Weblogs: February 2004 Archive Page

Computers and Composition Online is the refereed online companion journal to Computers and Composition: An International Journal, now in its 21st year and published by Elsevier. Our goal is to be a significant online resource for scholar-teachers interested in the impact of new and emerging media upon the teaching of language and literacy in both virtual and face-to-face forums. As part of this goal, we wish to foster a sense of community and collegial sharing of ideas by providing an online space where select features, announcements, and community resources work together to promote a virtual exchange for the latest and best work in the field. --Computers and Composition Online Weblogcandconline.org)

Found via KairosNews. Not a whole lot of action on this site yet... and the mission statement I quoted above reeks of administrativeese. Is this part of an effort by Elsevier (publisher of C&C) to respond to boycotts and other acts of rebellion over the control it wields over academic publishing?

I'm a bit suspicious, but I did contribute a long comment to C&C Online a few minutes ago. Overall I think it's good it's great to see yet another effort to rethink scholarship in light of new technology.

Conference ConundrumsJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Hooray... I just heard that I got near-full funding for both Princeton videogame conference (where I'll be presenting a paper on Will Crowther's original "Adventure") and the San Antonio 4C-s (where my paper topic is "Forced Blogging: Students' Emotional Investment in their Academic Weblogs"). Because the 4C's is a long conference in an expensive city, I might not be able to afford to go to the whole thing, but I present early and there's that blasted "stay overnight on a Saturday and get a cheaper airfare," so I'm going to have to wrestle with this one a bit. I'm hoping to share a room with a former colleague from the University of Toronto, but he may have had to book already... we'll see what happens. I've got the next six hours of my day booked absolutely solid...

--A Scheduled Quiz on As You Like It Sprang (New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University)

A scheduled quiz on As You Like It sprang
And caught some students unprepar'd today.
Soft-hearted me! I bargained with them thus:
They'll blog in verse (as Shakespeare would have done),
And I will grant them an exten-si-on.

Googling for 'weblog'Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I found this line in my weblog tracking service today:

03 Feb, Tue, 15:49:46 http://www.google.com/search?q=weblog&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=100&sa=N

My weblog main page generally gets a couple hits from Google each day, and I do like to see what people are searching for, so out of habit I glanced in the URL for the keyword -- and I was a little surprised. Yup -- someone's Google search for "weblog" turned up this site on a page of results starting at 100 -- and then someone clicked on that link, thus generating the above line in my tracking service. I checked and for the moment anyway, out of nearly 9 million Google hits for "weblog," my blog comes up 109th.

I know this ranking thing is pretty much meaningless, and I'm sure this is just a fluke -- but it's a pleasant fluke, so I printed out the page to have a keepsake.

Rosemary Frezza, Blog Angel (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've blogged about trolls, but I've also been thinking about the beings that I call blog angels -- those helpful, friendly folks who may or may not have blogs of their own, but who regularly e-mail suggestions or leave them in comments, who privately warn me about typos or broken links, and without whom blogging would be much less fun. Rosemary Frezza e-mails me at least once a day with a list of typos and broken links -- not just on my weblog, but on other pages on my site as well. I love her dearly -- I've known her all my life, because she's my sister.

Happy birthday, Rosemary!

Unless we get an influx of suggestions within the next three hours, I'll have no choice but to watch this year's Super Bowl. I write this post from the living room of Vidiot Emeritus Peter Ko, and if the prospect of sparing me from the tedium of this year's game isn't enough to spur your creative suggestions, the least you can do is spare Pete from the tedium of my company. --Super Bowl Weblog XXXVIII (Tee Vee)

An interesting site... the Tee Vee bloggers are commenting on the commericals. (How far did you get in Colossal Cave Adventure, Monty?)

My kids are sick, so Leigh and I planned to go to church separately today. I tried to go to an early mass at a different church, but couldn't find the church... my wife had given me directions that she later admitted weren't very good. So I decided to go to the latest mass in the area -- the 7:00pm service at the cathedral. But apparently the bishop is a football fan -- mass was cancelled.

;-) Neterature: all the quirky, jerky kinds of writing that is/are on the World Wide Web -- blogs, fan fiction, role-playing game sagas, news filterese, spam poetry, prose parodies, etc.

Neterature: Usually energetic passionate innovative and irreverently funny. Not always great or even good. But the best of it is young and sassy and undeniably full of life, in ways that on-the-page writing is not so much anymore.

And it's blooming everywhere -- in e-mail and instant messages and, more and more, spilling off the screen into our daily parlance. It's changing the way we express ourselves. --Linton Weeks --iT was a dark+stormy Nite (Washington Post (will expire soon))

A good survey. Ultimately, it sides with the wistful "because we are no longer crafting our stories and poems on paper with pens or typewriters, gone are the days when we were forced to think through everything before we wrote it down," which is 1) an overstatement and 2) missing the point. We come into contact with lots of bad online writing, but those of us with weblogs can make it easier for everyone else to find the good writing. Bloggers are editors -- not in the sense that we fix other people's mistakes, but because a weblog archive is the table of contents of an anthology; a single richly-linked blog entry functions as a separate codex.

Weeks gives a good survey of writing culture online, but still applies old media criteria to it -- which is rather like admitting that a horseless carriage does a lot of things horses do, and a lot of things that horses can't do, but questioning them because you can't breed horseless carriages. Of course you can't -- because horseless carriages aren't horses.

A neuropsychiatrist is quoted as saying that, when you read online, "Your critical faculties are in abeyance." They needn't be. People can be trained to appreciate modern art, fine wines, and just about anything else that follows discernible principles of aesthetic and meaning.

I do find it very amusing that Jakob Nielsen is introduced as someone who teaches people how to write online. His specialty is usability in human-computer interfaces, and of course he's great in that realm. But only by trial and error have he and other usability specialists determined what kind of writing permits people to use technical documents most efficiently. Nielsen has no expertise in the use of writing to persuade, inspire, entertain, etc. He has never claimed that he has, of course -- it's this article that presents him as a writing expert.