer from the same lack of vision that his colleagues over at HuffPo tend to fall victim to… He’s not just some lame old Journalist blogging, while wishing he weren’t. How do I know? He also writes about less-than-consequential crap.

4. three of you seemed to be making a similar point, esp. as regards Ailes. Or maybe Eric (in the third of three) is saying something different. We'll ask him.
a. Fact, fiction, opinion, conjecture, whole truth and nothing but - or part truth, part fabrication... doesn't really seem to matter in the blogosphere. I find this particularly true with the megablog sites. Boingboing, DailyKos, Plastic, Metafilter - one thing they all do is make reference to something and set up links to its explanations. I refer to this as a sort of 'short-hand noveling.' How easy to make a point and then POINT (click the mouse) to an explanation in someone else's words, for which you claim nothing other than mere association, not individual creation thereof.

b. I find their blogs to require a great deal of background reading before being able to interpret their own remarks. In fact, in the case of Ailes and Sullivan (who take this to an extreme) the supplementary reading often outweighs anything these guys have to say. Ailes will write a 3-sentence blog that requires paragraphs of material to be read before one can understand exactly what he is saying.

c. Speaking of pop culture, what can you say about making an obscure pop culture reference, and then hyperlinking to its explanation? (I already did it in this post, and back in my first post, too). Isn’t this sort of like having the cliff-notes to a conversation? Or hyperlinked editions of James Joyce?

5. what you thought about the not-so-pros:

a. over at Last Hurrah (smart Dem blog), this person has a pretty good grasp of the issues and a clear, unambiguous voice. He also talks to his fellow bloggers, "did you know...did you know?" This straight-to-the-point style is married well with a concise approach to make a strong impression right out of the gate.

b. They seem more real, and somehow less staged than these pro blogs. Probably because these nameless, faceless bloggers have nothing to lose and everything to gain, while well-known columnists have reputations to uphold and standards to maintain, thus they can't truly let their hair down and blurt- too many people would take notice.
nctories.

c. Whisky Bar is a little boring for me: too much of the "I" game. First-person writing poses a credibility problem. I start to wonder, "Who is this guy, and why do I care about what he thinks?" It's semantics, really, as the same info can easily be conveyed in the third-person -- it's just more work to write.I think the Who Is This? question is a biggy. Whether its the intentionally misleading two-step done by ailes or the fact that Billmon tells us nothing about him and Even tells us not much more, I think bloggers are kind of Pynchonesque, kind of anti-Wolcott.

6. An interesting meta-thought. Blogging is a chaotic medium where one never has to do any reporting. A blogger, in essence, does little or no research and therefore might be playing air guitar with the truth. love that phrase Of course, this makes for an interesting relationship with the truth - does this make blogs irresponsible next to journalism - notwithstanding how fantastically fast and funny some of them can be?

7. Nora Nora Nora
Nora Ephron makes a good point about the NYT's charging to read its op-ed pieces. It takes the paper out of the realm of blog-searching. It will surely change it's policies.

what a poster said:

Why didn't Ms. Ephron say what she really thinks about blogs?(1) They're way too loud.(2) It's just a bunch of hoodlums scrawling jungle writing.(3) It isn't even writing, just banging on the keys.(4) All the blogs sound the same.But don't worry, Arianna and Nora and Dick Clark and Fabian and Frankie Avalon will make it all all right.
Posted by: Glenn

This is clearly the story Calcanis was teasing in Nora's piece
http://galvestondailynews.com/wire.lasso?report=/dynamic/stories/A/AOL_WEBLOGS

8. i got kind of obsessed with Eve
http://eve-tushnet.blogspot.com/2003_11_01_eve-tushnet_archive.html#106971275892068949
http://eve-tushnet.blogspot.com/2003_11_01_eve-tushnet_archive.html#106968524043631467
http://www.livejournal.com/users/angevin2/249765.html#cutid1

9. . can we talk about how the various blogs use postings and emails?
Alterman kind of makes them a show.

10. random comments (2) from my friend bill heald

JW: Even in his blog I think he is a stylish, elegant writer. He is a really comfortable communicator, and very funny and knowledgeable about many things. Even though his postings are typically short, they are little chunks of art. You get his point, and a snapshot of his personality.
i really like how Kyrie's personality really shines through, too. I don't think this is necessarily specific to these guys, I think blogs really have the tone of a personal note which imparts a sense of intimacy.
Jesus, what is IN this coffee??

Outside help

2005-10-04T08:33:00.000-07:00

One of the unintentional lessons I have taught myself has to do with this blog itself, which I had envisioned strictly as a tool for staying in touch with students in the class, kind of a 24/7 meta-blackboard.
I didn't think anyone else would even know about it, but, indeed, the blogosphere is full of eyes that find you, whether you want to be found or not.
So anyway, here is somebody with some further suggested reading for this week. Said reading is optional. This guy even knows what YOU are thinking.

What I Expect

2005-10-02T18:31:00.000-07:00

The question of expectations (and, therefore, grades) has been posed to me.
Those of you seeking grades better than "pass" should understand that the single biggest component of a seminar, to me, is class discussion. What you add to class, how you teach one another, is very important to me.
The second biggest component of your grade is homework. And I consider homework to be the reading and then posting about your reading. If, for example, you do not post comments this week in which you react specifically to Wolcott, Ailes, MeMo, Sullivan and the other blogs I mentioned, you have not, in my opinion, done the homework. I'm not looking for thousands of words, but I am looking for an indication that you have read and thought about this material. I also enjoy very much your general thoughts and your outside reading, but specific comments on the assigned blogs are my way way of knowing we're all pulling the oars together.
The final paper is the least important consideration.

2005-10-02T18:30:00.000-07:00

More to think about

2005-10-02T11:05:00.000-07:00

With Wolcott, you should definitely dig back to his earlier stuff, because I think he's gotten a little lazy about posting, of late, and that in itself may be discussion-worthy. With all of these pros, ask yourself if their pre-existing "skill sets" give them any specific advantages or blind spots when they turn to blogging. Here's a Kos alumnus who often writes like a pro, even though, as far as I can tell, he's mainly a blogger. How is he different?

Advanced meme work. The thought unit Bush is drinking again started in a tabloid, but it's all over the blogs now. Are they adding value to it? Sharpening it? Mutating it?

This week's work

2005-10-01T06:07:00.000-07:00

We're going to focus on what happens when the pros, the people who are variously. "credentialed"by the preexisting media, try their hands at blogging. As I suggested,
James Wolcott is a good place to start, and so is Roger Ailes.
Eric Alterman was a little less well-established before he blogged, but he definitely had a career, as did Andrew Sullivan. Kyrie OÇonnor, who does MeMo (see my blogroll) was not famous, but a long-time working journalist (made much more famous partly as a result of blogging). Read her too. I'm going to ask you to go BACK to the Huffington Post, partly because it's full of credentialed people trying to blog. And there's this slightly puzzled refelction by a celebrity-turned-blogger.

Another thing I'm going to ask you to do is to read the work of more typical bloggers, often covering the same subjects. You can pick some of your own favorites, but try a smart Dem blog and this gay conservative less famous than Sullivan.
And then there's Wonkette, who's the best example of an overnight sensation.

As an index, I'm going to ask you to look, all week long, at how the blogosphere, including these blogs and others, treats the story of de-imprisoned Judith Miller. Almost all the blogs here, with the possible exceptions of Eve and MemMo, will look at this story; and it's a very elastic, protean meme in the sense that there is no real conventional wisdom about it as of this writing, except for the idea that we are not being told the whole story. The Huffington Post, at the moment, has a manic interest in it, especially Ariana. Watch it develop and flesh out over the next few days. If you're really ambitious, watch Sunday morning news shows and read the papers and note how conventional media are or are not reflective of or pushed along by the blogs. Look at how the blogs talk to one another.

No business like blog business...

2005-09-29T03:40:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-26T08:33:00.000-07:00

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!

2005-09-25T10:27:00.000-07:00

...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

2005-09-25T09:39:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-24T13:05:00.000-07:00

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!

2005-09-23T03:49:00.000-07:00

I guess we had better read this.

up way too early

2005-09-22T03:01:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-21T04:55:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-21T04:04:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-19T05:14:00.000-07:00

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

Neither here nor there

2005-09-18T09:34:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-18T09:28:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-17T06:39:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-15T05:16:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-15T03:56:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-14T10:40:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-12T04:52:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-11T10:22:00.000-07:00

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?

2005-09-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-11T09:01:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-08T06:24:00.000-07:00

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?

2005-09-08T03:04:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-03T14:44:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-03T14:10:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-02T05:37:00.000-07:00

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

blogology

2005-09-02T05:32:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-01T19:31:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-01T16:13:00.000-07:00

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.