Recently in the Weblogs Category

I guess I won't be linking to any many more NYT articles.

NYT has disabled their special access for webmasters

One of my students posted this on her blog... she'll be presenting it tonight in class.  I'm looking forward to it!  Here's a parody, by Meagan Gemperlein

At the beginning of the semester, I had blogged about hating blogging, but really in the end it wasn't that terrible. I came to see how it can be useful in a classroom setting and help promote classroom discussion. So the song parody is a realization that blogging can only help you understand something and not hurt you.

BLOGGING IN THE USA

A Song Parody of "Party in the USA" sung by Miley Cyrus

I started reading Huck Finn mid October with a hope to understand the text

But then who's this dude who's talking weird

Woah, gotta be a dialect

Figured out it's Huck an he's the main character

The book's his adventure down the Mississippi River

But this is all so crazy

Cause I can't understand a word he's saying

My head is hurting and I'm feeling really confused

Too much reading and I'm uptight

That's when I mark the page and just move on

I'll just blog it later on, I'll just blog it later on, I'll just blog it late on

CHORUS:

So I sign on to my blog and I write my thoughts away

My classmate comment like yeah

And I get new ideas like yeah

So I sign on to my blog

Now I'll write a thesis that will be OK

Yeah, I'm just blogging in the USA (more)

Welcome to the "fakeosphere." Internet marketing veteran and analyst Jay Weintraub says fake blogs - or flogs - fake news sites and manufactured testimonials are the fastest-growing segment of Internet advertising. He thinks it's a $500 million-a-year industry - and he compares it to the explosive growth of spam a decade ago.

"I don't think people realize how big this has become, and how quickly," said Weintraub, adding that a popular top flog campaign can generate 10,000 daily sales. --MSNBC

I certainly realize it. Now that a lot of the conversations that used to take place on blogs are taking place on Twitter, I'm getting far more comments from spammers than from visitors. I'm glad to see someone's writing about this advertising trend.

I just excerpted and linked to a story from the Huffington Post Blog, and after I checked my blog I found a strange link floating above all the rest of my text, making both my own text that was under the link and the link itself illegible.

I had already included a link to the HuffPo. I had to spend extra time locating and removing this extra crap that appeared in my clipboard buffer.

<div style="position: fixed;"><div id="new_selection_block0.017883485913577468" style="border: medium none ; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><br /><br />Read more at: <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lenore-skenazy/as-goes-halloween-so-goes_b_340163.html" target="_blank_">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lenore-skenazy/as-goes-halloween-so-goes_b_340163.html</a></div>

I feel bullied, or at the very least treated with the assumption that anyone copy-pasting from HuffPo intends to steal the content.

The next time I think of driving traffic to The Huffington Post, I'll remember how their CSS trick messed up my layout, and I'll probably pass.

In his Inside Higher Ed blog, Joshua Kim writes:

A transformative step that learning technologists can participate in proposing, pushing, guiding, leading, managing and maintaining would be providing a campus-wide blogging platform and institutional aggregation site. Here are some guidelines for what this could look like...

Here is the text of a comment I posted:

There is, of course, a value in creating a private online space for a specific class, but if we put our best stuff behind the Blackboard firewall, or if the content disappears into the Facebook or Twitter data sink, then we're missing the chance to use the web as a public resource.  Thanks for posting these guidelines. I like your thinking, Joshua, and I hope that more faculty and administraors will see the value of social networking technology.

In the fall of 2003, as a new hire at Seton Hill University (a small liberal arts college near Pittsburgh), I used MovableType to set up blogs.setonhill.edu, offering free, no-advertising blogs to students, faculty, and staff. 

The default template I provide is subtly branded, with a modest logo and link, but students can (and often do) choose a different design.  The fact that the blogs live under the setonhill.edu domain gives the student writers clout, and the frequency of posts and the pattern of cross-linking is interpreted favorably by Google (our aggregator has a respectable Google PageRank of 5.10).

We paid a one-time fee (about $300, I think) for a site license that permits 300 active blogs.  Each year, I've opted for an annual tech support package that has saved me hours of troubleshooting time, at a price that's about what we pay the web host.

Since blogs.setonhill.edu went online, nearly 600 users have created about 25,000 posts, attracting about 40,000 non-spam comments. I have often wished for the time to do the coding necessary to rank blogs by recent activity (in the last 24 hours, in the last week, in the last month, in the last year, and "all time"), but for now a list of recently updated blogs keeps the most active blogs visible.

Usually every semester, students get comments from the author of a textbook or academic article we've used in class.  Students posting their homework on The Scarlet Letter or the Associated Press Stylebook are likely to get some random search engine traffic.

A former admissions director blogged faithfully for some months before leaving for a different job, and the library, the student paper, our National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, some students involved in our Study Abroad program, all of my journalism and literature students blog on the system, and about a dozen other classes taught by other faculty members have experimented with blogging.  Several faculty members have experimented with using a blog as an official professional presence, and one colleague got a book deal out of a collection of essays he posted to his blog while on a trip abroad. 

I don't censor what the students write.  Of the 25,000 blog entries on the site, I'd say that only three crossed the line into destructive irresponsibility and offensiveness, and the authors of those posts withdrew almost immediately after posting them. (Those posts are still online, but you'd have to know what to search for in order to find them.)

I have to make a conscious effort to say "Grand Theft Auto" when I'm talking about the game.

An excellent group blog begins its afterlife.

Grand Text Auto, for six years (May 2003-May 2009) a single blog with six co-authors (Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, your very own Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin), is now back as an aggregator of four blogs by the original GTxA authors, including this one. Check it out.

This is from the online version of a paper being presented at Hypertext09.

I already knew the general shape of the history, and I'm not sure that the author is actually providing us with a new take or a new insight (the introduction simply establishes the facts, rather than emphasizing how a new archival discovery, historical or critical approach, or point of view shapes and organizes those facts).  Nevertheless, I was impressed with the references that carefully walk through events from the dawn of the blogosphere.

Today's blogosphere with its wealth of discursive practices is, in Jay Bolter's phrase, a writing space.^[1] It did not start this way. The blogosphere had an immediate historical predecessor, the weblog community, in which the weblog held a rhetorically ambiguous and contested status between a writing space that answered an author's expressive needs and an access structure^[2] through which an editor was meant to aggregate and annotate the Web's undiscovered riches. The conflict between access structure and writing space appears under a number of different names in the writings of Rebecca Blood, the weblog community's foremost apologist and chronicler, who describes it as an antagonism that split the community at its core: those who, like herself, believed that weblogs performed a "valuable filtering function"^[3] and aimed to be "dependable sources of links to reliably interesting material"^[4]:54 increasingly found themselves opposed to - and outnumbered by - an "influx of short-form diarists" who wouldn't link but posted "entry after entry of blurts and personal observations,"^[5]:149 thus "inverting the primary values of the community."^[5]:154 -- Rudolph Ammann

Today, at the Computers and Writing conference, the Kairos editors presented Jerz's Literacy Weblog with the John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award. (I knew about it in advance, and was able to get funding to attend thanks to the CIT department at Seton HIll.)  Lovas was a dedicated teacher, an accomplished administrator, and a patient mentor. I'm honored to be associated with his tremendous achievements.

From an announcement on the Kairos Facebook page:

Jerz's Weblog by Dennis Jerz of Seton Hill University

The John Lovas Weblog recognized this year has been a resource for writing teachers for most of this decade.  This blog offers a glimpse into the formative history of blogging in writing.  It bridges new media journalism, rhetoric, and composition studies in productive and insightful ways. 

It's author was one of the first professors to use blogging in teaching, coining the term "forced blogging" and problematizing its practice.  The weblog reflects lively intertextual exchanges with other blogs about gaming, interactive fiction, and digital pedagogy that have large readerships and show how much his bibliographical work is respected.

The blog, Jerz's Literacy Weblog, by Dennis Jerz of Seton Hill University, addresses a range of issues of relevance to our field from recounting panels at the recent 4C's conference to discussions of video games in education and the decline of newspapers.

Jerz shows continuing leadership in addressing the potential role of emerging technologies and new media in the teaching of writing and this is regularly reflected in his blog, making his site an excellent resource for those who wish to engage in such challenges.

Chair. Gian Pagnucci, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Process-Blogging: A Sustainable Foray into Collaborative Writing
Sabatino Mangini, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Jessica Schreyer, University of Dubuque

Endings: The Problem of Sustained Blogging
Steve Krause, Eastern Michigan University

Keeping a Blog as Chair: Sustaining Public Discourse in a Private Job
Gian Pagnucci, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

What follows are my notes, lightly edited.  My own comments are in square brackets.

An interesting development from the UK:

In the first case dealing with the privacy of internet bloggers, the judge ruled that Mr Horton had no "reasonable expectation" to anonymity because "blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity".

The judge also said that even if the blogger could have claimed he had a right to anonymity, the judge would have ruled against him on public interest grounds. -- Times Online

Back in 2003, my division chair said he would support a university blogging portal only if members blogged under their own name. That turns out to have worked out well for us.  I don't, however, require commenters to prove who they say they are. 

The Las Vegas Review-Journal says it has been served with a federal grand jury subpoena seeking information on people who posted supposedly threatening anonymous comments on a story about a tax fraud trial. -- The Register

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

"I was always hoping more people would read it, and it would get a lot of comments," Mrs. Nichols said recently by telephone, sounding a little betrayed. "Every once in a while I would see this thing on TV about some mommy blogger making $4,000 a month, and thought, 'I would like that.' "

Not all fallow blogs die from lack of reader interest. Some bloggers find themselves too busy -- what with, say, homework and swim practice, or perhaps even housework and parenting. Others graduate to more immediate formats, like Twitter and Facebook. And a few -- gasp -- actually decide to reclaim some smidgen of personal privacy. --Douglas Quenqua, New York Times

I think Harlan Ellison said becoming a writer is easy, but staying a writer is much harder.  When the availability of free blogging software meant that writers didn't first have to learn HTML in order to publish their thoughts online, we saw lots of word-oriented people add their voices to the tech-oriented people who were already online.  Now that Twitter and Facebook have lowered the barrier even more, social networking tools give an online presence to people who aren't interested in writing more than 140 characters at a time, or who are content with expressing their personal identity by joining groups.

Another phenomenon that the author doesn't mention is the effect of the group blog.  Super blog sites like Huffington Post, or smaller groups of five or ten experts in a specific subject matter, capture much of the buzz that used to be created by lone bloggers.

It's not uncommon for me to assign an essay or textbook to my students, and have the author find out about the blogging assignment, and either e-mail me privately or post comments directly on student websites.  Simply knowing that the words they write *might* be read by an audience much wider than the class does affect the parameters of the assignment.

I don't promise that my students will find fame and fortune through their blogs, but those of my students who are interested in a career in writing often report that their academic blogs, stuffed with academic content from several years of courses with blogging requirements, are a useful component in a professional portfolio, demonstrating the ability to produce quality work, over time, on a deadline, and in public.  

Weblogs have already changed the nature of journalism, giving readers a platform from which to challenge the mainstream media construction of the news.  And the social networks wouldn't exist in their present form if bloggers hadn't demonstrated the power of linking user-generated content.  Blogs are a textual medium, but now that the average internet user has the bandwidth to do plenty with audio and video, the primacy of text will fade.

The Huffington Post said Sunday that it will bankroll a group of investigative journalists, directing them at first to look at stories about the nation's economy.... Work that the journalists produce will be available for any publication or Web site to use at the same time it is posted on The Huffington Post, she said.

The Huffington Post Web site is a collection of opinionated blog entries and breaking news. It has seven staff reporters.

Huffington said she and the donors were concerned that layoffs at newspapers were hurting investigative journalism at a time the nation's institutions need to be watched closely. She hopes to draw from the ranks of laid-off journalists for the venture. -- The Huffington Post

This is good news for journalism, and probably good news for citizenry. It may be bad news for rank-and-file bloggers, since it will be a lot harder for guys in their pajamas living in their parents' basements to compete with professionals with a high-profile bankroll.

I don't know any bloggers who don't crave comments, but there are many more places than blogs that you can leave comments these days: on news articles, photos, videos, comment walls, and more. Comment writing is something of a new art form, and as many people who get comments will tell you, some are great and some are horrible.-- Grammar Girl

I'm not sure writing a comment is much different from writing a blog entry or web blurb, but I was still happy to see this. (I didn't watch the video, though... I'm not really a visual learner.)

In an academic context, I liken a comment to saying in public something that you might raise your hand to say in class, but because I give my students their own individual blogs, when a peer leaves a comment for a peer, it's a transaction that they know I might never actually see.  I ask students to post 2-4 comments per assigned reading, which I think is enough to keep the conversation going, but the range means that a peer comment is still participating at least somewhat in the gift economy.

[I came in about 10 minutes late so I didn't catch the beginning. These are my rough notes, lightly edited.]

• Pamela Gay, "The Blogitorial: An Alternative ? Genre for Writing"
• Derek Boczkowski, "When Writing (and Teaching) Goes Public: Blogging and the Wall-less Classroom"
• Michael J. Faris, "What's in a 'Zine? A Public Ancestry of Blogs"

What follows are my rough notes, lightly edited.  I've inserted my own thoughts in square brackets.

In my Literary Criticism class, next week we'll be looking at The Yellow Wallpaper -- most of us probably for the umpteenth time.  Here's a comment that just appeared on the course website, that reminds me why I spend six hours straight re-configuring a server from scratch because it got infected with a virus 12 hours before the first meeting of the class.

Hey there!

I am an NYC actress (and a former English Literature major) currently in production on a one-woman show (yes, ANOTHER one) of this phenomenal story. I was doing some research and just this afternoon spent some very enjoyable time reading the blog entries from your students in 2007.

I have been in love with this story since I first laid eyes on it in HS American Literature course, and then a few years later in undergrad. From the time I read it, I thought it was written just like a monologue, and dreamed of doing it someday.

I will say that actually memorizing and "living" the words as I speak them has opened up all sorts of insights for me that I never had upon reading/rereading/deconstructing/etc. for many, many years! That said, I still discovered new things to think about from your students, and am very much looking forward to peeking in on their discoveries (if that is allowed).

Thanks so much,

Annalisa

Yup. That's the kind of thing that makes the pain worthwhile.

The URL says it all.

www.whitehouse.gov/blog

As old media races to catch up with the Web and figure out how to successfully monetize print content online, one publication is taking a drastically different approach: web to print.

The Printed Blog, a startup founded and funded by former business productivity software entrepreneur Joshua Karp, is launching a twice-daily free print newspaper in cities across the country aggregating localized blog posts.

"Why hasn't anyone tried to take the best content and bring it offline?" said Karp, who thinks print media is far from dying. --Chris Snyder, Wired

GlobalNerdy, via.

You've probably seen many articles on companies and organizations saying that they take social media seriously. Here's one such organization that you might not expect: the United States Air Force. Take a look at the Air Force Blog Assessment chart, reproduced below:

Click the diagram to download the PDF version (455K).

The "rules of engagement" are quite good. You might find them to be useful for your own blogs, whether personal or corporate.

Now maybe the Huffington Post could be worth more if it further cut its burn rate. For instance, rather than not pay its bloggers, it could charge them -- for the privilege of getting to help maintain the jetsetting lifestyle of the Great Arianna, of course. As for some of the people the site does pay, like its tech staff? Those jobs could be offshored to, I dunno, Third World child labor. If HuffPo takes such steps, I could see the site being worth maybe $4 mil. (Then again, there's always the karma risk of exploiting workers. If a disgruntled work-for-free blogger or a slave-driving HuffPo middle manager ended up, say, inserting ground-up melamine into HuffPo blog posts in an attempt to trick people into thinking the content was more substantive than it really is, that might save Arianna some money in the short term. But what if a reader or commenter got poisoned?) -- Simon Dumenco

I read on Metafilter that publicists for the upcoming movie Coraline have sent beautiful hand-crafted boxes to 50 bloggers. I just finished reading the Neil Gaiman / Dave McKean book (not quite as good as their The Wolves in the Walls, but creepily delightful nonetheless) to my kids last week, so I was curious.

Absolutely classic, isn't it? Right down to the water stained, aged paper and old-fashioned typeset, I knew right away that these folks were kindred spirits, not just with me, but with many of you as well. As I lifted the lid, this is what I saw. --stainlesssteeldroppings

Raph Koster comments on the internet buzz surrounding a blog entry that went viral.

Last week, as one of my classes was wrapping things up for the last day, a student who has finished all his coursework noted that I was his professor for the first and last classes of his undergraduate career. He blogged his thoughts, and e-mailed the old student roster, inviting his former classmates to share his reflections.

I was so overwhelmed that first semester. I had to write papers I'd never written in my life, do difficult research, critically analyze works of literature, write newspaper articles, and many other things. And I honestly don't think I would have made it, if it weren't for those strangers sitting in that scary classroom with me. We made it together. We lost a few along the way, some changed majors, some transferred schools, but we all shared that first college experience together (except for the Katies, they were seniors). And when someday, we are sitting at our child's high school graduation party, and he walks up to us and says, "Dad, what was it like to start college?," we will all be able to look back on that first class with Dr. Jerz, and a group of frightened freshmen and say, "you'll be just fine." --Andy LoNigro

Several students from that class have already commented on Andy's post, including one who transferred to another school, some who are still in the major, and one who had already gotten her MA and was back on campus teaching freshman comp.

One imagines the Canterbury pilgrims might have felt the same way, with their destination in sight, as they looked back on the journey they made, and the tales they shared.

China continued to be world's worst jailer of journalists, a dishonor it has held for 10 consecutive years. Cuba, Burma, Eritrea, and Uzbekistan round out the top five jailers from among the 29 nations that imprison journalists. Each of the top five nations has persistently placed among the world's worst in detaining journalists. At least 56 online journalists are jailed worldwide, according to CPJ's census, a tally that surpasses the number of print journalists for the first time. -- Committee to Protect Journalists

Motringate? Mommygate?

An ad on the Motrin home page, aimed at moms who carry their babies in slings, has upset hordes of mom-bloggers who use the social networking service Twitter.

The best analysis I've seen so far is by Joyce Schwartz (known for coming up with the idea of putting missing kids on milk cartons), but if you want to dive into the fray, search Twitter for Motrimmoms.

Apparently Johnson & Johnson doesn't pay attention to the blogosphere over the weekends, because any with-it company would take the ad down immediately and post an apology.

BeyondMom has a transcript of the ad and some interesting commentary -- which includes the suggestion that maybe all the attention being called to the ad (which is a bit condescending to women who wear their babies) will help sell Motrin to people who "aren't mom enough to babywear."

Professor Philip Busse blogs about his adventures stealing political signs. 

Sure, I understand that stealing a sign will not change anyone's mind, and, most likely, will only embolden McCain supporters' disdain for liberals. Even so, yanking out the signs and running like a scared rabbit back to my idling car was one of the single-most exhilarating and empowering political acts that I have ever done. -- Huffington Post

Stealing signs is bad enough. He blogged about it, and expressed surprise that he got a negative response from his readers.

Writing the essay was an opportunity to explore and talk about political speech and the desire that most of us have to express our politics -- both in mature and immature ways, and sometimes a mix of the two.... I'm disappointed that most readers seem to have focused on the thefts, and not on the larger thoughts. -- Northfield News

When blogging was young, enthusiasts rode high, with posts quickly skyrocketing to the top of Google's search results for any given topic, fueled by generous links from fellow bloggers. In 2002, a search for "Mark" ranked Web developer Mark Pilgrim above author Mark Twain. That phenomenon was part of what made blogging so exciting. No more. (Wired)

Just a few days ago, I submitted a conference proposal that asked whether academic blogs are the new five-paragraph-essay, so this article comes at a good time.  Here's the concluson:

Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times. Twitter's character limit puts everyone back on equal footing. It lets amateurs quit agonizing over their writing and cut to the chase.

As a writing teacher, I'm perfectly happy to hear that bloggers are expected to write good prose.

I don't plan on giving up my own blog anytime soon, but the fact that so much energy has moved to feeds and commercial social networking sites -- the Wal-Marts of the blogosophere -- means that I have changed what and how I write on this blog.

'Hi YouTube, it's me, Kiki,'' the teenager said to the camera as she swiveled in her chair to jazzy background music. ''And today I'm going to show you how to cheat on a test - the effective way.''

She demonstrates her technique, slipping a small piece of paper with the answers in a clear-tubed pen as she rationalizes her reasons for cheating. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Kiki's video includes a link to her blog, where we learn she is a community college student who wrote a few weeks ago, "I think I want to start being in the media right now. You know, being seen in movies and television."  Well, you've got part of your wish, Kiki.

It's hard for me to imagine what's going through the head of someone who posts a video like this, but at the same time, I can't help but feel amused. First of all, there's a lot of stuff on YouTube, so it's not surprising to find someone has posted a video about cheating.

Second, how many words can you put inside a clear plastic pen tube?  We're talking about filling up the inside diameter, not the outside diameter.  Even if you have really good eyes, and can discern two lines of text, we're talking about 20 words.  In the time it takes to watch Kiki's video, you could say those 20 words to yourself 20 times over, or spend a minute making up an acronym to help you memorize key terms. (The YouTube article on how to cheat on a test with a fake Coke bottle label actually describes something that requires some forethought and talent, and users have rated it much higher than Kiki's method.)

Since I teach small classes where each student is expected to contribute during class, and because most of my classes are writing classes, I can de-emphasize the "memorize facts and spit them back" activities, and instead focus on process. 

When I gave a vocabulary quiz last semester, I let my students bring in a one-page cheat sheet.  I figured that the benefit the student would gain from having to filter the material and decide what was important enough to go onto the cheat sheet would be more beneficial to their learning than cramming. But in that case, I wasn't intersted in getting them to memorize any particular vocabulary words. Rather, I was calling attention to the process of deducing the meanings of unfamiliar words by having them break a word down into its components (prefix, root, suffix).  I also had them invent new words. (Examples I included were "post-cardiofractal" and "circumvore".)

Along the same lines, I let students in Writing for the Internet consult their textbooks and even look on their classmates' computers while they were doing an in-class HTML exercise. (My only stipulation was I didn't want them to ask each other for answers.)  Again, I wasn't asking student to memorize HTML, but rather asking them to internalize the technical steps that go into creating and uploading a web site, so that we can move on to the much more important issues of content and audience.

For my second time teaching "New Media Projects," I have replaced routine "prove you can use this tool" quizzes with peer-focused screencasts.  Rather than have students prove to me that they can perform certain design and programming skills in class, I am asking them to use Cam Studio to record a video of them talking a novice through some steps that demonstrate their skills.  So far we have screencasts on Blender 3D (a modeling and animation tool), Inform 7 (a programming environment for text-based games, which I don't think had been covered on YouTube before), and an open topic that's simply supposed to be interesting to Seton Hill University students.  This phase of the course is designed to get students familiar with various unfamiliar tools. Of course there's only so much they can learn in the two or three weeks we spend on each tool, but when each time they watch and comment on a peer's screencasts, they'll get a slightly different approach to using the tool.

(BTW, also quoted in the Sun-Times article is Liz Losh, whose path I cross on the blogosphere from time to time.)

When I first introduced my Seton Hill students to blogging in 2003, before Facebook had mainstreamed social networking into a neatly wrapped package, my students posted a mixture of personal and academic material.  Now that even my committed bloggers do most of their social networking elsewhere, I have started pitching the academic blogs as a more professional practice for real-world writing.  But my student Andy LoNigro just posted a thoughtful reflection on the weblog taxonomy promoted by Crawford Kilian in Writing for the Web 3.0.  Andy pushes back a little, in a way that makes me think that perhaps the reports of the death of social blogging have been greatly exaggerated.

I began to think about what categories our blogs for Dr. Jerz would fall into? I first thought about a category called Academic Blogs but what we write isn't always for academics. We have the opportunity to express our freedom and creative abilities. The more I looked into it and thought about it I realized that my blog here at SHU has an aspect of each of the categories that Kilian talks about in this section, thus creating a blend of all of them spawning the name: Blender Blog. It's like taking all of the cateogories and throwing them in a blender. -- Andy LoNigro

So, will "blender blogging" catch on?  My colleague Mike Arnzen coined the term "pedablogue," I use "xenoblogging" in my blogging rubrics, and my former student Evan Reynolds coined the wonderful term "drive-by blogging" (to describe the sudden bursts of not-too-terribly-focused blogging energy necessary to catch up when a blogging portfolio is fast approaching).

As it happens, in another class I teach a design tool called Blender 3D, and there are plenty of hits for "blender blog" in that sense.

My colleague Lee McClain passed this article on to me -- via a post-it note attached to the dead-tree edition of the story.

"Move over, mainstream media, it's the voter's turn," says the blurb for an event called: "Tapping the Creative Community: The Power of Voter Generated Media."

To be sure, there are television satellite trucks parked in the parking lots around the Pepsi Center, blow-dried anchormen speaking earnestly into cameras and dignified, old hands like Bob Schieffer of CBS roaming about the hall.

But in the media security lines snaking outside the convention venue, the faces are mostly young, the equipment mostly laptops, and the credentials for Web sites you may have never heard of. --Mackenzie Carpenter, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette