Blogs in the News: Blogging then and now

Earlier this month, there was an article in the Washington Post about net-surfing trends.

"Google Inc., for instance, bought Blogger.com in 2003; the number of people posting or reading material at that site jumped to 15.6 million last month from 2.5 million a year ago."


Yes that's a 528% increase, as you can see on the table here.

And that doesn't even include the people who don't use Blogger or reference other blogs than Blogspots. I'm thinking, ok, great, so people are really into blogging now. But as we've learned in this class, it's not so much what you write as what you read that can adjust the blogosphere.

What are the top blogs these days? Well the top ten, according to Technorati are:

1 Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things
By xenijardin.

2 Engadget

3 PostSecret
PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.
By frank warren.

4 Daily Kos: State of the Nation

5 The Huffington Post
By Arianna Huffington.

6 Official Google Blog

7 Instapundit.com

8 Michelle Malkin
By Michelle Malkin.

9 Thought Mechanics
By Theron Parlin and Matthew Good.

10 Blog di Beppe Grillo
Grillo's gags have tackled financial scandals and political corruption
By Beppe Grillo.

I have no clue what Blog di Beppe Grillo is, but I do see that at least half of the top 10 are politically driven blogs.

Frankly, I have this strange obsession with Instapundit.com, and how it somehow gets to have the first and last word with the surfing public. Sooo many people read it. I read it. What does this say about us as a nation? At least it means we care about politics a little, and I don't blame anyone for wanting to stay away from CNN and Fox News because they dilute their news so much. But it also means we assign authority to some bloggers to dish out news we then take as fact. I know we've talked about this in class before, too, but again, how much power does that give the bloggers whose sites get the most hits? After all, it seems they shape the common knowledge.

One example of this is the Baghdad Blogger, Salam Pax (a pseudonym). Salam's blog, Where is Raed? was one of the most popular blogs during the initial attack on Iraq in 2003. Salam is (allegedly) a gay Iraqi architect/translator who started his blog so a friend in Jordan could be up on his status while the country was under seige. His site was so popular that when he stopped posting suddenly there was an international uproar about what happened to him, whether he was hurt, or kidnapped, etc. It turns out he didn't have electricity and had to keep writing entries on paper, to post electronically later. During his absence on the Web, however, it became clear that many people were reading his site to get firsthand news of the region. Surfers looked at his reports as they would those from CNN, BBC and other news networks.

His wild popularity has led to a book deal, a movie deal, and wide critical-acclaim. Well, except for those who think Salam Pax and his blogspot is a scam from the US govt to broadcast propaganda. I don't see how that can really be the case, though, since in a few of his posts, he basically tells the Americans off.

What do you think about a blogger capitalizing this way? Is it good? Is it a sell-out?

More interesting to me than that is something my International Relations professor said the other day in a lecture on Public Opinion:

"Americans either have no opinion on our [foreing] policy, or they have contradictory views. Meaning, they say they want US troops to come home, but they aren't willing to sacrifice stability in the Middle East at this point. And apparently we also want increased federal support for government programs, but we don't want any increases in taxes... It is a tragedy that the citizens of this country don't offer a clearer view for the government officials to follow with better policy."

Obviously, not everyone is reading polarizing sources like the Daily Kos or Where is Raed? Or Pax's other blog Shut up you fat whiner! I'm even going to go out on a limb here, and say that the real reason for the 528% increase on Blogger.com, is not due to new classical blogs, which focus on linking and networking on national events, but instead due to web journals on MySpace.com for example.

In fact MySpace has been in the news recently too. A week after the Washington Post article, there was a (rather long) story on NPR's All Things Considered that I found intriguing. MySpace.com, one of the most surfed-to sites on the net, is hiring net-security against child molesters or stalkers. The story was covered by the BBC, too. Why such a big deal? Because MySpace is annoying, but it attracts millions of people. People who are now using the built-in blogging tool. For better or for worse.

Still, though I shudder to think about all the people out there calling web journals "blogs", it does open up the imagination to what the blogosphere will evolve into next.
Again from the Washington Post article on trends in blogging:

"'The growth in blogging reminds us the Internet is fulfilling its original promise about participation,' said Gary Arlen, a research analyst and president of Arlen Communications Inc. 'This medium empowers users in such a way that they can do what they want and be heard.'"

Blogging is changing, with so many new people expanding the field and different ideas of posts as newsworthy, credible sources. For now I'll choose to be hopeful that blogging will retain its authenticity as a reasonable educational network as it expands. But I also believe that future wholly depends on MySpace's success in policing the molesters and in the public's willingness to revise its definition of and subscription to future blogs. It's hard to say whether the new generations of bloggers will contribute to the global opinion as much as Salam Pax and other classical bloggers, since they may be too busy contemplating their own navels. I guess the question is where is the Next Raed?

cross-posted from Post-December

Portfolio Guidelines

Here's what we agreed on during our discussion.

Blogging Portfolio

Audience: Potentially any blogger

Purpose: To highlight the quality of your blog

Requirements:

• Link to at least three of your blog entries and include extensive commentary on your reason for highlighting those entries

• Include an introductory paragraph to explain purpose of the portfolio

• Include a couple of exemplary comments on class members’ blogs or a blog entry that responds directly to someone else’s entry: explain what these illustrate about your participation in a blogging network.
  

• Make the portfolio entry an example of an exemplary blog entry (ie, you might include links, graphics, or whatever you think an exemplary entry includes)

• Ideally, link up your discussion of each blog entry with ideas from class discussions and/or readings

Possibilities: You may choose whether to highlight your growth as a blogger or to stick with just highlighting your “best” blog entries.

I don't really like that idea.

I don't like the idea of a grade pitch. I'm definately going to do it, and I know it could be beneficial for me, but does anyone else feel like we(the students) have just gone a bit to far? I think all the work we've been doing is our grade pitch. The quality of our work should be the argument for the value of our grade. This typed argument for our grade seems to be an attempt to rationalize receiving a higher grade than we deserve. I'm sure Donna understands this, and I hope that my blogging on my own blog is a much stronger case than a typed plea for an A.

Again with the portfolio

Here's a timeline for creating the portfolio:

Tuesday, April 25: Finalize expectations/guidelines for portfolio as a class.

Thursday, April 27: Complete a draft of the portfolio

Tuesday, May 2: In-class peer reviews of portfolios

Thursday, May 4: Meet at Shakespeare's (or other eating establishment?) for end-of-semester celebration

Monday, May 8: Final version of portfolio must be online by 3:00 pm

I'm pulling up some of the comments from last week so that they will be easier to view, and we'll discuss these today in order to finalize a set of guidelines:

I like the first three criteria listed on Jerz's sample. I think those are relevant to our course.

I think it would sufficient to display 3 of their bests posts, which could be judged on the most interactive, the best-written, or what sparked the most discussion. And maybe include some of your own comments on the blog as a whole.

I like the idea of doing a "cover letter" for the posts we select from our blogs. I think this would allow more flexibility, because then you have a chance to define "best" from your own perspective. I like the idea of using that "cover letter" as a blog entry gateway to your "best" posts, but I also like the idea of creating another place for the posts to go. A place where one can add to their portfolio and reference it. Furthermore, I think if the portfolio is a post, it will get lost in the shuffle of the blog. As the blog gets longer the portfolio will be pushed out of sight. I think another page is a good idea, although I recognize the technical limitations of this. Perhaps we could create posts and then create a permanent link to them in the sidebar so the portfolio is always at the forefront of the blog?

I really like Nichole's comment about including a bad entry... my concern is that students might just choose a random entry that's very short or contains a bad link. What about including an entry that surprised, disappointed, or otherwise affected you the most (positively or negatively)?

Blogging Portfolio

One item to discuss today is the final project for the class, your blogging portfolio. And among the items we need to consider are these:

• What should it include? (Will it highlight your best blogging, be an overview of what you tend to blog about and/or how you tend to blog, or a combination, or...?)

• What should it look like? (Will it be a blog entry? Will it be a separate web page?)

• How will it be assessed?
  

Here are guidelines for a blogging portfolio required as part of a literature class taught by Dennis Jerz at Seton Hill. (And see the comment on this blog entry that adds some further elaboration from.) We might use these guidelines as a jumping off point for our own.

Epidemics

How does information (or anything) circulate socially? The same way disease circulates: by contact with an infected person. And if a lot of people get "infected" with the same content, the same feeling, the same whatever, we have a social epidemic.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about social epidemics in his book, The Tipping Point, but I haven't read that book. I was "infected" with this information by reading Peter Morville's column on social network analysis. And I "caught" this column from Collin Brooke's syllabus for a class on Networked Rhetorics that he taught at Syracuse last spring. And I wouldn't have known about this class, nor been connected to it (though in a tangetial way) had it not been for Marcia, who participated in it by blog, while living and studying right here in Columbia. And--can you believe it?--Marcia's latest blog entry is about creating "infectious action."

So if I map that little outbreak of information, it might look something like this:


And here's free mapping software that you can use to make your own map.

Please wait, your brain is loading...

After our captivating discussion today about microchips in your brain, I have am left with a lingering question: What the hell was half the class talking about? How did an article about a possible new medical procedure turn into attack of the Terminator? I understand that there are some ethical issues that go into these kind of procedures, that it could be tampering with human life, somehow turning it unnatural. But isn't it more wrong to deny ourselves our own greatness? If our natural abilities has led us to the discovery of this technology, shouldn't we take advantage of that? What is wrong would be to let die when life is an option. I see where some of my classmates were coming from, that it is just the first step to a Matrix-like reality. But come on, let's be reasonable here. It's like saying you shouldn't let people get an organ transplant, because that will lead to some real life Dr. Frankenstein taking the transplant procedure to the ultimate extreme, creating an entire new person out of transplanted body parts, kind of a living corpse and an abomination to the essence of life. But that probably won't happen and we all know that transplants are an amazing and wonderful thing. Although I must give the argument some credit, it IS intriguing. I myself have often wondered what is the limit of human potential. People are continuously getting bigger, and stronger, and smarter. We are living longer and technology is becoming an ever greater presence in our lives. Will humans continue to grow until we are all walking the Earth as half-robot Titans? or will we even stay on Earth? Will humans branch out to the farthest reaches of the galaxy? Where is the limit? Oh man, this is getting way too deep. I wish I had some kind of microchip to do this kind of thinking for me.

New template!

Don't worry: it really is our class blog! Thanks to Megan, we have a cool new template.

From grid to network; or, metaphors we blog by

While in Chicago for the CCCC convention last month, I stayed in a hotel that that had been built pre-World War II. I took a picture of a doorknob:



I find Art Deco design very satisfying: so geometrical. So grid-like. The beauty of precise, bordered form.

On my last day in Chicago I took a walk down to the new Millenium Park.



And yet I love this, too, though it is an image not of the grid, but of the network. Yes? How so?

Is a blog more like Millenium Park than like the doorknob? What forms of writing are like the doorknob?

Please. Talk among yourselves.

Secrets from the conference

OK, not really secrets. But perhaps I got your attention?

I have a number of links on the schedule (link in the sidebar)to notes on blogging from the conference I attended the week before Spring Break. I would especially like to draw your attention to Clancy Ratliffe's presentation notes, because she asks some interesting questions and also because she offers a great graphic illustration of one of the topic's we'll be considering in some detail in the next couple of weeks: networks.

She also asks these questions, which will make more sense if you take a look at the presentation itself:

* Couldn't this same discussion have taken place on a listserv?
* How could P2P review be implemented in scholarly journals?
* Can P2P review be used in a deliberate and systematic way in the classroom? If so, how?

I'm especially in the first question: what makes blogs (or are blogs) different from a listserv or discussion board? What's gained/lost/changed across these different applications?

But because much of the talk was about how to use blogs in classrooms, I'm also interested in your own experience (outside of this class) in blogging as a class requirement. Could this notion of "peer to peer review" be implemented in, say, a journalism class? An upper-level literature class? Etc.