Cyberculture: December 2003 Archive Page

The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has been awarded a knighthood for his pioneering work. --Web's Inventor Gets a Knighthood (BBC)

Definitely one of the good guys. If he had tried to keep control over his invention, of course it wouldn't have worked, since the web depends upon the contributions of thousands and millions of user-authors.

--Blogging Changing Journalism (New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University)

A small number of my students noted in their end-of-term reflection that they weren't all that comfortable with blogging because they expected a course in traditional journalism, not all this cyberspace stuff...

--Virtual Punchcard Server (Facade.com)

I found this and a great Tongue Twister Database (if by "database" you mean "long list") via J-Walk Weblog.

Sites are getting better at using minimalist design, maintaining archives, and offering comprehensive services. However, these advances entail their own usability problems, as several prominent mistakes from 2003 show. --Jakob Nielsen --Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003 (Alertbox)

Usually Nielsen's blurbs are more informative... the "summary" on his site reads more like a marketing tease. To give you a sense of what the page is like, I'll have to collect the first 5 subheadings: "1. Unclear Statement of Purpopse," "2. New URLs for Archived Content," "3. Undated Content," "4. Small Thumbnail Images of Big, Detailed Photos," and "5. Overly detailed ALT Text."

Since archived content, thumbnails and alt text (that's the descriptive text that sometimes pops up near your mouse pointer, usually in a yellow box) are all good things, Nielsen's observations are helpful for those who have implemented these good things in a less-than-optimal way. Observations six through nine are about information architecture, and thus not something my own students are likely to need; while the last item (warning designers about pages that link to themselves) is very relevant to my teaching of newbie web authors.

Some legal experts said that posting documents detailing the criminal charges against the 45-year-old entertainer was a breakthrough for public access. Others countered that it would undermine the spirit of the law and court proceedings, creating even more of a circus-like atmosphere. --Sue Zeidler --Jackson Web Site Unites, Divides Legal Profession (Yahoo/Reuters)

I've blogged about Jackson's defense website, so it seems only fair to link to this article, which mentions the prosecution's site and also comments on the trend towards online access to legal documents.

You could dismiss this as nostalgia, GenX-ers pining for the simpler pleasures of their Cold War youth. But that doesn't really explain it, because half the people buying these games are teenagers at Urban Outfitters.

No, these Jurassic games are popular for a more powerful reason: They're the canon of video games, and they prove that keeping it simple still works. Chunky, low-fi games like Pac-Man show us why so many of today's more advanced games can be so paradoxically dull. --Clive Thompson --Blasts From the Past (Microsoft/Slate)

A good application of a few basic elements of game theory to current consumer trends. (His earlier article on videogames as editorals was more trend-spottingly illuminating.)

Don't miss the final line: "Video games turn out to be just like sonnets and pop songs. Often it's restrictions, not freedoms, that inspire creativity."

In my opinion, Google today is far from the great search engine it was in those far-off days, yet I still use it.

Even knowing that it indexes only a small proportion of the web using a technique that too often gives precedence to pages that lack authority or coherence, that it is skewed by multiple blog links and can be manipulated by unscrupulous advertisers, doesn't stop me typing search terms into my toolbar and feasting on the results. --Bill Thompson --Is Google good for you? (BBC)

This bibliography was originally compiled by Scott Stebelman from 1996-2000. Scott, a librarian at Gelman Library at George Washington University from 1986 until 2000, retired recently. The page is currently being updated and enhanced by Dr. Seth Katz and Jim Bonnett at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. --Hypertext and Hypermedia: A Select Bibliography (Bradley University)

The pages I checked focus mainly on print resources published in the mid 90s, and the index page hasn't been updated since 2001, but it still looks very impressive. It led me to a site with much of Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies online.

The pleasures of videogames are frequently enjoyed by those that commonsense might encourage us to consider as non-players -- "onlookers" that exert no direct control via the game controls. In this article, I want to suggest that videogame players need not actually touch a joypad, mouse or keyboard and that our definition needs to accommodate these non-controlling roles.

[...]

Many a great game has poor visuals -- an entire generation of players grew up with blips of light, @ signs and even text-only games -- but there are few good game with bad controls. --James Newman --The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame: Some thoughts on player-character relationships in videogames (Game Studies)

Some good observations on the complexity of the player's identification with elements within the game world.

When my son Peter was about 2, he was spooked by one of those little coin-operated riding machines. He still enjoys sitting in them, but he never wants us to put in any money. The employee at the arcade near the shopping mall food court in Wisconsin got to recognize my face, and noticed that I never spent anything; at one point he would drop two or three tokens into a machine where Peter was happily watching the demo loop. When the familiar sequence was replaced with a "get ready to play" screen, Peter would put up with the interruption, or say "You play, Daddy." After the game was over, he would resume his enjoyment of the demo loop.

During the coin-operated videogame craze of the late 70s and early 80s, I spent about two dollars on Asteriods, but I would often go to arcades to watch. Often, after having watched somebody play two or three games, the gamer would invite me to push the fire button, so that he (always a he) could concentrate on moving and accelerating.

Looking back, I wonder whether maybe I should have reciprocated; I never did, and I never recall getting glared at for my stinginess. It was my perception at the time that the paying player was, at least in part, rewarding me for being such an attentive audience.

Dennis Jerz tiene un excelente Literacy Weblog, hoy navegando su sitio, he encontrado un link a un super artículo, sobre Memes, Memex y Vannebar Bush... Aquí transcribiré solo algunos fragmentos. Pero lo más importante es que, dado que El Tao de Internet ya ha llegado a Vannebar Bush, Memes y Memex por caminos alternativos, es bueno leer a un especialista en el tema. --Laura Mansilla --Meme, Memex y Dennis Jerz  (El Tao de Internet)

Yo no habla Espanol, but using the on-site link to the Babelfish translator really opens up a world of scholarship and ideas.

This morning, while my son was at choir practice, I spent an hour reading through the paperback "Canterbury Tales" that I first read as an undergraduate. It's taking a while to get back my reading knowledge of middle English -- long enough to remind me how difficult even my own language can be.

This is not passive news consumption. Neither is it broadcasting. The average blogger has time to surf the web, but no resources to report stories. Some bloggers will follow a news story to the end, some may lose interest after a few days. Commentary will range from the fully-formed to the random blurt and can freely mix the public and the personal.

All this represents something new: participatory media. And it matters. Not because of its resemblance to familiar institutions, but because of its differences from them. -- Rebecca Blood --The revolution should not be eulogised  (Guardian)

A good article, in which a committed blogger speaks intelligently to the wider world of non-bloggers. I do, however, question her estimate that an "average weblog" will be updated "perhaps a dozen times a day". Blogs that show that much activity are very rare, indeed.

From a Guardian special report on weblogs, which I found on Scott Rettberg's site.

The fact that Google now "sucks" is in a large part not Google's fault: Google simply reflects what it can see, and most of the Web is simply invisible to Google, as it now lies behind closed doors. Google's aggressive, but essentially dumb robots can only get so far. We're painfully aware that Google's lack of specificity leaves its robots chomping through thin air, dead pages, or trackbacks, more often than not. --Andrew Orlowski --A Quantum Theory of Internet Value (The Register)

Orlowski ruminates on the impact of Google Print, a new feature from Google (see BBC's coverage) that searches the contents of selected print books, along with the Internet.

It's a sure bet that the scholarly books that don't have huge print runs or huge advertising budgets won't be the ones paying Google to "feature" their results, which means that Google will be even less valuable than it already is to students seeking credible scholarly information.

I get to add another detail to my list of "why you shouldn't rely on Google" freshman comp speech (which I have to repeat in every class, at every level. Many students, rewarded by their high school teachers for their ability to summarize plot or express their own personal opinion of a text, seem to write up their whole paper first, and only then look for sources.

I ask students to submit notes telling me what they would have done more of if they had the chance, and the activity of scholarly research is often described as "finding quotes that support my argument," rather than constructing an argument based on the reading you have already done.

A student who has already polished the sentences and paragraphs, and has a few hours before being overtaken by sleep (or, in some cases, the actual deadlie) tends not to be very descriminatory when Google returns a list of hits that "look good".

Note: I'd already blogged this article when Jim e-mailed to me a suggestion. Keep 'em coming, Jim.

Gaming Culture and Theory -- Or; Will Somebody Please Pinch Me?Literacy Weblog)

About a half hour ago, I returned from a meeting with the dean of academic affairs, at which I was planning to pitch a new course that I'm calling "Gaming Culture and Theory." I brought a short stack of scholarly books along with me, intending to justify the academic value of such a course, particularly as Seton Hill University continues admitting more men.

But before I even made it to the chair, the dean said, "Just so you know, I'm going to ask you teach this course next January. Tell me, what will it be about?"

In return for teaching a course in the first few weeks of January (during Christmas break), I would get a lighter teaching load in the spring.

In order to accomodate the needs of students who want to go home for Christmas break, the dean wants me to teach the course online, and to commit to teaching it every other year (which is typical of electives at our small school).

I had already roughed up a syallabus that had us meeting in virtural environments for all of the second week and using blogs throughout the term, so I didn't have to think very much about that. She also asked whether the course would meet the university's "artistic expression" area requirement, and I said that I thought it would -- graphic designers could produce storyboards, English majors could write branching dialogue trees, programmers could produce their own Elizas, etc.

I decided to go with a cultural focus, rather than a heavy theoretical focus, because one of my goals would be to get students to begin thinking critically about the games they play (and about the rhetoric of gaming as it is represented by the mainstream media). Perhaps after I've taught more upper-class SHU students, I'll have a clearer idea of what kind of theoretical concepts to attempt, but something tells me a three-week intensive course offered during the January break is going to have to have a lot of hands-on game time. Since three weeks is probably not long enough for students to become fully invested in an epic MMORPG, I don't think I'll be able to work with EverQuest in class. And I want to include an exploring/socializing game, such as There.com, SimsOnline (neither of which I've played). I'm thinking of assignments such as asking students to use their avatars for cross-gendered role-play, to discuss such issues as sexual harrasment or body image in virtural environments. I'm not sure I could teach stand a course on the mathematical algorithms for generating the shadow for a stream of spurting blood, but the course will have to appeal to the gaming geeks in order for it to attract enough enrollment.

My parting shot was a request that I be given a budget to fund my own exploratory research on the pedagogical uses of virtual environments. Sure, she said, put it in the proposal. (Which is easy enough to say, but still... she didn't burst out laughing, which is a good sign.)

Where to start... EverQuest is probably out (though maybe I should investigate a little further before deciding...). Star Wars Galaxies? Deus X 2? Grand Theft Auto?

(Somebody, pinch me!)

Okay, okay, back to my long-enough list of short-term goals.

No matter how tricky or convoluted the map becomes, you will always have a clear picture of how to get from one part to another. Accurate mapping cannot be overstressed if one is to become an above-average adventure game player. Top players map at least 50 percent of their game-playing time. --Roe R. Adams III --Computer Gaming Methodology (Digital Deli)

Boy, that brings back memories. Back in my day, we didn't have this fancy camera-floating-along-behind-the-PC, 3D realtime-rendered automapping. What we had was a piece of paper and a pencil. That's the way it was, and we liked it!

Also of note farther down on the same page is a sidebar on dragons in computer games since Adventure. (The article's from a 1984 book, so the list isn't long.) And, while I'm at it, I found an interesting discussion of comptuer therapy (starting with Eliza, but moving on a bit.)

I'm working on a bit of computer history myself, or will be when I finish grading (tomorrow!). Historical research 101: the older your source is, the more valuable its observations; they haven't been tained by the passage of time, which tends to filter out the unpopular or unusual opinions and replace them with commonly-accepted wisdom.

Moveable Types of Information Literacy: Emerging Electronic Genres and the Deconstruction of Peer ReviewLiteracy Weblog)

Vannevar Bush, writing in 1945, lamented that the volume of scientific knowledge being published each year forced researchers to spend unprecedented time and energy searching for relevant information (and choosing what to ignore). His solution, the Memex, was a photocopier crossed with a microfilm storage and access device. A Memex user would theoretically create links between documents, annotating those links, add those annotations to the filing system, and share the resulting "trails" with other researchers. In some sense, what Vannevar Bush was trying to accomplish with his annotated "trails" has been implemented through the weblog genre (specifically, the research blog or "edublog").

Traditional textual scholarship aims to construct a specific, ideal, "correct" text. But computer science -- the discipline that generates the technology that drives (or hampers) information literacy -- aims instead for abstraction. In the open source software development model, particularly as described by Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," individual programmers contribute their labor freely to a common project made available to the general public for free.

Given the financial pressures publishers of journals exert upon libraries, and the brewing rebellion against what some activists characterize as a cabal of print publishers, some emerging electronic forms have radically altered the dynamics of the scholar-publisher relationship, without necessarily reducing the filtering value provided by peer-review. Electronic journals such as First Monday offer cutting-edge, peer-reviewed scholarship on a timeline of weeks. Even more radical is the Wiki, a form of electronic authorship that decentralizes authority and encourages all readers to annotate, expand, edit, or completely revise a common text.

In such genres, peer-review (in the form of inbound links, e-mailed or posted corrections/refutations, revision, or even deletion) is expected to happen after a text is published, thus making the process of peer review visible, instead of simply the product. Popularly-edited texts online typically summarize general knowledge, rather than offer a forum for the presentation of new knowledge or controversial opinion; further, emerging electronic genres also typically over-represent particular opinions espoused by technorati who manipulate the system (an effect which inspired the term "Googlewashing," and illustrated by the recent online prank that now causes a Google search for "miserable failure" to point first to George Bush's official biography on the White House web site). Developing strategies to compensate for these anomalous effects is a vital skill for 21st Century information literacy.

Who really killed Hamlet's dad? What does King Richard III want with a horse anyway? And where did the gravedigger get that gorgeous pink dress? Avenge your father, defeat your evil uncle and ascend the throne of Denmark in William Shakespeare's long undiscovered text adventure. --Robin Johnson --The Most Lamentable and Excellent Text Adventure of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Online Residence of Robin Johnson)

Very nice, Scott-Adamsesque implementation of Hamlet as a text adventure. Doesn't shoot nearly as high as Graham Nelson's verson of The Tempest (game | my review) but the JavaScript interface looks very smooth. I've got a long-dormant work-in-progress that features a character with a speech impediment, so I was amused to see Johnson's treament of Ophelia.

In order to compose this piece, I had to depend on a circular way of thinking. Initially, my plot was linear, but that did not work well. Rather than use a traditional pyramid plot structure, I outlined plot points, and wrote something for each. Then, I added more pages under some plot points and linked it all together. I linked absolutely everything to anything at first, and then gradually deleted links and added new to get rid of infinite loops or excessive backtracking. --Julie Young, a student in my "Writing for the Internet" course. --Rationale for 'La Tour Eiffel' (A Work in Progess)

For her term project, Julie started writing a hypertext travellogue, but soon realized that a hypertext document defies traditional notions of time (and space). Since Julie came into the course as an experienced blogger, I encouraged her to challenge herself for her final project. There wasn't time for me to offer a unit on hypertext literature, so Julie was pretty much on her own.

She conducted usability testing on a rough draft, and adjusted her linking technique and added more material after she observed what her test subjects did or didn't like about her work. As is the case with most literary hypertext, the brevity of each individual node can convey the false notion that the text itself is insubstantial, when in truth the amount of planning and fine-tuning that a mutipath story requires means that even a brief creative hypertext generally takes far more brain power than a traditional short story of the same length.

I like how she used devices such as a journal to take us back in time, and a suitcase full of brochures to take us forward. Have a look at "La Tour Eiffel."

Écrite en 1920 et jouée pour la première fois à Prague l'année suivante, cette pièce de théâtre, intitulée Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R.), introduit le terme robot, qui remplacera dorénavant celui d'automate. La pièce de Capek fut acclamée dans le monde entier. -- Dennis G. Jerz (via an anonymous translator) --Le règne des robots (L'Encyclopédie de L'Agora)

An editor from a Quebec online encyclopedia just asked me to approve a French translation of my web page on RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots). The request would have been more gracious if it had come before the translation was posted, but I already knew some of it had been put into Wikipedia's RUR article, and I helped edit that page, so I'm OK with this.

One problem -- I don't know French... I guess I'll ask Seton Hill's French teacher to take a look at it for me (if she has time).

I've been tweaking the original page since I first posted it when I was a grad student, and a reader recently took me to task (politely) for recommending the Toward the Radical Center translation, so I suppose this page needs even more work yet.

Among the attractions at the 1958 World'sFair in Brussels, Belgium, visitors would have beheld ?Professor RAMAC,? a four-ton IBM machine capable of offering up responses to users? queries on a two thousand year historical span... [T]he Professor offered the general public its first encounter with the magnetic disk storage technology today called the hard drive.... In 1950 Edmund C. Berkeley had published a book entitled Giant Brains: or Machines That Think, the first work to introduce computers to a general audience. The shift from Berkeley'santhropomorphism to the RAMAC'sfull-fledged personification as a ?Professor? or ?genius? hints at the kinds of synthetic identities that would culminate with Arthur C. Clarke'sHAL 9000 only a decade later. --Matthew G. Kirschenbaum --An Excerpt from Mechanisms [2]: 'Professor RAMAC' (MGK)

I left a niggly comment on the author's blog. It somehow didn't feel right simply posting, "Thanks, I enjoyed that."

To quote a student of mine... heck, phooey and darn. I got distracted before I hit "submit" on that comment and now it's gone. Drat.

Early, link-heavy blogs were, for the most part, a method of sharing links. They usually contained entries that consisted of one or two hyperlinks, the blogger's commentary on the link's content, and a place for other bloggers to make comments about the entry. These early blogs often focused on what Blood calls "the dissemination and interpretation of the news." By linking to news articles from "lesser-known sources" that might be otherwise overlooked by the "typical web user," weblog authors supply "additional facts, alternative views, and thoughtful commentary" that is often unavailable from large news sources (10/01/03). See Appendix A.

As blogging became more popular, many weblogs shifted from the original, link-heavy forms that dominated early blogs, to a free-form on-line journal where authors have begun to write more freely and frequently. Many blog entries now contain no links at all, as the new generation of bloggers share "notes about the weekend, [or] a quick reflection on some subject or another" (Blood 10/01/03). Many bloggers write bi-daily in these journals, which serve as more of an ?Update-in-the-life-of?,? than a source for news. See Appendix B.

Although weblog journals have gained immense popularity over the past four years, the original link-heavy style is still respected by many current weblogs. --Kirsten Schubert, a former student of mine, in her senior capstone paper at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. --Blurring the Borders of Rhetoric and Hypertextuality in Weblogs (The Hypertext Project)

Kirsten's blog truncated my (long) comment, so I'll post my reaction to her paper below.

To the best of our ability to discern, we have included only links to electronic journals that are scholarly, peer-reviewed, full text and accessible without cost. We have excluded professional magazines that are largely not refereed, and commercial journals that may only allow access to a very limited number of articles as an enticement to buy. By restricting membership in this way on the list that follows, we hope to do what little we can to promote free access world wide to scholarship in education. --Open Access Journals in the Field of Education (AERA-SIG)

Here's to open-access online journals. I hope Google notices this link and adds my PageRank value to the value of this page. (Via the original Pedablogue.)

Two North Carolina men were indicted for violating the state's junk e-mail law by sending thousands of e-mail pitches for investments, software and other products, in what prosecutors said was the nation's first felony charges for unsolicited e-mail. --Virginia Nabs Two Big Spammers (Wired/AP)

I'd like to think this will make a difference... maybe it will, maybe it won't.

More Questionable Use of My Work

While surfing the web today, I was surprised to find, in an OpenWiki installation on a web page published by the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management (University of California, Santa Barbara), a document containing a subtantial amout of my own work. The OpenWiki document in question states that it has been reproduced with my permission, but that text refers to the (belated) permission I gave when I discovered the first copy that Bren School made.

• Current version of my FrontPage Handout
• Copied and altered once without first getting permission
• Once again, copied, altered and this time released in an open source format without my permission

When I initially found the first copy, I saw that references to me and my institution had been removed, and the site was republished under the Bren School banner. I did give belated permission, provided that my name and institutional affiliation be restored to the document, and that a prominent link direct readers to my current version.

I did not, however, give permission for yet another copy to be made, and neither was I asked my opinion about releasing the document in an open format (which would permit multiple authors to modify and change the text even further).

The latest copy on the Bren site still offers my name, but now neither version contains a link to the current version. Life is too short to get mad, and I am a supporter of both the wiki genre and the open source movement, but this is the second time somebody at the Bren School has misappropriated my work for its instructional purposes.

Update, 11 Dec: A few minutes after midnight, about six hours after I contacted the Bren School, I received an e-mail apology, stating that the material had been removed. I'm grateful for the speedy reaction.

Often, while sifting through the mountain of daily Gothamist correspondence, we come across emails asking for advice about starting a blog. Why anyone would consider Gothamist an authority on the sweet, intricate science of blogging is beyond us -- but we are loathe to sidestep our obligation to respond. Here then, based on our blog-exploration and the evolution that is Gothamist, the first in a series of Gothamist Notes On Blogging, entitled "What not to do when you blog." --What Not to Do When You Blog (Gothamist)

While this is a good overview of current blogging trends, I find it offputting to see any definition of blogging used in such prescriptive terms.

I'd particularly disagree with Gothamist's invective against writing about yourself. Good writing is good writing, regardless of the subject. Please don't stop blogging just because the subject of your blog doesn't interest The Gothamist. Maybe you won't get many outside links if you only blog about yourself and the people you already know, but if you start linking to pages you find elsewhere online, you may develop a network of personal blogs written by other people whose personal interests intersect with yours.

Some blogs wear pinstripes, others wear tie-dye and sandals, and others just wear comfy sweats. Whether a blog is professional, creative, or simply a place for your own thoughts, good writing is good reading for whoever finds it.

One only needs to have had a weblog for about five minutes to see the relevance to blogging of Cialdini's ideas about how we are persuaded and how we reach decisions -- particularly concerning whom one links to or adds to one's blogroll. If you're honest, you'll recognize that at least some of Cialdini's principles have determined your linking/blogrolling preferences:

• Reciprocity (If I put you on my blogroll, you'll feel obliged to put me on yours.)
• Commitment/Consistency (Now that you're on my blogroll I'm unlikely to remove you.)
• Social Proof (If all those other people have X on their blogrolls, then he definitely should be on my blogroll.)
• Liking (The people I link to and have on my blogroll are similar to me, have praised me, are associated with events or projects I'd like to be a part of? at the very least, since I'm never going to reach the A-list, I can bask in the A-lister'sreflected glory.)
• Authority (Anyone on the Technorati Top 100 must automatically be knowledgeable, wise, and powerful.)
• Scarcity (Since the A-list has so few members relative to the total blogging population, what A-listers write must necessarily be of high quality. Similarly, a link from an A-lister is enormously valuable?regardless of the quality of the item at the end of that link.)

--Jonathan Delacour --I'll Link to Whoever He's Linking To (The Heart of Things)

This is a much more thorough examination of an issue I was muddling through a few days ago. Dammit, I wish I had time to pursue this further, but my plate is already full. I'll just have to read what others write (which is a heck of a lot easier than trying to figure it all out myself).

Update, 10 Dec: I don't think Delacour's assessment of "scarcity" is right. Because the A-list bloggers have so many inbound links, their opinions online are anything but scarce. But I agree with him in his application of scarcity to an outbound link from an A-lister. Even if the Alpha blogger has pages and pages out outbound links, each outbound link can be very valuable to the recipient (if, that is, the recipient cares about the currency of the blogosphere).

A solid agreement has been reached between BlogShares founder Seyed Razavi and technologist Jay Campbell -- the site is coming back! --Blogshares: Coming Back Soon

I figured that a good idea wouldn't lay dormant for very long.

OneLook's reverse dictionary lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word. Just type it into the box above and hit the "Find words" button. (Keep it short to get the best results.) In most cases you'll get back a list of related terms with the best matches shown first. --Reverse Dictionary

My inbox is rather full at the moment, but I did manage to fish out this gem that Jim sent last week. Looks like it uses the content of wikipedia to fuel its searches.

There are instances when, in the interests of the majority, some censorship may be used for a period of time. Indeed, there is material which virtually everyone would agree should be kept out. Sadistic pornography, incitement to violence against racial or ethnic minorities are just two examples. | But we cannot strive for an information society without allowing the free flow of information which is a pre-requisite. We just have to become better managers, navigators and users of information – let’s just say we need information maturity. | The Information Age has opened many doors for our eager minds to explore. Now the question is not so much ‘What information do I want?’ as ‘What information do I not want?’. --Arthur C. Clarke --Humanity will survive information deluge  (OneWorld South Asia)

I'm not sure I'm artciulating anything new here, but for me, reading some of the "high-profile" blogs feels a little bit like listening to talk radio: a charismatic figure stirs up people's frustrations and fears by linking to a news article or bit of information. Then a feeding frenzy takes place, with dozens of other bloggers quickly linking to this story or adding their comments, creating the noise effect I was talking about yesterday. --Chuck Tyron --Ten Blogs that Shook the World (The Chutry Experiment)

I confess that I probably feel too much validation when I happen to blog something that I later see climbing the charts on Popdex or Blogdex. Often, of course, I have seen the link on Slashdot, Wired, Metafilter, A & L Daily, or some other well-read site, so there is little wonder that other bloggers will pick up an interesting link. It's really far more satisfying when I find a gracious link on thinking with my fingers or MGK; these are people I've met in person (Torill was recently in Greensburg, and although Matthew probaby doesn't remember me, long before I started blogging I met him briefly at a conference -- probably the MLA, though I can't honestly remember).

This blog entry is a bit more of a hodgepodge than usual, but just now as I was scanning the blog entry I wrote for Torill's visit, I was reminded of Torill's reasons for not permitting comments on her blog. My sister Rosemary (whose eagle eye often catches typos in my blog entries -- thanks sis) told me that a comment spammer had struck my pointless Rainbow Hector Weblog. My journalism students are turning in blog portfolios, and one of the components asks them to reflect upon an entry that they wrote that generated good comments. Some students who haven't been blogging regularly probably won't get many comments on the blog entries they are feverishly writing the day before their portfolios are due. The artificiality of expecting students to write entries that generate comments leads to the following well-written, poignant plea from my student Shannon Gerstel, who uses images of nudity and shame to describe the way she feels about her blog in the hours before it is due.

I'll be very interested to see how many of my student bloggers continue to blog over the break, and what they write about when they are no longer thinking about fulfilling the requirements of an assignment.

The story you are about to read is true. It involves a fugitive heiress, guns, money, and layers of Internet intimacy and deception. It is a mystery that takes place at the edge of technology. And it is unlike anything you've ever read before. --John H. Richardson --The Search for Isabella V (Esquire)

A fascinating additional layer in the "Flight Risk" story (see the abbreviated back story or the abbrv bk stry) . The site itself has lain dormant since October, and none of the entries since mid-September have attracted any comments.

Jorn Barger, editor of Robot Wisdom, is missing. He resides in Socorro, New Mexico, and was last seen there by his housemate in very early October. Most if not all of his possessions, including his ID card, are still at his residence. --Eric Wagoner

Update: According to poster "cedar" on Metafilter: "I called the Sorocco PD at (505)835-1883 requesting any information they might have. Officer Richard Lopez returned my call immediately and let me know that Mr. Barger was not considered missing or in danger." Glad to hear it.

Update, 5 Dec: In "Jorn Barger has Left the Building," Wired offers a wrap-up that includes reaction from Barger's sister, but otherwise depends heavily on links to Metafilter. --Where is Jorn Barger?EricWagoner.com)

I've been on the receiving end of some of Jorn's scorn (though I'm sure I was only a momentary blip on his radar). I'm also aware that because of the pro-Palestine angle of his linkage he has been accused of anti-Semitism. Still, I only reluctantly removed Robot Wisdom from my blogroll when he stopped updating it regularly. His contributions to cyberspace are significant (he coined the term "weblog," for instance). Certainly any private citizen has the right to disappear from public view if he or she so chooses, but this sounds very strange.

About a week ago, I thought about writing a rather sad blog entry about the sad state of some excellent blogs, such as John S. Rhodes's Webword (hasn't been updated in since September), and Elwyn Jenkins's Microdoc News (activity across all of Microdoc's blogs has dropped drastically) and, of course, Barger's Robot Wisdom. For some reason I never got around to writing that entry, but let me try a bit now.

Rhodes and Jenkins had hopes of using their blogs to elevate their profile and thus attract business.

Rhodes worked hard to create Webword as a community focused around usability issues, and though I seem to remember his site being ranked #2 in Google searches on usability, it may have been chilly in the long shadow of Jakob Nielsen. During the dot-com boom, when so much money was being spent on poor web designs, I really enjoyed the usability evangelization (and commiseration) that went on in the comments fields. Rhodes deputized some loyal community members to help run Webword. With my recent job change from technical writing to new media journalism, I'm not spending as much time on usability issues, which makes sense because the journalism majors that I educate will probably not be expected to design the websites for which they write. (I do still teach usability in "Writing for the Internet," but since I no longer require students to design web pages for real-world clients, usability is less central to my pedagogy nowadays. Had I stayed in technical writing, or moved to a different school as a technical writer, I would have felt Webword's absence more acutely.)

Jenkins created maybe a dozen or more weblogs with slightly different themes; his aggressive appearance on the blogosphere generated some flak:

"In short, Mr. Jenkins' vaporous content is well on its way to earning him a place on most of the A-list blogrolls. From there he'll be able to make a lot of money from blogging. And Google, no doubt, will make a lot of money by inserting ads on the bloggers' pages. The only people who suffer will be those who try to use Google to find meaningful content." -- from How Bloggers Game Google, from Google-Watch (a site that is as critical of Google as Elwyn is laudatory; one of Jenkins's several content clusters includes the study of Google)

The basic principle of starting a whole bunch of blogs in order to learn what kind of an audience you attract and then figuring out how to make a living serving that audience sounds like a perfectly reasonable strategy; yet I always found it hard to glimpse the "real" Elwyn in his blog (even Elwyn's personal blog is sparse). Now, the spam comments collect on the otherwise inactive ProBlog, a group blog that he and others started as a reaction to Andrew Orlowski's periodic and vitriolic attacks on the blogosphere.

I wouldn't put my own online efforts in the same entrepreneurial categories as Rhodes or Jenkins... personally, I'm delighted that my position as a new media journalism faculty member gives me the excuse to continue blogging, while also permitting me to teach the occasional literature course, in an environment that seems willing to encourage my own creative new media efforts (chiefly in interactive fiction, but blogging is becoming more and more of a creative outlet for me).

As I contemplate grading weblog portfolios, I am once again buoyed by my own enthusiasm about weblogs as vehicles for personal expression, to help students trace their intellectual development, and to get them to experience the pleasures and responsibilities of publishing their ideas in a public forum, where real people can contact them and disagree or agree (as the case may be). Of course, there is always a certain percentage of students who simply can't get intellectually involved in the subject matter, and for whom any assignment is tedious and unrewarding. I don't see weblogs magically helping the disinterested and uninvolved students, but I do see the brightest students and the students in the solid center responding positively to their blogging experience.

No matter how digital the electronics got, the companies that made the gadgets were still stovepiped; suites of devices worked in perfect harmony - as long as they all wore the same corporate logo. If you managed to force a Sony receiver to work with a Panasonic TV, you lived in a rat's nest of cables with a coffee table covered in remotes and a spouse who couldn't turn on the television without a briefing. | Why didn't consumer electronics firms compromise on standards for interoperability? Because they're jerks.... This is where the PC industry comes in and the golden age begins. --Sonia Zjawinski --The Golden Age of Gadgets (Wired)

Mmmm... gadgets.

It's been an interesting and very rewarding nine months bringing a bit of entertainment to bloggers (and blog lovers). I'd like to thank especially all those people who donated money or their valuable time, those who became premium subscribers, those who worked on cool toys which made use of the fledgling API and all those who could be found on the forums and IRC channel. You turned a silly fun idea of a mad monkey coder in London into something worthy of the attention by thousands of bloggers and the press. --Seyed Razavi --Blogshares -- Closed Down (Blogshares.com)

That's too bad. Blogshares was a fantasy stock market that used incoming links as its form of currency. I also found it a good tool for tracking people who had linked to me, and (even better) a simple way to gauge the relative importance of blogs. But obviously the site required too much maintenance and brought in too little reveune. Thanks for the fun, Seyed!