The report, written by Senior Research Specialist Amanda Lenhart and Associate Director Susannah Fox, says that bloggers are avid consumers and creators of online content. They are also heavy users of the internet in general. Forty-four percent of bloggers have taken material they find online — like songs, text, or images — and remixed it…
Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy. The currency is reputation, expression, karma, “wuffie,” or simply whim. This can all sound a little like, well, ’60s-style utopianism. After all, Marx himself believed that the industrial proletariat would revolt against the bourgeoisie, creating a state where the workers own the means of industrial production.…
Murphy is launching PayPerPost.com, which will automate such hookups between advertisers and bloggers and thus codify a new frontier of product placement. Advertisers pay to post details about their “opportunity,” specifying, among other things, how they want bloggers to write about, say, a new shoe, if they want photos to be included, and whether they’ll…
If you believe the hype, blogs are as significant as the invention of the printing press for their ability to change the way the world will be seen. If on the other hand you believe the counter-hype, blogs are a self-indulgence which pander to dull people’s misguided beliefs that they have something interesting to say.…
Teenagers, in particular, provide a moving target for Internet researchers, remarks psychologist Kaveri Subrahmanyam of California State University in Los Angeles. “By the time you publish research on one type of Internet use, such as blogging, teenagers have moved on to something new, such as myspace,” she says, with a resigned chuckle. —Bruce Bower —Growing…
—Weblog: een doe-het-zelf medium — Chronologische ordening in de informatiechaos? I’m assuming the language of this site is Dutch. At the bottom is a list of over 100 early articles about blogging, most of them popular (rather than academic) and most of them in English. Just blogging it for future reference. Lots to learn here.…
Do you have what it takes to create a LiveJournal? Well, ask yourself this question: Are you able to put words together? Not in complete, grammatical sentences, mind you. Are you able to take a word and another word and place them one after each other? Then you’re set! —Lore Sjöberg —You and Your LiveJournal…
The story, “University Police Monitoring Facebook,” hit the street last Thursday. Many copies didn’t stay long, and not because eager readers were snatching them up. Some time between about 8 and 10 a.m., Tropolitan staffers estimate, 1,500-2,000 of the 3,000 copies distributed vanished. (The papers that remained were those in highly trafficked areas, like the…
Every student will soon be a blogger at the University of Pennsylvania’s College of Arts and Sciences — and the authors won’t just be filling their pages with party anecdotes. As part of summer registration, members of the class of 2010 are receiving from the college personalized “academic blog” pages, where they are asked to…
I know it sounds nerdy, but I jumped at the chance to tag along on my husband’s business trip to Hartford, CT last weekend so that I could re-walk the 2 miles that Wallace Stevens used to walk to and from his home on Westerly Terrace to Hartford Accident & Indemnity each day. I took…
With their mouths largely shut but their laptops and flip phones open, teenagers’ bedrooms are beginning to sound like the library. So is the dinner table. On her show May 10, Ellen DeGeneres ribbed guest Lindsay Lohan: “Every time I’ve seen you, you’re out with eight or nine girls, having dinner. You’re all sitting around…
A California appeals court has smacked down Apple’s legal assault on bloggers and their sources, finding that the company’s efforts to subpoena e-mail received by the publishers of Apple Insider and PowerPage.org runs contrary to federal law, California’s reporter’s shield law, and the state Constitution. Apple had also claimed that the inside information “could have…
Back in the 1980’s, when I attended high school, reading someone’s diary would have been the ultimate intrusion. But communication was rudimentary back then. There were no cellphones, or answering machines; there was no ”texting,” no MP3’s or JPEG’s, no digital cameras or file-sharing software; there was no World Wide Web — none of the…
Within blogosphere studies, there is considerable disagreement as to whether the blogger’s contruction of identity is a form of role-playing or an authentic attempt at mimesis. Some theorists have adopted apparently extreme positions: Raynes-Goldie, embracing postmodernism, suggests that “in this informational chaos, the question of truth is not really a useful one,” whereas McNeill notes…
Illegal or inappropriate blogging or social behavior over the Internet is now a violation of District 128’s student code of conduct at both Libertyville and Vernon Hills High Schools and can lead to denial of extracurricular student privileges. —Ed Collins —Schools crack down on inappropriate blogs (Sun Times) According to the article, the new school code…
But even still I wrote about work inbetween pictures of me drinking, opiononated rants on creationism and conservation, I use the words cunt and twat and fuck. I joke about kicking babies and coat hanger abortions. I wax poetic about spring breaks past and Zombie movies. Once I made it up to the meeting they…
It’s an outlaw town, a ghetto of perfunctory design that assaults almost every one of our senses–if it had an odor, it would be that of a rotting corpse covered in Dollar Store cologne. It’s a beast that has yet to be tamed, and has actually grown wilder as the years go by. And despite…
Blogging Scholarship in a Nutshell (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Earlier today, I was working on three different proposals, all with deadlines today. Amanda and Karissa stopped by to see how the proposals were doing. I noted that I was madly paring down the word count in order to make the proposals fit the online forms. Amanda suggested…
One item to discuss today is the final project for the class, your blogging portfolio. And among the items we need to consider are these: * What should it include? (Will it highlight your best blogging, be an overview of what you tend to blog about and/or how you tend to blog, or a combination,…
On one level, blogs are little more than personal journals posted on the Internet for all to see. They provide a forum for teachers to share ideas with colleagues around the world or simply talk about themselves and others. But under a wider lens, the sometimes funny, sometimes searing blogs paint what may be the…