Weblogs: April 2005 Archive Page

In the minority are those teachers who have setup their blog/cms as the main home page for their site, integrated into their blog or CMS or at least provide obvious links to their CV, teaching experience, etc, off of the main page of their blog. The blog/CMS is thus positioned as the main public face for establishing professional ethos, an inseparable part of the teacher/researcher's identity. I was actually surprised at how few I have been able to find; it seems a large number of those in the field don't provide direct links to their professional CV or teaching philosophy from the front page of their blog or only a brief mention of their professional affiliation thus making it obvious to me that they would not share their blog as the singular main portal into their professional identity in a cover letter or resume submitted to a hiring committee.

Here's the list I have so far where teachers are building their professional identity into their blog/cms site, or at least featuring the blog as their home page with direct links back to CV, bio, etc.

• Matt Barton
• Johndan Johnson-Eilola
• Dennis Jerz
• Charles Lowe
• Clancy Ratliff
• Rich Rice
• Clay Spinuzzi

Anyone have suggestions for other sites in rhetoric and composition with these characteristics? I'm sure there must be some more out there and I'd like a few more examples. --Teachers Who Position Their Blog or CMS as their Professional Home Page (KairosNews)

I discovered an abandoned deposit in my company owned by one of our Outer Rim customers who died along with his entire family as a result of an landspeeder crash. He actually deposited this funds amounting to IC12,000,000,000.00 (Twelve billion Imperial Credits), for safe keeping in my company here in Mos Eisley. Company file records shows that the funds was actually for a project our late costumer wanted to start in the near future (a multi million Dollar Spice plant in Kessel), before his sudden and untimely death. As such since his death none of his relations or next-of-kin has come forward to lay claims for this property as the heir, this is the basically the reason why I have contacted you. My company cannot release the roperty unless someone applies for claim as the next-of-kin to the deceased as indicated in our operating guidelines. --PRIVATE AND URGENT (The Darth Side)

Amusing comment posted to Darth Vader's blog. ("Tomorrow I may strangle General Veers.")

Goodbye, Blogdex (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I used to love Blogdex, but today's "most contagious information currently spreading in the weblog community" are measured by a grand total of three links. So I've taken it off my blogroll. (I can't remember the last time I did that.)

The last announcement was posted in October of 2004, and that announcement hasn't been cleared of the spam that has collected there over the past few months.

I'm glad Technorati is still operating, but I do miss Blogdex.

Although the English word weblog is known in other languages, this has not prevented translations to appear. In Spanish, for example, weblog in general has apparently been translated using the journal-style kind of definition. In effect, in Spanish, weblogs are more commonly referred to as bitácoras, even though the word weblogs is well known. The word bitácora refers in the first place to the journals kept by captains of the old vessels that sailed across oceans, for example the ones used by Spaniards and Portuguese to arrive to the American continent in 1500. A bitácora is clearly different form a personal diary or diario íntimo in Spanish because it implies a trip. It is the account of events that happen during a long journey or physical movement from one place to another. This metaphor of movement in the Spanish language does not exist as clearly in English. Nevertheless, the word journal is used to call those weblogs that have a more personal or intimate tone. --Virginia Melián --Weblogs: nodes of participation in a global context? Non-expert publishing in many languagesDigital Divide and the Media: Challenges for Communication and Democracy)

This seems to be a paper delivered at a conference called Digital Divide and the Media: Challenges for Communication and Democracy.

I really hate PDFs... using Firefox, I can't copy and paste more than one line at a time from the HTML document that Google generated from the PDF original, so the process of posting an excerpt from a PDF is a royal pain.

Are libraries and librarians willing to support initiative to provide weblog support for their community? The University of Minnesota Libraries think so: “It is our goal to develop a blog server through which everyone in the university community (faculty, staff, and student) can have access to their own individual blog” (University of Minnesota Libraries, accessed December 7, 2004). Other campuses are also providing students and staff with the means to creatE their own blogs. Though not library-initiated, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School hosts “Weblogs at Harvard Law,” which allows anyone with a harvard.edu e-mail address to create their own weblog. (John Harvard’s Journal 2004) Seton Hall University students can create their own weblogs with a service provided by the Humanities Division and the New Media Journalism program ([Jerz], accessed December 7, 2004). -- Reichardt, Randy and Geoffrey Harder, Science & Technology Libraries, 25(3), p105-116. --Weblogs: Their Use and Application in Science and Technology Libraries (PDF) (Science & Technology Libraries)

That's Seton Hill University.

It's a good article, nevertheless.

"Certainly, I didn't do as much as I should have after all the excitement of the late 1990s. I suspect many of you in this room did the same, quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp away." --Rupert Murdoch, "old media" mogul. --News must adapt to web, says Murdoch  (Guardian)

Simply counting the volume of conversations and comments and the number of trackbacks is one indication of the size and scope of the network surrounding your blog. Whether or not those comments are in agreement or disagreement requires content analysis, but presumably positive or neutral comments would be indicative of a healthy relationship between the blogger and his/her audience.

Examining the credibility and authority of the people who are commenting and/or linking to the site is another way to assess the impact and importance of the blog.

One needs to look beyond just quantity of postings or links to the quality of the dialog. I like the way Dennis G. Jerz of Seton Hill University categorizes blogs in his classroom and have adapted his categories below:

"Coverage" -- The number of times your brand or issue is mentioned.
"Depth" -- How deeply does the posting discuss the brand? Is it just a passing mention or does the blogger go into the subject in depth with numerous links?
"Interaction" -- What was the nature of the interaction? Was the posting designed to solve a problem, compare different brands, or simply allow the author to rant?
"Discussion" -- What was the nature of the discussion? Was it a true dialog with extensive exchange of ideas, or was it just bantering back and forth.

Jerz further classifies comments as:

Comment Primo -- a comment that launches a discussion on someone else's blog
Comment Grande -- a long comment posted on a peer blog, which is then advertised via a cross-blog posting
Comment Informative -- in which a commenter uses his or her particular knowledge in order to flesh out a general or incomplete statement made in a peer's blog entry
Link Gracious -- a link that draws attention to the source of an idea or to a good conversation happening on someone else's blog

Consider also adding Tonality, an indicator of the health of the relationship between the blog community and the brand. If the tone of the posting leaves a reader less likely to do business with your organization it is negative. If the posting leaves a reader more likely to do business with your organization, or recommends the brand, it is positive. If it essentially just discusses facts it is neutral or balanced. --Katie Delahaye Paine and Andy Lark --How To Measure Blogs, Part One... and what to do with the data (The Measurement Standard (via Cymfony))

Apparently the folks at Cymfony were so excited that they appeared in this (subscription-only) article that they pasted the whole thing on their website. I've added extra line breaks for legibility. The link goes to Cymfony's copy, but it originally appeared on The Measurement Standard. I note that authors removed "xenoblogging" and "wildcard" from the categories I proposed, and their interpretation of "interaction" is very different from what I intended. Still, it's a good article, one to which I'll return fairly soon, since this summer I'll be helping two different university administrative units launch PR blogs.

Odd that the article is written in the first person, but is credited to two authors.

Six Apart plans to release version 3.16 of Movable Type this Monday, April 18. The new release includes over 100 bug fixes and improvements including significant security fixes making this a must-have for all Movable Type installations. --Movable Type 3.16 on the way (neil's world)

Aah, phooey... just this afternoon I finally upgraded from MT 2.65 to MT 3.15. One weekend and it'll be obsolete.

I really like MT 3.15's comment moderation feature. If someone posts a comment that looks like spam, MT can hold it for moderation -- that is, the blog owner has to click a button to publish the comment.

Once students users approve a comment from a poster, other comments from that poster get approved automatically.

The only complaint I have is that comments awaiting moderation show up on a page that I created to show all comments across all blogs, a page which doesn't seem to be rebuilding anyway. Hmm... that's a bother, but I've been at it long enough today. Time to go home.

First of all there are two categories of blogs. One is the traditional web-log where a web surfer shares his online discoveries. And the second is the web diary where person shares his or her thoughts of the day. --John C. Dvorak --Understanding and Reading a Blog (for Newcomers) (Dvorak.org)

Interesting... Dvorak uses the masculine pronoun to describe "the traditional web-log," but uses both masculine and feminine pronouns to describe "the web diary." (See my handout on gender-neutral language.)

I spent quite a bit of time sorting through (and adding to) my collection of blogging-related bookmarks. Several of these have been linked here previously, but I thought it would be useful to compile them for easy reference. Here, for example is a (perhaps somewhat arbitrary) collection of blog criticisim links... --William Cole --Blogging Workshop (Donut Age)

A useful collection of links... I'm flattered to be on it.

Shizzam! This, my friends, is entry #201! Hard to believe that only 8 months ago, I wrote my very first entry here on the Seton Hill University blog system. I don't think I could say enough positive things about blogging:

1) I get to be part of a large r community of like-minded individuals - we are all here to learn, to get a decent education complete with a college degree that (we hope) will lead us on to bigger and brighter things.

2) My writing has noticeably improved over the last eight months - I've been forced to tailor what I say to suit my audience (less swearing for instance) and to transform "forced blogging" assignments into something that I hope is interesting for other people to read. This is an essential skill for a person who's hoping to make a career of words.

3) I have a ready made audience at my fingertips. This is a great thing.

4) Blogging got me a job! (at the Writing Center with a whole other community of great people! sweet!)

Okay. enough. We now return to our regular programming. --Moira Richardson --Joy of Blogging - Entry #201 (Literary Tease)

Moria is one of my students. This is one of those examples of student enthusiam and achievement that I just want to print out and hang on the wall, to remind me why I love this job -- and to keep me going when thinks look bleak.

Note that each letter of the word "larger" is a link to a fellow bloginator. Very clever!

They Took It Sitting Down (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The other night, about a third of my American Lit survey class insisted on sitting on the floor. They pushed the chairs aside and clumped together in the front of the room. The weather was nice, but we couldn't go outside because a student was using her blog for her presentation. So I guess this was the next best thing.

The sitters were bloginators -- part of the core of English majors who put more than average effort into their academic blogging. I think on some level they were trying to assert control over the class. They weren't aggressive or rude about it... in fact, they asked my permission first, so I can hardly call it a protest or a rebellion. I had to position myself in a strange way so I could make eye contact with them and also the rest of the class, but it was a harmless, cheerful request.

American Lit is a general education course, which means that I have to teach so that it makes sense to students who've never taken a lit course, and who may resent being forced to take it. But the students who have had me in other classes have already heard me explain the difference between plot summary and critical analysis; they have heard me explain why it's important to keep up to date on your blog (and not try to get it all done the night before the portfolio is due); and they have heard me give the lecture on the importance of finding peer-reviewed academic sources before you commit to a thesis statement. And they've heard me repeat those lessons several times (since they themselves might have needed a while to accept it). So I can't blame them if they feel a little bored.

I don't require the class to read all their peer blogs, but many of the English majors already read each other's blogs for social purposes. So the most vocal group comes into the classroom already knowing what the most active participants want to say about that week's reading. I had to remind some of the more intense bloggers that they are welcome to blog more than they are required to, but for a while there we had a kind of digital divide. The online part of the class was going well, but the most committed bloggers felt the class discussion was redundant.

Sometimes I feel I'm able to go into much more depth in the freshman "Intro to English Study" course. While the students in that class have a diversity of attitudes towards such things as punctuation and academic research, they all enjoy writing. Today when I passed out photocopies of a book chapter on Death of a Salesman, one of the freshmen noticed my name on the handout and beamed. She held it like it was a precious gift, and she practically cooed, "Oh! You wrote this?" It sounded completely spontaneous, not at all calculated to flatter me. And of course, these freshmen will be among the bloginators taking American Lit survey courses next year... and I'll have to teach them alongside students who don't like writing or reading.

When I humbly went to the Ed school seeking advice, the boss was adamant that I shouldn't even think of lightening up on the course content simply to make the education majors feel less terror (or rage). He pointed out that Ed students take the course to fulfill two area requirements -- literature and American culture. If they feel the course is too difficult, he says, they are welcome to drop the one course and take two others that are less demanding -- if they want to pay double the tuition.

Next year, the American Lit surveys will go from a lecture (capped at 35) to a writing-intensive seminar (capped at 18). I welcome the change, especially because I'm teaching two sections of Am Lit in both the fall and spring terms -- one on Tuesday and Thursday, and one on Wednesday evening. I like that arrangement. The two sets of students will be able to read each other's blogs, but they won't talk about the same things in the classroom. Each week, half of the course content will be freshly prepared just for them, and half will be a tweaked and revised version of material I had just presented the day before.