Weblogs: June 2005 Archive Page

It just can't be good, it has to be original and good.

When I think hard about it part of me kind of wishes
we hurled our bodies into the air, at times, cracking on impact,
but I miss the rest of you
and I am now working on keeping myself at SHU.
You can vote for who you feel wins the argument.
I strongly recommend that you become involved in one that doesn't kill anyone.
I don't know how many of the younger readers will remember him,
following me from trash can to trash can as I went about my business
in like.. some scholastic endeavor. Or something.
All I can say is, I’m not surprised France came up with crap like that. --Feeling Inspired? (New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University)

A "found poetry" exercise, inspired by Kait.

Vacation June 18-25 (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Sometime this weekend, I'll be taking the wife and kids to a cabin for a week in Amish country.

Actually, that phrasing is misleading. It's more accurate to say I'll accompany my family to a cabin that my in-laws booked.

At any rate, I'll be offline the whole time... and that will be the first time I've been offline since... well, since I went online.

If I can't quickly figure out a way to hold comments for later approval, I'll have to disable the script for adding new comments until I return. I might blog a bit more today or tomorrow, but the weekend spam attacks are about to start, so I thought I might as well take care of blocking comments now.

THE Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has criticised the new web-based media for ?paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry?. He described the atmosphere on the world wide web as a free-for-all that was ?close to that of unpoliced conversation".

[...]

?There is a tension at the heart of the journalistic enterprise. Its justification is that it promises to deliver what other sources can't -- information that is needed to equip the reader or viewer or listener for a more free and significant role as a human agent. But at the same time it is bound to a method and a rhetoric that treats its public as consumers and the information it purveys as a commodity.? --Archbishop hits out at web-based media 'nonsense' (

The headline creates the impression that the long quote I included above applies to web-based media, but the article notes that Rowan also criticized traditional media. The article also ends by noting that Rowan "said that it was important not to scapegoat the media," and that Rowan praised BBC journalist Frank Gardner.

Whether you're a newly minted blogger or a relative old-timer, you've been seeing more and more stories pop up every day about bloggers getting in trouble for what they post.

Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don't want published. You might, for example, publish something that someone considers defamatory, republish an AP news story that's under copyright, or write a lengthy piece detailing the alleged crimes of a candidate for public office.

The difference between you and the reporter at your local newspaper is that in many cases, you may not have the benefit of training or resources to help you determine whether what you're doing is legal. And on top of that, sometimes knowing the law doesn't help - in many cases it was written for traditional journalists, and the courts haven't yet decided how it applies to bloggers.

But here's the important part: None of this should stop you from blogging. --Legal Guide for Bloggers (Electronic Freedom Foundation)

Also worth noting: Bloggers' FAQ on Defamation and Bloggers' FAQ on Intellectual Property

This article is designed to help publishers and editors understand citizen journalism and how it might be incorporated into their Web sites and legacy media. We'll look at how news organizations can employ the citizen-journalism concept, and we'll approach it by looking at the different levels or layers available. Citizen journalism isn't one simple concept that can be applied universally by all news organizations. It's much more complex, with many potential variations. --Steve Outing --The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism (PoynterOnline)

If citizen journalist websites would organize some kind of virtual internships, in order to encourage promising student journalists and make them think seriously about how they can develop their talents, moving them from personal rants to quality research and reporting, how would that affect my role as a journalism teacher? A question to ponder.

If you want to be "cool", "hot", or "whatever", then you need to know the lingo. --compiled by Anette Lamb --Blog Lingo (Escrapbooking)

I especially like "barking moonbat."

This semester we are going to experiment with blog technology to practice working on your critical thinking, reading, and writing skills. Frankly, I'm not sure where this is going to go this semester, but I hope we will find this useful and productive. Students last term convinced me that blogs rather than course discussion lists were more useful to them for deep discussion (as opposed to short messages), so let'ssee if they were right. Jo Koster --CRTW201 Blogging Home Page (Winthrop University)

I found that students who only blogged sporadically sometimes found it difficult to remember which peer blogs they had commented on. I like the idea of a blog sheet, though I wonder if it might be more useful to have students keep that log online, as one of their blog entries.

I have thought about the "designated blogger" role. The whole class benefits when one or two super-dedicated bloggers do a lot of filtering and cross-linking. But I'd like to spread that responsibility around a bit more...

"Since the war has ended, all is good."
"Are the people happy?" I asked.
Mr. Shukry paused for a moment, as if it were the simplest question he'd been asked in months, "Of course they are happy," he said.
"Are you Muslim?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. --Michael Yon --A Fork in the Road (Michael Yon: Online Magazine)

Grocery stores full of fresh fruit. Gleaming kitchen appliances and widescreen TVs. A picnic in northern Iraq.

A fascinating report from Dohuk.

So let's say you popped up your news aggregator of choice and have subscribed to each of those blogs. How much would you read? How much information would you get? Our little analysis shows you would have read a bit under 22,000 words. That would amount, in terms of printed pages, to 44 single spaced pages.

Your alternative? Well, on that day, you could have picked up the New York Times and read every stories on the front page. That would have netted you 12,964 words, or about 22 single spaced printed pages. You could have listened to the evening news, are about 3000 more words. Ultimately, you would have consumed more words reading blogs than going with mainstream media: 5 TV shows would have netted you about 15,000 words. 5 newspaper stories (assuming a different report on each story) would have netted you about 8,000 words. So blogs are much more prolific in terms of words. --Tristan Louis --Secrets of the A-List Bloggers: Lots of short entries (TNL.net)

I've done this kind of analysis on student weblogs. Students who draft their work offline, then post it online don't tend to create links within their text. Students who post an entry that offers a well-thought-out conclusion don't often get comments more involved than, "Good post."

Students who pose stark questions don't tend to get replies, unless the question is posted within the context of an entry that shows the student is giving away the benefit of some significant thinking.

Students who are looking for comments from peers will sometimes get offended when their peers don't write back. I have resisted requiring students to respond to a given number of blog entries. I do plan to ask students to post entries centered around their analysis of excerpts from primary sources, and to ask them to respond to similar entries posted on peer blogs. There is room for students to get credit for "wildcard" blogging -- that is, an off-topic post that builds community or permits them to experiment with the weblog format. There is also room in my weblog evaluation rubric for students to get credit for the work they do to help their peer's blogs, such as posting links to those blogs, posting followups prompted by something somebody posted on another blog, or leaving long comments on peer blogs.

But I want to preserve at least part of the "gift" value of a comment or an inbound link. I tell students that if they like getting comments, then they should reply thoughtfully to the comments left by their peers, and they should visit and contribute meaningfully to the weblogs of all peers who leave comments. The students will pretty quickly figure out who is not likely to return the favor of a comment, and they will invest their energies elsewhere. The students who put more than the usual amount of effort into their blogging will find each other. This can lead to a kind of digital divide, as knots of students who already know what their peers think about a certain text either dominate the in-class discussion or feel bored as the in-class discussion covers the same ground they covered last night.

So while I resist forcing students to comment on peer blogs, I think I might start each discussion period with a question based on something a student blogged about the day before, and/or a discussion that is currently productive. If I work that into a short reading quiz offered in the first five minutes of class, that creates an incentive for students at least to lurk on the blogs, and to come to class on time so they can write the mini-quiz. I recognize that not all students will have the time to check the blogs right before class, and I don't want to reward the kind of last-minute blogging that involves banging out something in the computer lab across the hall from the classroom. So I'll need to think about this for a bit.

A student has just shown up for a consultation, so ttfn.