Weblogs: November 2003 Archive Page

Making Slow Progress on MT ResurrectionLiteracy Weblog)

Dave my ISP has made a copy of the whole blogs.setonhill.edu website the way it was this morning, and backed up the last working version of the site (from about five days ago, when comments stopped working). Already I've gotten five e-mails from bloggers reporting that they can't log in or that their entries are disappearing. That can't be helped at the moment, but you will be able to get those missing entries back -- in addition to the complete copy of the whole website, I also exported all the data from each blog in a format that will let us import the missing entries and comments.

Thanks, Dave, for devotinig so much of your holiday to this problem, and thanks to all the SHU bloggers for your patience and understanding. Belive me, I share your frustration. At any rate, comments seem to be working again -- so that's something! I'll keep everyone updated.

Update: I think it works now! Hooray! Knock on electrons...

Our MoveableType Installation Should be Renamed StuckTypeLiteracy Weblog)

Drat, drat, drat, and darn! I'm sorry to report that blogs.setonhill.edu is even more busted now; apparently since about noon today it's been impossible to post new entries. I feel sick to my stomach about the terrible timing -- especially for those students whose blogging portfolios are due next week, and even more especially for Karissa (who had hoped to blog her participation in the Miss Pennsylvania contest... I've set up a blog entry for Karissa on my site, where I hope she can at least give us updates, but I know it won't be the same thing).

I've been keeping in regular touch with my ISP, who offered to restore the whole blogs.setonhill.edu site the way it was before the errors started happening, but then we would lose a couple days worth of entries -- so I asked him to hold off.

--Miss Pennsylvania Pageant (Sugarpacket)

My student Karissa Kilgore is participating in the Miss Pennsylvania pageant this weekend. She had hoped to use her weblog as a way to keep her family informed, but alas since MT won't let us post comments, she's missing an opportunity to let her friends and family cheer her on.

If anybody would like to leave messages for Karissa, please feel free to leave them here. Update, 28 Nov: Our blog software seems to be working again... knock on electrons.

Moveable Type FrustrationLiteracy Weblog)

I've been using MT since the middle of September and haven't had a single problem with it -- until now. Since some time over the weekend, none of the 40 or so authors on blogs.setonhill.edu have been able to post comments. They can still post blog entries, but we can't comment anymore, which really disrupts the culture that had developed online.

I've sent technical requests to the MT forums and to my ISP, but am at the moment completely in the dark, and won't be able to get back online until later tonight (though I doubt it would do much good even if I could). Since the students are due to submit their weblog portfolios soon, this is extremely frustrating -- for my students and for me. (My own weblog runs Will Gayther's JWeblog, so comments still work here.)

Think blogs are useless? Donna, while applying for jobs, got a email back from Central Pa Magazine. They happened to have read her blog and asked her to write a column on food/health for them. Let's all cross our fingers for her that they ask her to be a regular columnist. | Woo Hoo Donna. You give good hope to future journalists that blogs are an extension of a résumé. --Brian McCollum

--Think Blogs are Useless? (BAM SE)

Very interesting in light of the ongoing discussion of Dvorak's anti-blogging column. Neither Brian nor Donna are in any of my classes -- in fact, Donna graduated before I started at Seton Hill. But both are regulars on the New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University website. Congratulations, Donna!

--Lileks vs. Salam Roundup (Instapundit)

Glenn Reynolds has a good collection of links covering Minnesota blogger and fisker extraordinaire James Lileks's angry reaction to Iraqi blogger Salam Pax's criticism of the US-led occupation.

It's no coincidence that the most-read blogs are created by professional writers. They have essentially suckered thousands of newbies, mavens, and just plain folk into blogging, solely to get return links in the form of the blogrolls and citations. This is, in fact, a remarkably slick grassroots marketing scheme that is in many ways awesome, albeit insincere.|Unfortunately, at some point, people will realize they've been used. --John C. Dvorak
--Co-opting the Future (PC Magazine)

This article seems to presume that many (if not most) bloggers are trying to blog for profit.For a person who has Internet access, the cost of producing a blog is minimal or nil; likewise, reading a blog costs nothing. One reason I bloog, and give away my ideas for free, is because I know that I benefit so much from the freely-given ideas I have read on other people's blogs. I hope there will always be professional writers, but I also rejoice that so much amateur content is being produced, shared, enjoyed, and put to use in the world. The vast majority of bloggers aren't in it for the money.

"Writing is tiresome. Why anyone would do it voluntarily on a blog mystifies a lot of professional writers," he says. But that presumes that professional writers don't write voluntarily. Yes, writing is tiresome, and except for a few superstars, writing doesn't pay very well, so many professional writers have made economic sacrifices to feed a compulsion that drives them to write. I recall a conversation I had with a struggling young actor who finally announced her decision to stop taking acting roles that were good opportunities but that didn't pay anything -- yes, they looked great on her resume and yes, she learned a lot, but all the time she was spending rehearsing or auditioning for free wsa time that she couldn't spend looking for paid work. I feel the same way about my blogging, but quite frankly I've been fortunate enough that, while I don't get paid directly for my blogging, as a new media teacher I feel that I need to blog in order to participate in the cyberculture I am teaching and studying.

Most academics don't get paid for the academic articles they write, and get paid only very little for the books they write. When I give a talk at a conference, my university will pay my way (up to a point). Of course, this wasn't true when I was a grad student -- since there is very little research money in the humanities, I had to pay my own way to conferences, while students in engineering (for instance) had travel budgets from the corporations bankrolling their professors' research. While grad students in the sciences thought of their research as a job, we in the humanities often didn't even earn enough money to pay our tuition, so we ended up paying thousands of dollars for the privilege of marking stacks of papers and teaching lower-level classes. It came with the territory.

There are professional speech-givers who wouldn't dream of giving a speech and getting reimbursed only for travel expenses, but as an academic, I'm expected to deliver papers at conferences. Yes, it's a bother, but it comes with the territory.

I feel the same way about blogging... on a Saturday night after the kids are in bed, what am I doing? Blogging. A few years ago I might have been watching Saturday Night Live; now, rather than sit still and absorb media produced by someone else, I am spending a half hour or so creating someting of my own, and posting it for whoever finds it.

Dvorak cites the statistic that most blogs have a readership of 12. So what? If they are the right 12 people, and the blogger gets sufficient satisfaction, what's the problem? Traditional diaries theoretically have a readership of one, but that shouldn't devalue their importance in the culture of literacy. I think most professional writers do understand concepts such as self-expression and personal discovery. If each of a blogger's 12 readers also has a blog, and each of those reader-bloggers is read by an overlapping but not identical group of 12, then the dynamics of producer and consumer, author and reader, authority and readership are completely re-written. This is part of the whole paradigm shift in new media.

Is it possible to write a policy for academic blogging that respects a university's mission but doesn't amount to censorship? The vice-president for academic affairs asked me to draft a policy for student bloggers. Since we are a Catholic institution, the administrator's off-the-top-of-her-head suggestions included suggestions like "no foul language" and "no links to porn". Since it's possible that an anonymous commenter (or spammer) might leave offensive content on a site, or the contents of a page linked to by a blogger might change, and since a student might actually want to research the usage of a curse word or do a feminist study of pornography, I don't think a list of "thou shalt nots" is going to help. (We've already had one of those lists for thousands of years, and so far it hasn't solved all of our proglems.) --Dennis G. Jerz --Examples/Discussion on Academic Blogging Policies? (KairosNews)

What began as the ultimate outsider activity -- a way to break the newspaper and TV stranglehold on the gathering and dissemination of information -- is turning into the same insider's game played by the old establishment media the bloggerati love to critique. The more blogs you read and the more often you read them, the more obvious it is: They've fallen in love with themselves, each other and the beauty of what they're creating. --Jennifer Howard --It's a Little Too Cozy in the Blogosphere (Washington Post (will expire))

Item! Some Bloggers Love Themselves Too Much! Howard is right, but her realization is sooo 2001.

On the same day she spoke about media panics to my journalism class, Torill Mortensen introduced my "Writing for the Internet" class to hypertext theory. (This is going to be a long post and I'll probably be too lazy to link everything properly, so see Torill's online lecture notes, "Hypertext, class and power.")

She began by asking the class to visualize taking a book and cutting it up, line by line, and gluing the words all together -- you could read the whole thing in one very cumbersome, very long, line. (She corrected herself -- actually, you would need to cut up two books!)

She introduced Vannevar Bush, an American scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, who felt the need to find something constructive for the scientists of the world to do once World War II was over. (This reminded me of the passion of Mr. Antrobus in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth.)

She introduced Bush's Memex, and noted that its strength was that it organizes information not according to random order such as alphabetization, but the way our brains function -- by association. Even the most disciplined thinkers don't think according to a relentlessly rational, linear argument. (Here, I thought of a passage in Virgina Wolf's To the Lighthouse, which presents male thought as rational, attempting to progress firmly from A to Z, but shows a male character becoming frustrated because when he tries to move from A to Z by firmly focusing on each letter in his mind's eye, by the time he gets somewhere around Q or R, he finds his mind wandering.)

Torill worked her way through Englebart's "Mother of All Demonstrations," Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and Habermas's didactic philosophy of the media as a democratic conversation (rather than as a one-way flow from the aristocracy downward). She compared sophisticated, painstakingly constructed blogs which "reek of cultural capital" to the "bararian blogs" which have no cultural pretension.

She also shared a few stories from blogging lore, including "Damn the Pacific" -- the joint blog of transoceanic lovers, one of them dying from cancer, who begged for donations to fund plane tickets. Google actually caches at least some of the pages from "Damn the Pacific" -- so the story hasn't completely vanished from cyberspace. (I was rightfully booed by my own class when I asked whether Lane's new boyfriend also has cancer. Sorry about that, everyone.)

The saga of Kaycee Nicole also helped concretize the theory. Kaycee was the imaginary cancer-striken daughter of a blogger who doubly traumatized her audience -- first by killing off her daughter, and second by admitting the daughter never existed. (Here, I thought of Edward Albee's play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which features an imaginary son, created by a childless couple as a means to cope with their psychoses, and also as a weapon to use against each other.)

We also talked about Jill Walker's posts in which she makes oblique references to her breakup with another blogger, and Torill pointed out a current message on Jill's blog that is a coded announcement (for those who can read between the lines) that Jill is seeing someone new and is very happy about it. Jill says that, while her blog may appear to reveal quite a lot about her personal life, she still chooses what to reveal and how. The way I see it, her autobiographical blogging gives her control over the events in her life -- or at least over the way the readers of her blog perceive her life.

After Torill's lecture, I introduced her to Julie Young, whose blog I discovered while I was still competing for my current job. The content of Julie's weblog on "blogs.setonhill.edu" is a little different than her earlier blog, and she has admitted that she also keeps a "secret" blog where she can write juicier gossip than she wants to post on her academic blog.

"Doesn't everybody keep a secret blog?" Torill asked.

I don't have a secret bog... this is it, folks.Torill @ Seton Hill University -- 'Intro to Hypertext Theory'Literacy Weblog)

It's not hard to imagine the power of millions of people each taking pictures and attaching them to physical places. You're headed into Helsinki, and you want to see what the Esplanade looks like in mid-August. Or you wonder what the inside of the Intercontinental hotel looks like. | There's immense potential for people to keep each other informed, or perhaps, misinformed. We all know the power of a picture to over-select, to crop, to be too specific and miss context important to other people on the scene. Now that potential is being democratized. --Justin Hall --Personal Life Annotation Devices (The Feature)

Via Jill, who has also recently posted links to the Idea Line (a beautiful expandible index to new media art and narrative) and the 100 x 100 Project.

Torill 'thinking with my fingers' Mortensen @ Seton Hill UniversityLiteracy Weblog)

For the past few days, I have been showing Torill's "thinking with my fingers" blog to my new media journalism students. Around the time that our own "New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University" blog was lagging, Torill posted about the lack of personal touch in group blogs. And since many of my students reported, in their midterm blog portfolios, how disappointed they felt when the blog entries they worked hardest on didn't attract comments, I called my student's attention to Torill's position on blog comments (on MGK she has written, "While I can see the value of them, I don't want the hazzle of maintaining and editing a blog where I need to check to see what others may have written into it. I treasure my peaceful little slot on the net.").

It took a bit of effort, but I managed to get some students a little worked up about the things that this Dr. Mortensen was saying. When some students on Monday offered to send her nasty e-mails, I sort of choked for a moment -- I hadn't expected a response that strong. This morning, one student apologized for forgetting to write an e-mail.

At any rate, because Torill and I had agreed to keep her visit a secret, we imagined that she could make a dramatic entrance, so I left her in a computer lab on the floor below, and started class for a few minutes before sending a student to get her.

When I flashed her bio on the screen, Jen recognized her -- "I think I just saw her in the lab downstairs!" Jen knew something was up... maybe Torill Mortensen isn't really a Norwegian blogger -- maybe this exotic foreigner is just imaginary, or maybe I have asked a friend to come into the class and pose as "Dr. Mortensen" in order to make some obscure pedagogical point.

"Would I do that to you?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

I'll blog some more about Torill's presentation later... in one class, she spoke of the technology panic in the Norwegian media, and in the other she gave an excellent, well-paced introduction to hypertext theory.

She's downstaris in the comptuer room, probably blogging away. It's so encouraging to find out that I'm not the only person who's so addicted to the Internet! Anyway, we're going to meet up with my family and have an enjoyable evening (if the kids aren't too rambunctious). Then tomorrow I'll take her to the airport, where she will continue on her US lecture tour.