Weblogs: February 2005 Archive Page

--Drive-by Blogging (Google)

Weblog portfolios are due soon, so there's more activity than usual on my students' weblogs. Moira mentioned that fellow student Evan Reynolds had used the term "drive-by blogging" to describe the sudden rush of blog entries that fill in the gaps and fulfill the requrements of the weblog portfolio assignment. That was a new one to me.

A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of "web log.") Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People. --Michael Gorman --Revenge of the Blog People! (Library Journal)

Gorman's op-ed piece isn't easily accessible online, but I've found someone's cached PDF copy.

Gorman writes, "When it comes to recorded knowledge, a snippet from page 142 must be understood in the light of pages 1 through 141 or the text was not worth writing and publishing in the first place." He is talking about Google's plan to digitize the contents of some huge libraries and serve them up to online searchers. The original material that was initially published as books, so from that perspective Gorman is correct. Still, there are queries for information that don't logically have to lead to a patron's request to check out a book. And while I, too, find it distressing when my students habitually click the "full text only" option when they are using the library catalog on campus, literally across the street from the library's stacks of printed journals, today's students have developed the digital literacy that helps them to multitask much more efficiently than their sequentially-working elders. Thus, it's hardly productive to sniff at the information-processing skills that students have developed through their entertainment and social uses of the internet.

I don't think it's a bad thing that Google will let people idly peek at a fact in a book that they would otherwise never see. At the very least, they'll have had that peek. And I bet that some of the dusty books that would otherwise have never been found will get more readers than they have now.

I have some sympathy for Gorman's position... for anyone to claim that Google reveals God's mind is ridiculous. Still, I'm stunned that the president-elect of the American Library Association and Dean of Library Services at a major university would brag in the year 2004 that he knew barely anything about weblogs.

Checkmate in Four (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

My seven-year-old son whipped my butt in chess last night.

He's beaten me before... once when I was paying attention to fending off an attack deep in my territory, and he suddenly popped his rook out from behind a row of pawns, pinning down my king.

I'm embarrassed to say that he did the exact same move on me yesterday, so he actually beat me twice in the same day. In my defense I don't play as aggressively as I could. He often doesn't protect his queen when he launches into an attack mode, and although he knows rooks, bishops and knights are worth more than pawns, he often makes bad sacrifices. So at some point I will focus only on blocking his attacks, keeping the game going as long as possible, unless he makes an obvious mistake.

If he plays well, I will let him get a pawn to my end of the board, and once he's gotten an extra queen I'll shift into fighting for my life. The two times he used his rook to pin down my king I was surprised, but since I had deliberately held back at an earlier stage, I didn't think much of it.

But last night, I moved the king's pawn forward and didn't guard it or cover the gap with another piece, so that he was able to get his bishop off to one side and take out the pawn with his queen. There I was, slack-jawed.

"I got that from a book," he chirped. "But you moved your knights differently."

My boy, who will dance in front of the mirror for fifteen minutes with one sock on if I don't remind him to put the other one on, made eye contact, leaned very close, and whispered, "Daddy, you should really watch the whole board."

The other day, after reading a few blog entries I've recently posted about Peter, my wife said, "Peter's getting old enough that he might want some privacy. I wonder if he knows that you blog his whole life."

"Not his whole life," I mumbled.

Peter chimed in: "He doesn't know the future!"

And so the darkness touches the links, and the darkness tastes their power, and the darkness broods and breeds in its desire. The dragon of the night rises, corporations tangled in its wings. It leaves the links powerless, the search-engines crippled, and the readers lost as the rankings swell like rivers and the paths of cyberspace are flooded.

The name of the darkness is marketing economy, and all it touches turns into tinned, cold meat. --Torill Mortensen --Ragnarok will see no blogs (Thinking with my fingers)

Amusingly oblique but poignant prose.

I shake my angry fist at tinned meat!

Several events have sparked a debate about whether an ethical threshold has been crossed: the decision by Marqui, a company in Vancouver, to pay bloggers to mention the company; Newsweek'srevelation that a group of 100 technologists in Silicon Valley accepts free products and services in return for word-of-mouth endorsements (or not); and the news that BzzAgent, a 3-year-old Boston company, has enlisted thousands of volunteers to generate buzz for clients? products, sometimes in ethically questionable ways.

The ground is shifting so rapidly that the Word of Mouth Marketing Association last week released a draft Code of Ethics to help define the rules of the road. (The group invites the public to participate in the process.) --J.D. Lasica --The cost of ethics: Influence peddling in the blogosphere (Online Journalism Review)

It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs to some degree members of the MSM, and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward as fact information that is incorrect, specious or cooked. You lose status and respect if your take on a story that is patently stupid. You lose status and respect if you are unprofessional or deliberately misleading. And once you've lost a sufficient amount of status and respect, none of the other bloggers link to you anymore or raise your name in their arguments. And you're over. The great correcting mechanism for people on the Web is people on the Web. --Peggy Noonan --The Blogs Must Be Crazy  (Opinion Journal)

An excellent assessment of the power of blogs, written by a MSM ("mainstream media") insider.

Many thanks for responding to my brief survey. My name is Ashley Holmes, and I am conducting some descriptive research as part of my M.A. thesis in composition under the direction of Dr. Chris Anson at NC State University. Most of my work has involved collecting and describing cases of blogs used for the teaching of college composition. I am interested in cataloguing and analyzing the various uses to which blogs are being put. To enrich the information I have gathered, I would greatly appreciate your responses to some brief questions about your use of blogs in your teaching. The survey below should take you only a few minutes of your time, but your responses will be enormously helpful to me in my project.

When you submit your responses, they are sent only to me in email format. If you would like more information about my project or this survey, please contact me at ashley_holmes@ncsu.edu. Many thanks in advance for your help. --Use of Blogs in the Classroom: A Very Brief Survey (North Carolina State University)

--Wahoooooo! We're off and blogging, getting er done! (John Haddad)

One of my students demonstrates his enthusiasm for a new semester of blogging.

blogs.setonhill.edu Hacked (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Many of the pages on the blogs.setonhill.edu website have been taken over. As far as I can tell, the blogs are operating correctly and the data are all safe, but the hack is taking over the display. Very frustrating, I am sure, for SHU bloggers.

I'm seeking help right now.

Update: It looks like the blog entries and everything else that bloggers have put into the site are all safely locked away. The only files that seem to have been affected are index files. So if you "Rebuild" your site, all the functionality should return.

Rebuilding the site won't plug the security hole, which seems to be at the ISP that SHU pays to host blogs.setonhill.edu. More updates as soon as I get them.

Deni Rust, 34, of McCandless, continued her husband's journal after his death, using the Web site he created to immortalize his writings, to establish a guest book where friends and family can share memories, and to post her thoughts as each day passes.

A year later, Deni Rust still struggles to live with her grief. Her Web journal has become part catharsis, part weekly update, part cry for help. She has received e-mails from faraway strangers who offer support, and she believes the journal is, in a way, necessary for her to survive. --Alana Semuels --An online chronicle of grief (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Very painful to read, and very human. Thanks for the link, Julie.