Weblogs: January 2004 Archive Page

"I always say that while I can't vote, I can damn sure make a difference," he said. "It doesn't feel odd, it shouldn't feel odd, because all Americans should be doing this. We as a country need to be more involved, especially our youth." --Stephen Yellin --Teen Blogger Heads Online (Wired)

I'm being called away, but I wanted to blog this before I forget it. I immediately thought of Ender's Game, an Orson Scott Card novel that features two teenage supporting characters (siblings of the hero) who affect global politics by participating in online discussion groups.

--'She's a Flight Risk' Resumes

Isabella v has started posting again, after a long hiatus (which I noted in December).

I only learned about it after getting an e-mail from "isagirl@hushmail.com" responding to a blog entry I wrote last year.

Torill Mortensen has a post today referencing the ongoing debate about gender balance in the blogosphere. Are there more men, or more women? Are the men or the women more visible? --Liz Lawley --Academic Women and the Blogosphere (Misbehaving)

I found this discussion interesting, especially in light of Andrew Orlowski's sneering dismissal of bloggers as mostly teenage girls.

At our small school, which until recently was all female, social networks are tight. There are about 80 student blogs on our MoveableType installation, of which I'd say about 50 represent students who are currently in my classes (and therefore are forced to blog). One student recently estimated that another 50 students regularly read the blogs of their friends. If this is true, most of them are lurking.

The online social networks typically mirror the offline social networks -- at least, so far as I can tell from my position as a faculty member. The students who regularly comment on each other's blogs tend to sit together in the classroom, although I don't think that group identity correlates with posting frequency. Nevertheless, a critical mass of female students who have been forced to blog for my classes has decided to turn their academic tool into a social one. Some see their roles as welcoming newcomers, answering questions about personalizing the plain-vanilla designs I set them up with, and helping newbies properly interpret comments that come across as snarky or offensive to the uninitiated. And, as we have seen elsewhere in the blogosphere, we have had our share of personal spats that spill over into the blogosphere (though of the two major incidents I can think of, both ended peacefully, with new or renewed friendships).

As a group, the male students who blog for my classes don't participate in this social network. One male student is a bit of a troll, but in the classroom he is personable and cheerful, and those who know him don't find his online persona troubling.

Another three male students who aren't in any of my classes have also requested blogs, and two of these are among the most prolific bloggers on the site. Besides myself, two other male faculty members are blogging as well. Because they are outside the dominant social network, these male bloggers are more likely to post a stand-alone essay on something that the female-dominated social network isn't already discussing. While I have been writing more commentary in my blog in the last year or so, it still leans more towards "professional link log" than "public journal." And because I'm not in a position to give a grade to any of these "outsider" male bloggers, the only way I can encourage/reward/praise their best blog entries is by linking to them. If it is true that men are more likely to blog for professional reasons, and if professional blogs are more likely to have more outbound links, perhaps I am part of a mechanism that inflates the visibility of male professional bloggers.

I don't have any numbers to support my theories, and at 5:15 on a Friday afternoon I'm not about to start looking for any. Time to pack up and head home.

A few questions spring out from this. It is generally accepted that giving credit for creation is important; is it the same for ?link discovery credit?? Will (should) the practice of linking to sources of links come to be taken very seriously by bloggers, out of a shared concern to keep things fair and transparent, in a similar manner to standards of citation in academia? Should one link to the immediate source or make an effort to trace links back to the original source? (Is it always clear which is ?the? original source?) --Sebastian Paquet --Link Propagation and 'Discovery Credit' (Many-To-Many)

I don't credit metasites like Google News or Blogdex when I find stories there.

If journalist A publishes a quote from a source, journalist B can try to contact the source directly and get him or her to repeat the statement; if the source cooperates, journalist B doesn't have to cite journalist A as the source.

Obsessing too much about link discovery is something like wanting to give credit to the taxi driver who took you to the library where you found the source you were looking for.

Still, as Jill Walker notes, "The economy of links is not product oriented. It is service oriented, and the service is the link." (Seb's article links to Jill's "Links and Power," a wonderful theoretical piece that was well worth a revisit.)

There are times when I first see link A on site X, but I'm not motivated to blog anything about A until I see commentary on site Y. In that case, site Y is being more than a taxi driver -- blogger Y deserves the credit on my blog, even if blogger X had the link first. Or link A might point to a website where articles soon disappear behind a paid subscription wall; in those cases, I'll often Google up a different link on the same subject.

I will say that a link to the original article/document being discussed is vital... it's not sufficient simply to link to the blog that quotes some off-site document. That blog may go offline one day, or the quote may turn out to be inaccurate or taken out of context.

(Suggested in a comment posted by Susan, who credits J-walk.)

After some good-natured ribbing about his taste in clothing, General Wesley Clark, the Democratic Presidential candidate, has decided to donate his much-famed argyle sweater to charity. --General Wesley Clark's Argyle Sweater (EBay)

I found myself doing a little superior dance, because I just happen to have a read a blog entry about the history of sweaters on the linguistically fascinating flaschenpost, and I am therefore critically equipped to understand the cultural significance of Wesley Clark's Sweater and its presence on E-bay.

I didn't realize that what the English call a "jumper" is the same thing I call a "sweater". To me, a jumper is a long sleeveless dress worn over a shirt; the jumper is typically of a rugged material like denim, and is thus suitable as a play outfit for little girls.

Private vs. Public

Anyone can read this: professors, classmates

Don?t write about your love life or last weekend?s activities unless you want your professors (or Dr. Gawalek) to read about it

Take caution when complaining about classes or classmates

Also, watch what you write ? don?t link to pictures of you doing anything illegal while at Seton Hill. Someone will invariably turn you in.

--Julie Young --Getting the Most Out of Your Academic Weblog (Work in Progress)

Julie also offers sections titled "Academic=Thought", "Foster Discussion", and "The Upside".

"Dr. Gawalek" is Mary Ann Gawelek, the academic vice president here at Seton Hill University.

While blogging's earliest advocates operate on the "information wants to be free" principle, many businesses would shudder at the very thought. | "Information is power" is a more likely mantra in many organisations. Whenever you hear those three words, you're hearing the signal of the kind of closed information culture where there's also a heads-down, bunker mentality utterly unsuited to the openness required for a convincing weblog, be it an external PR effort, or knowledge-sharing internal one. --Neil McIntosh --Why blogs could be bad for business (Guardian)

A few months ago, I was at a fancy on-campus dinner event. The university president, JoAnne Boyle, was working her way through the crowd, laying on the charm. I was part of a little group of people who were treated to a funny story about a well-known donor who called with some crotchety advice about one of the big topics on campus. When we all finished laughing at the punch line, I asked for the donor's first name again, because I hadn't caught it, and someone kidded me, "So, is this for your blog?" We all chuckled, but JoAnne's face turned white, and she quickly went off to charm someone else.

A little while later, as she was giving an impromptu welcome speech, she noticed who I was sitting with, and said, "The reporter who's the bane of my existence is sitting next to the faculty member who's the bane of my existence!"

Everyone turned around to see me recovering from what was almost a spit-take.

I don't think of my own blog in terms of power... goodness gracious, I'm just trying to teach a few things and enjoy doing what I do. I noticed that Alexa, a website ranking service, has placed jerz.setonhill.edu above www.setonhill.edu, and has recently replaced the screen capture of Seton Hill's home page with a screen capture from my own curricular home page. (My curricular website gets 57% of the traffic to the *.setonhill.edu domain, and the main site gets 29%, at least according to however Alexa measures it. The blogs.setonhill.edu subdomain gets 12%, by the way, which is up from 8% the last time I checked.)

I don't really know what any of this means, but, like businesses, universities also operate with a rigid power structure; administrators know things that faculty members don't need to know; tenured faculty members know things that their nontenured colleagues don't need to know.

Since I know that some of my students read my blog, I've found myself screening my blogging, since I don't want my blog to give away the "big twist" I want to throw into my lecture. And one day last term when I was very sick, a student blogged about how mentally befuddled I was. That student wrote sympathetically, but what if she hadn't?

Many of the students who started blogging for me last semester will be blogging for me again in different classes this term. I've learned a few things about instructional blogging... for one thing, I need to get the students reading each other's blogs more. We spent perhaps too much time counting the number of comments each blog entry generated, and not enough time getting students to link to each other's conversations. I'll be introducing three classes to blogging this week, and I plan to move pretty quickly from the basic "show me that you can post a link" to writing thickly-linked texts, with well-chosen links that not only demonstrate the student is keeping up with other blogs, but that gives readers a map to good reading online. We'll see what happens.

The entrenched business culture may not adopt blogging beyond the basic public relations and customer service approach. But a university's function is to educate -- to pass on skills and knowledge, by giving students the intellectual tools, in a microcosm of the society that awaits them after they graduate. Progressive educational philosophy emphasizes empowering the student. A weblog forces students to come into contact with that outside world a little earlier, which can be a burden. But with that responsibility comes power.

I'd rather the university president not think of me as the bane of her existence because of my blog, but at the same time, it's nice to be noticed.

For almost all important social and political issues, a view of the past is essential, and the most powerful analyses of issues requires a historical framework that reflects all the complexity and ambiguity of the past. Yet, for most people, it seems that their concept of history settled into a fixed evaluation (usually a negative one) based on a class taken long before college. Every time someone asks me what I teach, I brace for their inevitable reaction. They usually tell me something like, ?I was horrible at history,? or, ?I hated history.? Since these tend to be new acquaintances I have no knowledge of their lives, but I am probably correct 90% of the time when I respond in turn, ?You had the wrong history teacher.? --John Spurlock --The Uses of History (The Blue Monkey Review)

John has announced his New Year's Resolution to post something on his site every week. "If you are out there and read this," he says, "add grit to my resolve by sending along your comments. "

Well, That was Unexpected.Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I showed my five-year-old son the two recent blog entries in which he features (Johnstown Flood and The Meatball), and to my surprise he spent the next 40 minutes dictating responses to all the comments left by readers. It was interesting watching his composition process... the sentences are choppy not because he speaks in choppy sentences, but because he has to pause in order for me to type what he says.

Anyway, now that I know how detailed and occasionally off-topic his responses are, I'll try to encourage him to dictate private e-mails instead -- those of you who aren't parents can probably only take so much of this unbridled cuteness. Well, according to Peter, it's time to play Legos now, so bye.

Instead of being dollars or euros or kroner, links seem a lot more like the major prison currency, cigarettes, in the hands of a heavy smoker who cares more about smoking than about any other prison commodity. First of all, you can do something with them; as an afterthought, you also use them to get more PageRank if you like. --Nick Montfort --Linky Lucre (Grand Text Auto)

Nick's reading of Jill Walker's paper Links and Power comes up with some interesting observations. I've often thought of blogroll-hunting as a kind of game (one which I keep telling myself I shouldn't play so often). My goal is not so much to encourage people to link to my blog, but rather to find -- as soon as possible -- the links that other people post. For instance, Eric Mayer was poking through lists of weblogs and recognized my name from the interactive fiction community; I found his blog entry a few hours after he posted it. This kind of link-hunting keeps my online research muscles limbered up, and it's something I can do in a twenty-minute time window (while waiting for the kids to go to sleep or when a student doesn't show up for an office visit).

While my link-collecting activity is, from one perspective, no more meaningful than manipuliting blobs of light in the shape of spaceships or warriors on a video screen, or passively watching blobs of light reproducing the motions of professional atheletes thousands of miles away, my particular collection of links represents my memory (how many times have you blogged something just so you'd remember it?), and the aggregation proceeds according to a set of criteria that I may not always articulate (Mike Arnzen has noted a recent explosion of blogs relating to games, but that seemed perfectly natural to me since I've just bumped a few game-related projects higher in my priority list). I'm not sure whether eating dots in a maze or watching professional athletes creates anything of even the slightest value to others; but, as Nick points out, "Google likes blogs - but people like blogs, too! Google likes blogs for all the right reasons."

I remember a short story about a future society in which people are screened for intelligence in a sort of maze where they live their whole lives and try to attach meaning to the events that occur within the maze. One such event involves the collection of metal discs that occasionally appear on the walls. People pry these disks off, making their fingernails bloody (though one wonders why they wouldn't just use one of their discs to pry off the other disks...). These discs serve no purpose other than being collected; I forget what the other meaningless activities are, but robot caretakers encourage the humans in all their activities but one. There is one room that humans are told to avoid; the protagonist, whose name I rember is Jon, ignores the warnings and enters the room, which I think contains nothing more than a big question mark. (I wish I could find that story again. I must have read it in the 80s.)

Anyway, the collection of links on a web page is not as meaningless as the collection of ornamental metal discs, since I use other people's links to find information, people who share my interests, and, yes I admit it, sources of good links.