Media: November 2004 Archive Page

Through a new effort, Wikinews, members of the open-source community who write and edit Wikipedia's encyclopedia entries are encouraged to test their skills as journalists. The news site follows a similar set of rules as the encyclopedia, which allows anyone to edit and post corrections to entries, so long as each change is recorded.--Joanna Glasner --Wikipedia Creators Move Into News  (WIred)

I wish this development in Wikipedia had occurred a few months ago, so I could use it in my "Writing for the Internet" class. We're already wrapping up the term, and there really isn't time to introduce a new activity.

The site is still in demo mode, so I'll withhold my evaluation for now.

I don't expect that it will be the best source to go to for breaking news -- but it might be an excellent resource for finding follow-ups to stories that you found compelling. Just bookmark the article that interests you, and check it every so often for major changes (such as links to related stories, new backgrounders and sidebars, etc.).

But who knows... if an eyewitness e-mails a cell phone photo and uploads a quick description of breaking news, the traditional media might use Wikipedia as a valuable "ear to the ground".

I do hope they will have some kind of moderation system, so that stories filed by eyewitnesses will get higher visibility than stories compiled from wire reports.

"Serious games" demonstrating everything from flying a jet plane to negotiating a hostage crisis are used to train workers who can't afford to slip up on the job.

Firefighters can use "HazMat:Hotzone" (http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/hazmat) to learn how to respond to a chemical-weapons attack, George Soros wannabes can learn the ins and outs of currency trading with Forex Trader (http://www.inusa.com/tour/forex.htm), and college administrators can use Virtual U (http://www.virtual-u.org) to wrestle with angry professors and meddlesome state legislators.

Developers say serious games are especially effective for younger workers who have grown up with "Madden Football" and "Grand Theft Auto," but designers need to incorporate the irresistible appeal of these mainstream hits in order to keep participants engaged. --Video Games Teach More Than Hand-Eye CoordinationReuters/Yahoo (will expire))

There's nothing really new in this article, other than a reference to Halo2. The "recent conference" mentioned in the article as the source of a quote was held about six weeks ago. Still, it's good to see these issues being presented by the mainstream media.

What is quality in hypertext? How, in other words, do we judge a hypertext collection of documents (or web) to be successful or unsuccessful, to be good or bad as hypertext? How can we judge if a particular hypertext achieves elegance or just mediocrity? Those questions lead to another: what in particular is good about hypertext? What qualities does hypertext have in addition to those possessed by non-hypertextual forms of writing, which at their best can boast clarity, energy, rhythm, force, complexity, and nuance? What qualities, in other words, derive from a form of writing that is defined to a large extent by electronic linking. What good things, what desirable qualities, come with linking, since the link is the defining characteristic of hypertext? As I have argued elsewhere, the defining qualities of the medium include multilinearity, consequent potential multivocality, conceptual richness, and ?especially where informational hypertext is concerned? reader centeredness or control by the reader (Hypertext 2.0, pp. 33-48). Obviously, works in a hypertext environment that fulfill some or all of these potential qualities exemplify quality in hypermedia. Are there other perhaps less obvious sources of quality? --George Landow --Is this hypertext any good? Evaluating quality in hypermedia (Dichtung Digital)

I'm teaching a small course in media aesthetics next term. This might be a good way to introudce them to hypertext aesthetics. I haven't read this yet... when I do, I'll probably have more to say about it. But right now, I need to see whether Deus Ex: Invisibile War runs on my office computer...

He made no mention of the National Guard story in announcing the change, saying he had agreed with CBS executives last summer to leave sometime after the Nov. 2 election. But he was forced to fight for his professional life after anchoring a September “60 Minutes Wednesday” story about Bush’s service that turned out to be based on allegedly forged documents. --Rather to step down as CBS News anchor (MSNBC)

--textual genre [spammed to hell]

To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke... "My God, it's full of spam!"

While doing a bit of idle ego-googling as I wait for my kids to fall asleep, I came across this blog, whose author last year favorably linked to an article I had published in early 2003.

A few months ago, this web page was found by a spambot. Since then, it has been pounded over and over again by comment spam. My copy of NoteTabLight counted over 11,400 instances of "http" on this page alone.

The more recent versions of MoveableType are better at preventing this kind of abuse...

There, but for the grace of MT-Blacklist, goes my blog.

On the eve of Schulz'sinduction into the Army, his mother died of cancer. She was forty-eight and had suffered greatly, and Schulz later described the loss as an emotional catastrophe from which he almost did not recover. During basic training, he was depressed, withdrawn, and grieving. In the long run, though, the Army was good for him. He went into the service, he recalled later, as ?a nothing person? and came out as a staff sergeant in charge of a machine-gun squadron. ?I thought, By golly, if that isn't a man, I don't know what is,? he said. ?And I felt good about myself and that lasted about eight minutes, and then I went back to where I am now.? After the war, Schulz returned to his childhood neighborhood, lived with his father, became intensely involved in a Christian youth group, and learned to draw kids. For the rest of his life, he virtually never drew adults. He avoided adult vices?didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't swear?and, in his work, he spent more and more time in the imagined yards and sandlots of his childhood. But the world of ?Peanuts? remained a deeply motherless place. Charlie Brown'sdog may (or may not) cheer him up after a day of failures; his mother never does. --Jonathan Franzen --The Comfort Zone: Growing up with Charlie Brown (The New Yorker)

My mother purchased paperback copies of "Peanuts" -- we had stacks and stacks in the little room under the stairs, spanning decades. (I remember reading plenty of cartoons on the US space race, jokes about Sputnik, the introduction of the character Woodstock, etc.)

She also had a few volumes of "Pogo" from the same era.

Frequently with murder stories, reporters must balance the need to collect information with the feelings of survivors, who invariably endow the martyred loved one with a saintliness that blots out not just the negative but even neutral reality. --Unwanted Spotlight: When private people become part of a public story (Journalism Ethics Gallery)

Purpose: To introduce the fundamental concepts and methods of object-oriented programming, source code compiling, and creating executable files; to promote the art and science of interactive fiction; and to have fun in a creative and novel way. --Byron Philhour and Albert Boyle --Introduction to Object Oriented Programming through Interactive Fiction (St. Ignatius College Preparatory)

Calling a weblog ?literary? does not require content that is about literature or even content that aims to be literature. It is not an attempt at categorizing one weblog and its author as more worthwhile in a canonical sense than any other. To the contrary, I propose that every weblog can be considered literary in the sense that it calls attention not only to what we read, but also to the unique way we read it....The novel... is defined as much in how readers are trained to enter its shared codes as it is by the specific delivery of those codes. Likewise, the weblog relies on particular codes enacted by both author and readers?readers who become, in this case, secondary authors. --Steve Himmer --The Labyrinth Unbound: Weblogs as Literature (Into the Blogosphere)

While Himmer acknowledges that bloggers choose all kinds of topics and methods, I think his choice to mostly exclude pundit and k-blogs from his analysis makes the following statement problematic: "A typical weblog offers both factual and interpretive information at once, making the distinction between truth and fiction irrelevant in favor of differentiation between trustworthy and untrustworthy."

Yes, it's useful to make the distinction... but there is a huge subset of bloggers who meticulously cite their sources. I recently responded to what I felt were some elisions that were excessive on an entry posted by The Pink Bunny of Battle, and the next time I checked his site, he had a major entry that was meticulously cited. I'm not saying that he changed just because of my entry, but he recognized that his credibility depended on his accuracy, which would increase his legitimacy in the eyes of many readers. (The Pink Bunny is now blue, by the way.) The effectiveness of his Battle Bunny persona wouldn't be as strong if he didn't pay careful attention to the facts that he uses in order to support his points. The polemic and the political speech are both long-standing literary genres. Yes, they depend more on ethos (character, trustworthiness) than logos (facts, accuracy), but bloggers can easily append a comment that links to a fact -- in a way that a citizen cannot stand up and shout out a correction to a speech given in Congress.

Himmer's assessment of weblogs in terms of Aarseth's ergodic text is useful, because it reminds us that weblogs are serial and cumulative, meant to be experienced in short bursts over time -- rather than, for example, in extended, frantic sessions just before one's academic blogging portfolio is due. Himmer's observation that a blog is a text that is never "finished" meshes with the experience one often has with hypertext literature, which never comes to a definitive end. Some people find the open-endedness of the text intriguing because it leads to critical inquiry. A reader who has a consumer attitude -- read the text in order to get to the end and come to a conclusion and get it over with (or get credit for writing your homework) -- brings to the act of reading a completely different set of expectations.

I'll have to think some more about what those expectations are.

Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications. -- About Google ScholarA Quick Review of Google Scholar (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Google Scholar just went live yesterday. Thanks to my former student, Matt Hoy, for sending me the link. Here are my immediate thoughts.

First Usenet archives, then Blogger, then G-mail, then desktop search, and now academic research. [Update, 19 Nov: How could I forget Google News? --DGJ] Google Scholar is just as simple as Google; the familiar brand name will probably be irresistible once the word gets out. One often hears laments from faculty who note that students are reluctant to go to the library. Some are just as reluctant to use the library’s official research databases, preferring instead the simplicity of findarticles.com, so of course they will be attracted to Google Scholar.

Google Scholar Looks Promising

In general, I like Google's new service. While it offers only some of what you would expect from a library database, the convenience of the one-box-fits-all interface is very attractive. Like most Google services, what really makes the best impression is the added features that you never thought would be useful, but that soon make you wonder how you lived without them. Google scrapes the content of online articles, which means that if the online articles mention offline resources (such as old-fashioned books or anything else that is not a web page), Google will learn about them.

It looks like Google’s bots are capable of reading bibliographical information in many different formats and generating database entries for resources that are cited in web-accessible documents, but that are not accessible on the web directly. This may help make up for the fact that regular Google is naturally skewed towards serving up information that is readily available online. For some search topics, the highest-ranked hits are older academic books that are not available online.

A search for “Grand Theft Auto” brings up references to the game itself, not just articles about the game. So new media objects that are not web pages and books that are not online can also accumulate page rank. This is good.

Google's academic research database isn't perfect.

Nothing is perfect, of course. Naturally I first checked to see which of my own publications were indexed. Not all of them are, but I did find the full text of one of my articles that I thought wasn't available online. Not bad.

My first academic article, which has been online since 1997, isn't in the database. I did a search for the York Corpus Christi play, and followed a link to what was supposed to be an article on "Signifying God" in the play, but turned out to be the abstract of an article on the trial of Charles I (the full text of which was not available).

Search results also include references to offline books, with a link to a service that permits you to find nearby libraries that own copies. It gave me a pleasant little Thursday morning ego boost to see how many copies of my book there are in university libraries in Pennsylvania (for example). More important, the tally of number of links to a particular source offers a quick guide to texts that one assumes to be influential.

Google's bots can't improve on the accuracy of the information they index, and since human researchers have been known to cite sources without reading them, the page-ranking algorithm is not a substitute for real peer-review.

Scholars in technical fields refer to me as "Jerz, DG", while scholarship in humanities fields uses my full name. A human editor would catch that kind of thing, but a bot cannot.

On my second query I saw results taken from what look like papers published on a course website. One assumes that the countless undergraduate papers that will be indexed by the service won't themselves be cited by anyone other than other undergraduates, but the sheer numbers of students citing other student work is going to skew the search results. In this area, Google Scholar is no worse than regular Google, and somewhat better (since even those authors whose work is mistaken for an academic paper will have done some filtering of their source material).

In a regular Google search for "internet addiction," the top hits are commercial sites selling books and tapes that offer cures. The Google Scholar search returns the publications of the leading proponent of "internet addiction disorder," who also happens to be the same person behind the top commercial site (but that's a different story). And fairly high on the list of the Google Scholar results is an article that questions the validity of internet addiction disorder.

Students and Google Scholar

I just got back from proctoring a "Research Skills Quiz," where I brought my freshman comp students to a computer room, gave them a random topic (such as "health issues on university campuses") and told them they could leave the room after they showed me three peer-reviewed academic articles. A few finished the exercise within minutes, most finished it by the end of the period, and a few will have to do a make-up homework assignment. Several were unable to distinguish between letters to the editor that appeared in academic journals, editorials and position statements, and full-length articles in which scholars present their original research.

Google Scholar is not going to help those students develop research strategies. Students who are determined to muddle through without actually learning may be distracted slightly less, but that will probably give them a false sense of relief that will only delay the inevitable jolt that will shake them out of the high school mindset.

One of the features that I like -- the fact that Google Scholar indexes offline materials – is likely to frustrate the entry-level student using Google for an assignment with a pressing deadline. Having been conditioned to think that Google is the easy way to access all information known to human kind, they may be confused by the frequent dead ends and links to printed books that are only available in libraries.

Conclusion

I think Google is a step or two away from extending its reach to yet another area of information technology… and Google is now that much closer to fulfilling Vannevar Bush’s dream of the Memex.

When it comes to the kind of searching that I might do in order to refresh my lecture notes as I prepare to teach a class (when I’m looking for fresh ideas, rather than any particular answer), as I feel my way though a subject that I don’t know terribly well, or for the casual academic research that I do when pursuing inspiration, backtracking serendipity, or just kicking around a topic for a new proposal, I’ll probably turn to Google Scholar first – but that’s because I’m confident that I will be able to filter the search results as I see them. Students who don’t have that skill won’t be served by Google’s coolness.

Librarians and teachers who don't educate themselves about how to use Google Scholar's strengths, and make a strong case for when and where alternatives are preferable, will do their students a disservice.

--Computers and Writing (George Mason University)

The online syllabus for what appears to be a graduate level course -- that's a hefty weekly reading list, that covers a broad range of topics. The next time I can't think of a blogging topic (which is admittedly rare), I'm coming back here. Compiled by Byron Hawk.

--Writing (in) Cyberspace Hyperpacket (Arizona State University)

A good collection of resources, compiled by Katherine Heenan.

The combination of prolificacy and inattention to accuracy that characterizes this process is highly suggestive of the modern pedagogic technique known as "journaling." For decades, (following, we are probably meant to assume, some breakthrough research at a school of education somewhere) young students have been not merely encouraged but required to fill pages of their notebooks with writing. Not stories, nor essays, nor any other defined genre of writing; just writing. The writing is judged solely on bulk: So many pages are required per week or semester, but the writing on those pages need not be grammatical or even intelligible. Even the "talented and gifted" program at my own sons' school employed journaling as a principal activity, merely raising the quota over that of standard classrooms. It may well be that the practice of journaling in the schools, along with the acceptance of "creative spelling" as a form of personal expression not to be repressed, underlies much of the success of Wikipedia. --Robert McHenry --The Faith-Based Encyclopedia (Tech Central Station)

I tell my students that they shouldn't cite Wikipedia in their academic papers, but I find its coverage of certain cyberspace issues to be current and useful. Accurate? Not always. Free? Very.

I've also edited a few of those articles, and my Writing for the Internet students were required to start a new "topic" on Wikipedia and see what happens.

Wikipedia won't and shouldn't replace traditional sources of information, but rather than tell my students to stay away from such sources completely, I'd rather they develop the critical skills to use the digital resources that are available to them. Students should know how easy it is to alter a Wikipedia document, so they will understand how easy it would be to plant false information. And the majority opinion isn't always right -- history is full of scientific discoveries that were laughed at and silenced by the majority.

--Daniel Radosh
--The Powerpoint Anthology of Literature

Via KairosNews.

But can IF ever be great art, the type which people go back over and over to read or play? A similar question would be: can computer games ever be as evocative or lasting as cinema? While these forms have undeniably not produced anything as transcendent as a Bergman film or a Nabokov novel so far, one has to remember that interactive fiction is still in its infancy.

There is no reason why well-written interactive fiction cannot equal or beat traditional ludic literature, such as the spy novel or the detective story, in quality. Complex literary worlds created in IF may convey moods and feelings, an end in itself. There is also no intrinsic reason why stories cannot have great characters and let choices from the reader shape them? The short answer is that it is too early to answer these questions. The jury is deliberating, and looking to the future. --Swarat Chaudhuri --Tales That Let You (The Statesman)

Via Grand Text Auto.

The title of the article seems to be truncated on the website, and the formatting is choppy in other ways... but if you can get past the sloppy presentation, Chaudhuri's article is a good introduction to the literary issues behind my favorite digital genre.

--IF Comp 2004 Results (IFComp.org)

Luminous Horizons, by Paul O'Brian, is the winner.

This glossary is an ongoing volunter project that aims to define terms that have developed special meaning among those who write, play, and study interactive fiction (which in this case means a specific kind of parser-based computer game, not literary hypertext). The wiki philosophy is that any page in a wiki text is part of a discussion, and no page is ever finished. --Interactive Fiction Glossary (IF Theory Book)

This glossary has been neglected lately, mostly because my new job took up much of the time I had been devoting to interactive fiction. I'd love to see some activity on the IF glossary again.

So, is the academic attention to blogs the same as "selling out," the way punk-rockers sold out when they received public acclamation rather than evoke the sensation of disgust? The attention given to weblogs in the media, elevating blogs to journalism or at least commentary, is one way of colonizing the field. If blogging can be defined within the known genres and boundaries, it can also be restricted and controlled according to known rules and made to submit to already predefined aesthetics. --Torill Mortensen --Personal Publication and Public Attention (Into the Blogosphere)

This year, a significant number of students in my "Writing for the Internet" class had kept their own personal blogs. One had kept a public journal since she was thirteen. These students were immediately aware of the differences between the kind of journaling they were used to doing, and the kind they were expected to do as students at Seton Hill University.

Although I have given students instructions about polite discourse, ad hominem attacks, and the ethics of changing entries after they have been posted, I have never told students what language they should or should not use. Nevertheless, the students recognized that four-letter words were not in casual use on the blogs of other students active in the SHU blogging community. Several of these students responded by continuing to blog on their own personal sites.

Occasionally, online friends follow links from the personal sites to the "academic" sites, and leave comments that feature instant-message-style abbreviations and syntax, as well as in jokes.

A similar thing happens in reverse when students post comments here... strangers respond to what I said, calling me "Dennis," but the students respectfully call me "Dr. Jerz" (even though I am invariably simply "Jerz" when students speak to each other informally offline).

Here I was about to reach back into Mortensen's article for another quote, but since I've met the author, and of course because I read her weblog and see the daily tracks she makes in my server log, my first instinct was to call her "Torill". Perhaps today I'll call her Dr. Mortensen.

Dr. Mortensen asks whether the academic desire to categorize and define will kill the development of a weblog as a living medium.

[H]ow do we imagine a way to study blogs not colonized by the dominant culture? This is a matter of conviction. To a certain degree all cultural criticism is a matter of belief. Those who find that society is gendered will claim that the solution can be found in studying gender-differences, while others find that the alternative to the hegemonic study lies with the non-dominant ethnicities.... Ultimately, communication happens as human beings create meaning from a set of signals which we can call signs (or any other arbitrary collection of symbols we choose).

Firefox 1.0 has excellent bookmark-management features, some of which were present in earlier versions of the browser. Users can, with one click, sort bookmarks according to site name, location, date last visited, etc. The newest bookmark feature is Live Bookmarks, which allows users to browse RSS feeds from their favorite websites directly from the site's bookmark or in sidebar in the browser window. --Firefox 1.0 Makes Flashy Debut  (Wired)

Some kind of spyware got into my laptop computer sometime last month. It very cleverly closed the browser window when I tried to search Google for certain keywords (including, I presume, any keyword that would help me remove whatever virus it was). I loaded Firefox in order to find a good spyware removal tool, and haven't gone back to "Internet Exploder".

Students reared on Internet Explorer look at me blankly when I talk to them about "bookmarks". IE calls them "favorites." But the verb "bookmark" is so much more handy than "add to your favorites" or "favoritize".

I have the version 1.0 preview, and I won't upgrade until the big rush is over. I love the tabbed browsing feature. The search bar is awesome -- when you hit CTRL-F, a search bar appears at the bottom of the screen, and you can immediately start typing. The browser starts searching with the first letter that you enter, so that you don't have to type in a search term and press "Find". For example, to search for "immediately", the page will automatically scroll to the first appearance of the string "i", "im", and "imm" as you type. If there is no word with the string "imm" on the page, you get a soft, blunt burping rejection noise, and part of the search bar flashes red.

I also like that your browsing isn't interrupted by a nagging message saying that you don't have a plug-in required to view the page. Firefox delivers that message in a bar that appears at the top of the browsing window.

While some pages optimized for IE don't work so well (the web page access to Microsoft Outlook offers only a subset of the features available to IE users), my only other complaint is that the firefox logo doesn't look anything like a firefox -- it looks like a little tomato.

After repeating some of Wonkette'snumbers, Sullivan mused, "A Kerry landslide? Could be. Could be." He cautioned the numbers could be misleading, even as he was publicizing them.

This is the kind of stuff we used to run in my aforementioned school paper, when the speculation surrounded who was going steady. The difference is that the bloggers aspire to being a force in our public life and claim to be at the forefront of a new political-media era. It was clear to me, from following their efforts that night, that, unlike journalists, some blog operators who are quick to trash the MSM not only don't care about the veracity of the stories they are spreading, they do not understand when there is a live hand grenade on their keyboard. They appear not to care. Their concern is for controversy and "hits." --Eric Engberg --Blogging As Typing, Not Journalism (CBS News)

And, of course, the big conclusion:

One of the verdicts rendered by election night 2004 is that, given their lack of expertise, standards and, yes, humility, the chances of the bloggers replacing mainstream journalism are about as good as the parasite replacing the dog it fastens on.

While I wouldn't have put it quite so viciously, I think Engberg is right to point out the flaws in the "blogging equals journalism" meme.

Blogging is a good thing. Journalism is a good thing. Journalists can blog. Bloggers can do journalism.

Bloggers need not be parasites on journalism, and journalism need not scorn blogging.

Nevertheless, the essay makes a good case for the dinosaurs.

Colleges have spent millions on "smart classrooms" packed with the latest gadgets to assist teaching -- computerized projection systems, Internet ports at every seat, even video cameras with motion detectors that can track the movements of a lecturer. But colleges have spent far less time and money giving professors the skills to use even the simplest technology effectively.

The result: Students say technology actually makes some of their professors less effective than they would be if they stuck to a lecture at the chalkboard. --Jeffrey R. Young --When Good Technology Means Bad Teaching (Chronicle)

An excellent observation from a student: "Sometimes overheads are better because you can draw on them, and that's kind of an interactive feature that's gone away with PowerPoint."

I very rarely use PowerPoint. I am much more likely to blog on a topic related to an upcoming lecture, and then during class use the links embedded in the blogs as an outline. I ask my students to do the same, though I do find that students seem to have written a conventional paper on a word processor, then pasted it into their blog... it can be rather dry listening to someone read word-for-word what your eyes can scan much more quickly.

I do occasionally load up the word processor, and type examples and thoughts as they occur to me... I sometimes do this on the blackboard when a good discussion is going, but I can take the word processor file with me.

This strategy is an implementation of the "just-in-time teaching" method, which I've found very useful, since my curricular material just keeps getting longer and longer, with more links and more examples, with every year that I teach... and all that information can be overwhelming to a student who sees it all laid out on the first day of classes.

Another student complaint from the article, referring specifically to discussion forums: "Students don't read other students' responses, only those posted by the faculty member. They write responses in order to fulfill the participation requirements of the class."

Each year, on the day after Christmas, scholars and teachers of Modern Languages convene for their annual North American conference.

At that conference, countless job interviews take place -- an early step for some toward achieving a coveted academic position.

9interviews.com documents the progress of nine such scholars, each one committed to attaining a place among the professoriate. --9 Interviews

Via Culturecat. I haven't had the chance to view them yet (not over my slow home modem, that is.) Still, they look very promising.

Many people come here, just as many people seek out the stage, because they know it is a place where they won't have to grow up too quickly, where the fickleness and irresponsibility of youth are a way of life. Pasts and past relationships are shed like so much old luggage. The unspoken, winking conviction among the nubile ingenues and underwear models who sprout from the hot pavement like whack-a-moles is that fidelity is cute but impracticable. (Note that while many romantic comedies come out of Hollywood, none take place here.) And in the city that first brought you silicon, the commingling of technology and romance has always been encouraged. --Out of site  (Guardian)

I started reading this article because the lead mentioned how actors use the Internet Movie Data Base to size up potential dates. But I kept reading because of the writing. Enjoy a high-tech look at romance in Tinseltown.

And for roughly thirty years, almost any description of mailing lists of any length has mentioned flaming, the tendency of list members to forgo standards of public decorum when attempting to communicate with some ignorant moron whose to stupid to know how too spell and deserves to DIE, die a PAINFUL DEATH, you PINKO SCUMBAG!!!

Yet despite three decades of descriptions of flaming, it is often treated by designers as a mere side-effect, as if each eruption of a caps-lock-on argument was surprising or inexplicable.

Flame wars are not surprising; they are one of the most reliable features of mailing list practice. --Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software (Shirky.com)

Shirky extends the well-trodden ground of flamewar analysis to weblog and wiki environments, and touts the Slashdot user moderation solution (and the meta-moderation, which polices the moderation system).

Part of the appeal may be that, unlike many of its antecedents, I Love Bees could not be played just by sitting in front of a screen. Over the Internet, players were able to work together on puzzles, usually hidden in corrupted image files on ilovebees.com. Those answers were just starting points, however. Players then had to use them to respond to the mysterious calls that rang at hundreds of pay phones across the country every Tuesday. --Noah Shachtman --Sci-fi fans called into an alternate reality (NY Times | C-Net)

Reflections on an Emerging Academic Weblog Community (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The Seton Hill blogging community has a small number of dedicated bloggers who generate the vast majority of the activity (at one point I estimated that 5% of our bloggers generate 50% of the activity, though that number changes based on how close we are to a blog portfolio due in one of my classes). This year, it seems that more of the most committed bloggers already had blogs elsewhere, and still keep up their old blogs. One of the new crop of bloginators actually transferred to SHU after she started spending time on the SHU blogs. She wouldn't be here if she didn't have a tendency to blog elsewhere, so naturally she brings a different kind of approach to her blogging.

As the number of points in a network increases arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4) the number of possible connections increases geometrically (1, 4, 9, 16). Already this year I get the sense that the blogging community is not as tight as it was last year, but that is probably simply because we have 160 weblog authors now (though most of those who aren't currently taking a course requiring them to blog aren't touching their blogs).

We have more experienced bloggers in Writing for the Internet than I've ever taught in one place before, and many of them brought with them a network of blogging relationships, which means that the limited energy they have for blogging is shared.

If I were to measure the blogging activity at blogs.setonhill.edu, and draw conclusions about what blogs are and what bloggers do, we would end up with an incomplete image of blogging. When the Perseus data first came out, lone wolf bloggers (those who don't use ready-made packages) were quick to point out the flaws.

Still, the Perseus report put forth this observation:

Blogging is many things, yet the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life. It will be written very informally (often in "unicase": long stretches of lowercase with ALL CAPS used for emphasis) with slang spellings, yet will not be as informal as instant messaging conversations (which are riddled with typos and abbreviations). Underneath the iceberg, blogging is a social phenomenon: persistent messaging for young adults.

If you place it in the proper perspective -- most blogs hosted at large centralized blogging hosting services fit this description -- it all makes sense. Some media figures reacted with such disdain that I wonder if they themselves feel that a teenage girl's social blogging isn't really "blogging". We've discussed several times in "Writing for the Internet" that social blogs, academic blogs, political blogs, and fictional blogs all serve different purposes.

Lampa is right to question that concept of the blogosphere by noting that most blogs, and most bloggers, don't fit that category. But, in the case of SHU, where about 5% of the bloggers generate about 50% of the activity, it's probably still fair to say that most of the *blogging* does fit that category.

It's simply the nature of the medium. A certain kind of blogging perpetuates itself on the Internet. Other kinds don't.

The teenage girl who doesn't link to outside sources and who doesn't read other blogs isn't doing anything wrong -- of course she should feel free to blog however she wants. But she's only engaging in a subset of the activities usually understood as part of blogging. (See Jill Walker's definition of blogging, which was itself generated on her blog, via comments collected from bloggers.)

Bloggers who like reading other blogs, who leave comments on other blogs, and who engage in what I call "xenoblogging" tend to get more comments. If you happen to be someone for whom getting comments is a satisfactory reward for blogging, then you will be encouraged to blog more. If you happen to blog the kind of entries that attract comments, then the more comments you get, the more you will blog. At system that rewards behavior that sustains the system is healthy.

If, on the other hand, you don't particularly care whether anyone comments on your blog, or you don't even blog with a system that permits comments, or you don't track inbound links or other signs of interest from the outside world, then you won't have any incentive to adjust your writing style in order to encourage interaction. We don't tend to come across systems that don't perpetuate themselves or can't adapt, simply because those systems die out. (See "Emergence.")

The writing on such weblogs isn't necessarily worse than the writing on weblogs, it's just less... well... it's less bloggy. If you don't really gain any bloggy benefits from posting an online diary, you won't be motivated to go to the extra trouble to publish your writing online.

At the core of the blogosphere lies a minority of active and engaged bloggers who post, comment, and link frequently, creating a kernel of conversational community based on personal networks facilitated by blogging tools and associated technologies. However, for the vast majority of users who blog casually, infrequently, and for the benefit of their real-world friends and family, the blogosphere does not exist in the ethereal, hyperlinked connections that bind blogs to one another; rather, it resides in the mind of the individual blogger as an online imagined community resulting from the shared experience of instant publishing. -- Graham Lampa --An Introduction to the Imagined Community of Instant Publishing (Into the Blogosphere)

In the 80s, the popular Boderbund software PrintShop made it easy for anyone with a printer to make huge banners (on fan-fold computer paper, of course). People who had never designed a banner or flyer before were suddenly able do it easily -- though not necessarily well. Lampa begins his article by noting statistics taken from the Perseus Development Company survey that labeled two-thirds of weblogs found on large hosted websites are classified as "abandoned". Data from these blogs also show that less than 10% linked to traditional news sources, and 20% don't contain outbound links at all. The survey challenged the notion that weblogs are all (or mostly) updated daily, that they contain political commentary, and that they link to each other and outside sources frequently.

I have some idea of who reads my blog, simply because some of them comment, and others link in. But I get the idea that many more people read my blog than comment on it, simply because frequently when I blog on a topic that has drawn comments from certain people in the past, those people quickly comment on the latest entry, even if they haven't commented on anything else in weeks or months. But I'm not sure what to make of Lampa's claim that

for the vast majority of users who blog casually, infrequently, and for the benefit of their real-world friends and family, the blogosphere does not exist in the ethereal, hyperlinked connections that bind blogs to one another; rather, it resides in the mind of the individual blogger as an online imagined community resulting from the shared experience of instant publishing.

Because I don't see hyperlinks as ethereal, maybe I'm tripped up by the implication that an imagined community is somehow less ethereal (insubstantial, intangible) than what the "typical" social teenage blogger generates in her mind regarding her audience.

If, as the Perseus report concludes, the "typical" social blogger writes casually for a small audience of friends and family, then she probably has a fairly concrete idea of who those friends and family are. That makes sense. But where, then, does "imagination" come into play? How does "imaginary" equate to "less ethereal"? Lampa quotes Benedict Anderson, who writes, "all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined." Marshal McLuhan observed that media technology, which extends the reach of the human senses and expands the capacity of our memory, has the potential to turn the world into a "global village." Lampa also notes the importance of the link economy (where amateurs give their work away for free) as contrasted with the market economy (where experts disseminate their works to the masses). He also notes that consumers of traditional news are only consumers, while bloggers are producers as well as consumers... this alone marks a huge shift in the power structure. This conception of the blogosphere has been examined fairly thoroughly.

Lampa's section on "Filtering Community" covers the basics well, and observes that because bloggers tend to link to and discuss what interests them, "[i]nstead of deciding what will be most profitable to promote, the blogosphere promotes what its members find to be most interesting". Of course, he pretty much means the top 5% of bloggers are the ones with the power, though of course if enough low- or mid-ranking bloggers talk about something, they are bound to attract the attention of one of the A-listers.

Lampa pushes the point as he works to his conclusion: "[T]he community represents a relatively small number of global elites who have the luxury of time, talent, and expendable wealth." I balked for a little bit upon reading that, since the existence of all those dead free blogs on central hosting agencies should be evidence enough that creating blogs are so cheap that they are expendable. But a homeless person can use a computer in a public library in order to maintain a blog, but one has to be homeless in a society that has access to technology. The filtering characteristics of the blogosphere will naturally reward the kind of talent that is required to create content that appeals to the taste of bloggers, but that is little surprise. And, of course, maintaining a blog takes time.

Lampa's conclusion does not dismiss the vast majority of bloggers who blog below the waterline, and ends on an optimistic note that "the imagined blogging community created by the mass ceremony of instant publishing will continue to produce previously unimaginable quantities of indexed, archived, and hyperlinked material that impacts people's every day lives."

I'd like to echo his observation that the nature of blogging necessarily changes as it increases in scale, from a small group of technically-savvy pioneers to a much more diverse and more loosely connected network.

News organizations promised Wednesday to look into why their Election Day exit polls showed an initial surge for John Kerry, but also blamed bloggers for spreading news that gave a misleading view of the presidential race. --Blogs Blamed for Exit Poll Fiasco  (Wired | AP)

The headline is a bit incendiary, but the article makes a good point. Any blogger can post a knee-jerk reaction. I speculate that perhaps bloggers who don't usually read or write about politics dipped their toe into that pool the other day, which means that the production and consumption of political blogging was skewed a little bit more towards newbies.

Thomas Jefferson said that if he had to choose between a nation without newspaeprs or a nation without government, he'd ditch the government and keep the newspapers -- but only on the condition that every man receive a newspaper, and that every man know how to read.

I don't suggest that blogs should or could replace government, but it does take a bit of practice to be able to "read" blogs as pointers towards official and credible information, rather than take every under-supported opinion or unsourced claim as if it were true.

Tim Russert's Electronic Whiteboard (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

"Florida, Florida, Florida," wrote Tim Russert on his famous whiteboard during the 2000 presidential election.

Russert has levelled up to a fancy schmancy digital whiteboard. He filled up the columns with data in red and blue, which was a nice touch, but the displays seemed more static than I remembered them from 2000. Back in the day, Russert had several different whiteboards, which gave the illusion that he was scribbling very rapid changes.

This time around, it seems that Russert felt he had put so much work into creating the one page with the red and blue column, that he didn't want to change it much. I watched NBC from about 11am until the wee hours of the morning (I drifted off for a while as dawn approached), and although he said "Ohio, Ohio, Ohio," at one point, I didn't see him write it.

I seem to recall that one of Russert's Election 2000 whiteboards is preserved in a museum somewhere. While his digital tablet is very cool, I think it was underused. Still, whoever managed to get it on camera tonight is probably going to be very happy about the sales it generates.

Update: See a photo on Engaget

Videogames vs. Television (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

He's done his homework, taken his bath. The six-year-old boy has an hour or so before bedtime. He's already read a book to his little sister, and plans to listen to a book about elections as bedtime reading.

What to do in the meanwhile? Watch a TV show or play a computer game?

His mom would like to sit in the living room and watch a show.

His dad would like to sit in the den and play a game.

The boy gets out his "Electronic Spider Stompin' Game" and pits mommy against daddy. Winner takes all.

Daddy wins by one stomped spider.

Online Syllabus Not "Official" Enough? (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I just got an e-mail from an administrative assistant who wanted a copy of the syllabus for one of my current courses. I sent her the URL of the "syllabus" page of the course website, as well as links to the "outline" and "projects" pages.

She responded that she couldn't get the documents to print without the navigation bar at the top and the URL at the bottom -- did I have a "clean" version that I could send as an e-mail attachment?

While I did some of the early drafting in a simple word processor, I didn't design those syllabi as print documents that I then posted on my curricular weblog.

I did work on a special print-specific stylesheet, since printing from the default Movable Type template results in the rightmost inch of each page being cut off. I recognize that students will print pages in order to mark up and ponder, but I designed the whole site to be consulted and used online.

When I explained this to my correspondent, she cheerfuly said that she would just cut, paste, and photocopy in order to construct a paper-ready document out of the printed web pages.

Problem solved... though I'm still uncomfortable that the presence of navigation buttons at the top of a printed syllabus and a URL at the bottom seem to be challenges to the authority of a syllabus.