Weblogs: May 2005 Archive Page

The traditional, dominant method for getting academic work, research and ideas reviewed and accepted by peers is for work to be published via a recognised source. Publication in a acknowledged journal demonstrates the work meets a required standard for acceptance into the academic community.

When an academic is working on an idea at a very low level they may call upon colleagues within their department to revise and pass comments. However, this process is less well suited for work that is at the ?working or draft stage?; i.e., not quite ready for submission for publication, but well past the beginning stages of development. It would be ideal if a wider body of reviewers could assess the work. --David Tosh and Ben Werdmuller --Weblogs: a contributory element to the research dissemination process (ePortfolio Research and Development Community)

If you like, you can see Google's HTML translation. [Update, 31 May: Karissa tells me that the URL is broken. Oh, well.]

It's kind of nice to see, in the opening paragraph, references to blogging at Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, the University of British Columbia... and our own Seton Hill University. We weren't worth mentioning by name in the body of the article, apparently, but there we are, in footnote 5.

The educator's anonymous Web log, set at an unnamed university "in the South," spun tales of spoiled-rich "Ashleys" with their $500 sandals and $1,500 handbags, eating disorders, plagiarism and drug use, legal and illegal.

"At this school it seems like every kid is on multiple medications," the professor wrote, describing her charges as "barely literate," prone to emotional problems and "terrified of displeasing Mommy and Daddy." --Thomas Korosec --SMU lecturer takes heat for telling blog (Houston Chronicle)

Liner, the author of "Phantom Professor" weblog, is actively shopping her story around.

"I heard the two words every writer waits a lifetime to hear," she said. "Movie deal."

Ah! Leave it to Hollywood to rescue us from all that pesky soul-searching about boundaries and ethics.

Something important is happening in the world of journalism:. It's an evolution from the lecture model, to which we in mass media have become accustomed in the past century, to something closer to a conversation. The shift stems from the collision of technology with media.

This evolution is having an effect on all three major constituencies of journalism. The most important of those is what I call the former audience -- the people who until recently were our readers, listeners and viewers, who until recently were either buying our lectures or not. --Dan Gillmor --What Professional and Citizen Journalists Can Learn From Each Other (Bayosphere)

Whether there is a subscription requirement or a Site Pass, there is still a wall around Salon's content -- and that means the blogosphere ignores it. Without this persistent cross-linking, relatively few read its words, and as history is being made -- or Googled -- every day, Salon's footsteps in cyberspace become fainter and fainter. --Adam L. Pennenberg --Salon's Balancing Act (Wired)

Murdered blogger's last entry helps find killer (Suspect admits to the deed) Here's his last entry. --Murdered Blogger's Last Entry Helps Find Killer (Metafilter)

The comments left on Metafilter add much more to the story than those left on the victim's site.

If blogging is both the construction of a personal knowledge artefact and an ecological practice, which reveals emergent knowledges as a series of dynamically linked spaces, this immediately focuses any pedagogy of blogging on questions of connectivity and the evolution of ideas over time.

I am therefore becoming increasingly convinced that blogs used across classes over the duration of a degree course, rather than blogs focused on specific assignment tasks or blogs developed for single semester units are a more congruent use of this technology.

If students were encouraged to establish a blog at the beginning of their course and continued to use it to post research notes, stories and reflections throughout their degree studies, this would become a unique and powerful teaching and learning tool. The blog would evolve together with (and record) the student's learning and practice experience. --Marcus O'Donnell --Blogging as pedagogic practice: artefact and ecology (Blogtalk Downunder)

I agree. The panel I proposed for next year's 4Cs was sparked by the realization that more and more students are coming into our classes with experience as social bloggers (or with a knowledge of other social networking programs, like friendster, P2P file sharing, and IM culture in general), and on the role of their academic blogging as it is situated in the larger context of the blogosphere. Only the very young or the very cutting-edge people in the composition field have the proper experience to assess this dynamic.

O'Donnell's article also references Patricia Remmell's KairosNews posting, "Falling out of love with blogging," which sparked an excellent discussion of a topic rarely discussed in the blogosphere (for perhaps obvious reasons).

Via Kairosnews.

Extracurricular Blogging Roundup (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Grades are in, and the semester is winding down. Things are fairly quiet on blogs.setonhill.edu, but that doesn't mean the site is dead.

Our admissions director, Mary Kay Cooper, continues to maintain her Training for the Ride of a Lifetime fitness blog, and she has also recently started the Seton Hill University Admissions blog.

The Setonian's news editor and online editor, Amanda Cochran, has posted her personal thoughts about her first day in a newswriting internship at the local paper.

Mike Rubino is one of SHU's most prolific bloggers, even though he has never taken a class with me. He frequently posts about the comedy improv troupe of which he's a member, The Cellar Dwellars. He just posted a tremendous account of what happened when the Cellar Dwellars were recognized by people in the crowd as they waited for the midnight showing of Star Wars.

Karissa Kilgore has recently posted about the astronomy, math, and philosophy courses she's taking this summer, as well as her struggles to get caffeine.

Mike Sichok waxes nostalgic over Nine Inch Nails, the 24th in a long-standing series of music reviews he has posted to his blog.

Oh, and if you'd like to see a photo of the top-level administrators of Seton Hill University waving flyswatters to the tune of "The Blue Danube Waltz," take a look at the photos I posted from the Seton Hill Unviersity faculty and staff end-of-year party.

1. Know and follow IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines.
2. Blogs, wikis and other forms of online discourse are individual interactions, not corporate communications. IBMers are personally responsible for their posts. Be mindful that what you write will be public for a long time -- protect your privacy.
3. Identify yourself -- name and, when relevant, role at IBM -- when you blog about IBM or IBM-related matters. And write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of IBM.
4. If you publish a blog or post to a blog and it has something to do with work you do or subjects associated with IBM, use a disclaimer such as this: "The postings on this site are my own and don?t necessarily represent IBM?s positions, strategies or opinions."
5. Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.
6. Don?t provide IBM?s or another?s confidential or other proprietary information.
7. Don't cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their approval.
8. Respect your audience. Don't use ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, etc., and show proper consideration for others' privacy and for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory -- such as politics and religion.
9. Find out who else is blogging on the topic, and cite them.
10. Don't pick fights, be the first to correct your own mistakes, and don't alter previous posts without indicating that you have done so.
11. Try to add value. Provide worthwhile information and perspective.
--Guidelines for IBM Bloggers: Executive Summary (IBM)

A good set of guidelines for the blogosphere in general.

Six in ten among the public feel the media show bias in reporting the news, and 22% say the government should be allowed to censor the press. More than 7 in 10 journalists believe the media does a good or excellent job on accuracy--but only 4 in 10 among the public feel that way. And a solid 53% of the public think stories with unnamed sources should not be published at all.

Perhaps the widest gap of all: 8 in 10 journalists said they read blogs, while less than 1 in 10 others do so. Still, a majority of the news pros do not believe bloggers deserve to be called journalists.

Asked who they voted for in the past election, the journalists reported picking Kerry over Bush by 68% to 25%. In this sample of 300 journalists, from both newspapers and TV, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 3 to 1--but about half claim to be Independent. As in previous polls, a majority (53%) called their political orientation ?moderate,? versus 28% liberal and 10% conservative. --Joe Strupp --New Survey Finds Huge Gap Between Press and Public on Many Issues (Editor & Publisher)

This article notes that the survey may have over-sampled upper management, with 43% of respondents being editors or news directors, many of them well-paid, and only 47% rank-and-file reporters.

Are classic essays like Swift's still being written, or has the elegant thoughtfulness that is the essay's legacy been winnowed away by its rapacious bastard offspring, the blog? And will the Internet generation, suffused by the blogosphere, lose the ability to write essays altogether? (The plethora of essays for sale online to students portends they may.)

Blogging has replaced the real essay for most people under 30, just as the Internet has replaced the daily newspaper. Polls show more than 60 percent of online readers trust independent news sources like blogs over mainstream news sources. But while blogs provide immediacy, they also breed inaccuracy - from spelling and grammatical errors to errors of fact. An essay, despite the immediacy and passion with which it might have been written, has still been perused by an editor, a copy editor and a fact-checker before it saw print. (Even Swift had an editor.) A blog has been reviewed by no one, edited by no one - not even, in many cases, been proofread by the author.

Some bloggers, such as Andrew Sullivan and Richard Scheer, are former newsmen with real journalistic credentials. Others, like Matt Drudge, are more like Stowe's Topsy - they just grew. Blogland isn't like the world of mainstream journalism, and bloggers are not usually serious essayists like Sullivan or Scheer. Any dot-commer can blog - a serious journalist with years of experience like, say, myself, or the teenager down the block spewing political rants during breaks from Grand Theft Auto. The problem in the blogosphere is that the kid and I will be received with equal credibility. --Victoria A. Brownworth --The Long Arm of the Blog (BaltimoreSun.com)

While Matt Drudge has often been lumped with bloggers, his site is a collection of links, with an occasional news/gossip exclusive. Drudge has shown what the democratization of journalism means for politics, but to compare him to an essayist is like comparing a ballet dancer to a polka dancer. Yes, both are dancers, but the set of skills involved are completely different. I can't tell you how many times that an outsider's attempt to analyze the blogosphere reminds me of the old story of the blind men and the elephant.

Citing the prevalence of online essay banks and the prevalence of bloggers in the same paragraph, and then implying that the two are somehow causally related is silly. Online essay banks were there long before the bloggers showed up.

For someone who strikes such a literate tone, I'm surprised Brownworth starts off with this example: "But blogs are pretenders to the throne of true essay writing. They mimic the essay much as Eliza Doolittle mimicked the Queen's English before Professor Higgins got his hands on her." Excuse me? While Eliza does show up at Higgins's house asking for lessons, she doesn't make any attempt to mimic the Queen's English beforehand. It's only Higgins who, intellectually smug and self-assured, gets it into his head that if only Eliza spoke more properly, he could pass her off as a duchess. "I could even get her a place as lady's maid or shop assistant, which requires better English."

If you consider what happens to Eliza after Higgins makes her too good for Covent Garden, and she gets tired of the ruse that lets her play the lady, I'm not so sure that Shaw's Pygmalion is the literary example I would choose if I were trying to make a point about the superiority of essays to blogs.

Brownworth dismisses all the things that blogs do better than essays, so naturally when she evaluates blogs on the same set of criteria that have been historically developed for essays, she's going to find bloggers come up short.

"Bloggers are more Web-cam style diarists than essayists," she says. Okay. And the average essayist, if placed in front of a web cam, would produce a pretty boring video diary -- if judged according to the criteria that are active in the webcam community.

As a writing teacher, I struggle to get students to plan ahead, to condense, to revise. So I can identify with Brownworth's woes. But an experienced diaryblogger has a certain set of skills that a non-writer has never developed.

Brownworth, whose essay invokes Orwell to attack the achievements of bloggers, uses a bit of Orwellian rhetoric herself. Brownworth's final warning, " Blogland is a sprawl, fast encroaching on the fragile landscape of the finely wrought essay," invokes the "urban sprawl" that encroaches on the "landscape" of pristine nature.

This presumes that the "finely wrought essay" is natural, while it is in fact the result of hundreds of years of conventions, aesthetic rules and personal judgments.

The essay is just as artificially constructed as the weblog. Yes, the essay has been around for hundreds of years, but its existence depends upon the existence of an intellectual aristocracy of educated men and women with the necessary leisure time to write back and forth to each other about subjects that they deem important, using rhetorical techniques and organizational patterns that they themselves deem effective.

The great Greek orators voiced similar complaints about a vulgar form of communication that they said killed spontaneity, and would permit anyone with a smattering of technical skill to masquerade as a great communicator.

The bastard art the Greek orators derided was called "writing".

Link via metafilter.

I have recently decided that not being in a class that requires blogging is a bad thing. Because i am not required to do blogging, i don't do it. This isn't because i don't want to, it is because i don't have time to. If it were required, i would make time to do it, seeing as how blogging would be a part of my homework. I fear that in mentioning this, i am going to be bombed with blog-required classes, but, i almost look forward to it *shudder* So, next semester blogs, come on, bring it on. I will be attempting to blog over the summer, although i don't know how often this will be... --Lori Rupert --I bid thee farewell (Kaleidoscope)

One of my students posted this pretty much on her way out the door for the summer.

No one at Southern Methodist University knew -- for sure -- who The Phantom Professor was. The professor's blog, like those of many untenured academics, was anonymous and the university was never named. --Scott Jaschik --'The Phantom Professor' (Inside Higher Ed)

A professor blogs anonymously, venting about the campus crime and the wealthy socialites in her classes. SMU officials admit that they know about the blog, they admit that they worry about the blog, and they admit that they think Elaine Liner might be the blogger. I'm not sure about the timeline of events, but an editorial in the school paper is involved.

Elaine Liner doesn't get rehired.

Fired for blogging? Is this a first amendment issue?

The First Amendment reads, in its entirety, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

What, exactly, does Congress have to do with Southern Methodist University's decision not to rehire a popular and talented writing professor?

"SMUAshley" is right: "You had free speech -- your blog was published. What you don't want is consequences of that speech."

Liner might have been better off saving all those stories for a tell-all book, after she has carefully scrubbed it clean from any details that might identify individuals.

Come to think of it, might sell even better now, given the publicity it has received.

We edubloggers talk and write about this a lot, this idea that the tools of the Read/Write Web necessarily change the relationships and construction of the classroom. When audience moves from one teacher to many readers, when assessment moves measuring correctness to measuring usefulness, when we ask for long lasting contribution of ideas instead of short-lived answers to narrow questions, it requires us to rethink our roles as teachers and to redefine our curricula. Remember, we don't own the content any longer. Our students teach us the tools. They are already connecting and collaborating. To hold on to the vertical classroom is to risk irrelevance...soon. --Will Richardson --Horizontal Classrooms (Weblogg-ed)

Okay, okay, I'm rethinking, I'm rethinking!

The columnist who once ran for governor of California launched a Web site called The Huffington Post on Monday. It features dozens of name-brand bloggers, as well as news coverage. Is this a welcome addition or an unwanted intrusion? --Blogs of the Rich and Famous (AOL -- Daily Pulse)

Now this is funny... when AOL is tweaking you for not getting it, you know you're in trouble.

It almost seems like some sick hoax. Perhaps Huffington is no longer a card-carrying progressive but now a conservative mole. Because she served up liberal celebs like red meat on a silver platter for the salivating and Hollywood-hating right wing to chew up and spit out. --Nikki Finke --Deadline Hollywood: Arianna's Blog Blows (LA Weekly)

The Huffington Post: First Response (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

What will be the contributions of a large bunch of people, who could have blogged on their own if they wanted to, but were motivated to do so by the Arianna Huffington brand name?

I briefly checked out The Huffington Post today. I was never too impressed by the collective achievements of the celebrity intellectuals that Salon pulled together in its heyday. The experiment will expose a wider range of people to the potential of the internet.

John Cusack's entry on Hunter S. Thompson is probably the most literate and engaging thing on the site. Playwright David Mamet has some existential fun with the nature of truth and authority in the blogosphere; I hope his future entries are less "cutesy." Scientist and media expert Jay Winsten's comment on the Center for Disease Control's overstatement of the effects of obesity on health also caught my eye.

A significant number of the other contributors are of the "My homework assignment was to post a blog entry... how does this work?" variety. See Al Eisele, a columnist whose blog entry reads like a column, and the co-blog of writer Brad Hall and actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who attempt a comedy routine. Including charter school activist Roger Lowenstein was a good idea, since his criticism of teacher unions and the left in general will deflect criticisms that Huffington is simply trying to create a liberal echo chamber, but somebody ought to tell him to break up his prose into browser-friendly chunks. On the other hand, comedian Ellen DeGeneres, who has written several humor books in a narrative, conversational writing style, seems right at home in the medium. She should really choose link text that is more cognitively or emotionally significant than the word "here," but that's a common characteristic in the writing of hypertext newbies.

Does that little graphic of the speaker really need to be Flash animation? Why wouldn't a GIF suffice?

I do like the openness the site shows on its wire feed... while there's no way for visitors to post comments to the blogs written by the contributors I've mentioned above, it is possible to comment on wire stories (which are excerpted on site) and on Huffington Post exclusives. The site invites leads and scoops, so it's in direct competition with The Drudge Report, the retro design of which is getting less and less cool every day.

Well, the grades for graduating seniors are due today, so it's back to the salt mines for me.

Update: Online reviews from AOL ("Blogs of the Rich and Famous") and the LA Weekly ("Arianna's Blog Blows").

A Metafilter poster echoes Yeats: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards blogging to be born."

My goodness, that Metafliter post is full of good bits. The next comment says The Huffington Post is "like a Drudge Report, only happier and more famous."

And check out the hilarious Guardian spoof.

The appeal of the blogs? Humor seems to be the biggest attraction. Ironic detachment from the news, an ability to deflate egos and refreshing, undisguised opinion are also valued. All are antithetical to most news organizations.

American newspapers traditionally and scrupulously segregate fact-based reporting from opinion by designating pages for each. Radio and television try to ensure that opinion remains secondary to reporting. Conclusions should be drawn warily. Bloggers tend not to care if they, and their readers conflate opinion and fact. It's part of the appeal of the blogosphere.

As news organizations fight to regain their battered credibility and vanishing audiences, the blogs and the number of people who read them continue to grow. The blogs entertain, they provoke, and they are not constrained by journalistic standards of truth telling.

This is a challenge and a danger for journalism. --Jeffrey A. Dvorkin --When Those Pesky Blogs Undermine NPR News (NPR)

The issues extend beyond the world of journalism.

Dvorkin notes that "younger people find the Internet a more useful place, and a more nimble way to get their news," but when he says " blogosphere has proven once again to be an amoral place with few rules," he misses the point. The internet is full of moral people, too. But because the mass broadcast media offers its audience only one meaningful way of personalizing its content (the on/off button), Dvorkin is thinking in monolithic terms.

He is right to note that there are instances where the public's right to know does not supersede issues of national security, but the specific case he mentioned -- the U.S. government issuing a redacted report that could be easily, trivially manipulated to reveal the redacted text -- is itself a newsworthy story. Journalists are trained to understand that just because they discovered a name (or a fact) does not give them the moral justification to publish that name (or fact) in every circumstance. That's because journalists are trained to think of the impact their work has on the general public. Bloggers, who may be writing for an imagined audience that consists only of peers, may simply not understand what it means to post a personal comment on their weblog.

A former student of mine from the University of Wisconsin, who started blogging for a class project and kept it up after she graduated the class and entered law school, kept detailing her escapades with alcohol and misadventures with boyfriends. I was often horrified to read of her exploits, but 1) they were funny and 2) they helped remind me that the "good students don't drink too much, only bad students do" binary opposition I carried in my head was false. At any rate, when I last checked this student's blog, she had removed all the entries and replaced them with a statement suggesting it was time for her to move on. I guess she doesn't want future potential clients to Google her and read of her exploits.

This student wasn't a journalist, but she named the names of her friends, not just herself. Presumably her friends have blogs that might mention her name.

Since more and more students are arriving at college already having blogged socially, it seems to me that part of freshman orientation should include a "be careful what you write" warning, along with "don't walk home alone" and "don't procrastinate."