We’re sure Marx and Orwell would have blogged
Orwell, definitely,” said Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds. “Marx would have had to acquire a bit more ‘snap’, I’m afraid, to have made it as a blogger.”
Time for the last post Financial Times 17 Feb 2006Well, no to most of this actually. The ones that are interesting are the guys who have some knowledge which they wish to impart or a few well based ideas to thrash through with equaly knowledgeable friendsAn example in biology, an area I am interested in, Evolving Thoughts, the weblog of Australian based academic John Wilkins. His blog roll:
AetiologyAfarensisDe Rerum NaturaDienekes' Anthropology BlogDispatches from the Culture WarsIdeas of Imperfection: Nostalgia for the Stone AgeJohn Hawks Anthropology WeblogMusgrave's AstrobloggerNational Center for Science EducationPharyngulaPhilosophy of BiologyPostSecretSarkar Lab WebLogScott Page's All-too-common dissentThe Lippard BlogThe LoomThe Panda's ThumbThe Questionable AuthorityThoughts in a HaystackUnscrewing The Inscrutable
He gives a plug for a new philosophy and history of biology blog,
hpb etc., by Robert Skipper of the U. of Cincinnati. Academic and arcanerie - experts in general - are a growth area in blogging. Its not just politics, social issues, or personal problems or pictures of cats in contorted poses.There are issues with academics coming outside the peer review system, but most would use a blog to publish a paper: more likely to pass on a few book titles or a useful idea they have come across in reading, or a considered interpretation of a academic text, which might need to be more than a book review.
These guys do not fill their blogs with mind-numbingly boring personal matters of concern only to their perpetrators or half-formed political opinions better left to pundits who actually know something. There's nothing wrong with expressing one's opinion about world events, but for most people this is done in a narrower setting such as a bar over a few drinks, shouting imprecations at some politicians soundbites or obfuscations onTV, or at a dinner party. Or, should it be: that's how it used to be before everyone got a blog or access to the comments of blogs.
Google by The Sunday Times
Big Google is watching youEvery web move you make is recorded for ever. And the Chinese government for one is getting wise to the potential, says John Lanchester
The Sunday Times 29 January 2006
How many ordinary everyday ordinary user realised what exactly what Google got from you in return? I have suggested elsewhere we all put in nothing but 'bush' for a week or two without actually searching the lists so created. Then Google could present a perfectly ambiguous sample to the DoJ.
blogginghead.tv
bloggingheads.tvIf I hadn't checked Arts & Letters it wouldn't be in my domain....The subjects covered are wide, so will link it to moleskine modality too. Not real time but you can see the potential. Not long before it is possible to buy a bespoke for one of these.
How Much is Your Blog Worth ?
Well,
How Much is Your Blog Worth ?
moleskine Modality by this account worth $0.00
Two site with a lot of weblog related links
RconversationHyerGeneMediaBlog
Keeping up- to-date on the latest weblog related things is pretty difficult, but these two sites help the update: one run by a former CNN journalist based in China, the other grandly called part of the Corante Network and Media Hub. I hate the word hub when used in IT context. I can't exactly say why, except can't see the word without thinking about a car part.
The blogdex experiment
As you will be quite aware, this faltered at the first hurdle: boredom. I could not possible keep on checking everyday first thing, when there is so much else more worthwhile to look at and study.
Been writing a bit more in
baghdadskies since a bit of reading stimultated me. Unless you are keen on blathering over understanding it is inevitable that your weblogs are going to suffer post-wise.
This blog with its emphasis on weblogging for and by the keen amateur who wanted to keep up with developments - but not let it take over life completely - was a fine idea, even if I say so myself, but I can't be bothered to make sure it, or any of the others I write to are read by the many rather thatn the few by the use of the various arcane technologies available. You know, a weblog can be just a place to put stuff. It doesn't really matter whether anyone else read it. I always write with myself in mind anyway. Its an ideal person like me who I am writing to. He or she would understand what I warble about and find it interesting.
One thing I don't like about communicating in weblogworld, is when a comment I have made on a post in another blog which I might have come across while surfing gets deleted: that shows I really am sensitive behind the steely, objective exterior. I try to inject a smidging of literate levity into otherwise quite dire comments streams, but they tell me this is not done: its flaming or some other faux which I have not kept up with. Which is vaguely reminiscent of some dinner parties I have attended with the majority of attendees just happening to come from the same world of work. You cannot put a word in there. If you do, all heards turn in unison with that unaked question: what does he know about (x) ?
I note that certain literary weblogs soon develop a club into which you cannot join: if it is a woman who is reading books whose titles she wishes to pass on to other like-minded women, it is fatal to comment some drivel if you are not part of the regular group. It is very easy to detect, and of course delete. If its a man who is obsessed with computer technology, let us say software, it is fatal to write in a comment which is in effect only dragging the other comments down through its lack of knowledge. it is not possible to write a comment to a post whic says, this GTR version 3 sound interesting , What does it do exactly? You've got to know already and be able to make a slick remark about it.
So you see, communication on the internet is limited as it in life. You can rarely if ever walk up to someone in the shopping centre to ask what he thinks of Richard Feynman as a teacher. It just doesn't work: you know that when they start to walk slowly backwards away from you.
Ahhhhhh-cademic tenure
Daniele Drezner is not going to get his
tenured professorship because of his blog ( maybe).
Blogging Prof Fails To Heed His Own Advice
Jacob Gershman, Staff Reporter of the New York Sun, October 11, 2005
::
Does he
need a tenure? It means a guaranteed high salary for life in laymans terms. Maybe he ought to go the next stage: earn a living by what he writes on the blog: advertising to the hilt, within his ethical parameters, bien sure; PaylPal begging bowl, et cetera.
His Sitemeter records
4,365hits today,
48,375 this week, and
4,000,094 million this year. He ought to be able to make a very good living . I don't know what a professor gets in the States, but we can guess anything between $100-150,000. If you paid 1 cent (or penny) for each time you read his blog, he would not starve. Add to that his newpaper, magazine articles and interviews (all now to be paid for if they weren't before, Daniel...): a basic 40,000 from the weblog and the endless interviews (and articles in the res about said interviews) explaining how he is now earning a living from his weblog and the necessity to charge a fee for the one he he is now doing which includes an explanation of the need for a fat fee....the film rights to his soon-to-be-completed film script
I-blog will be auctioned quite soon.
Blog on blog
Been a bit slow on this site becaus others take the time.The original idea had only been to collect and collate on a narrow range of topics such as social software people, weblogs are being used for, new software, webloggers in trouble, design, and similar.Going bak to checking Technorati and Blogwise after not bothering for a quite a long time I realise we are talking standards here. ::This site popped up doing a bit of checking on the background to Blogwise:MyBlog.comIt has a compendious blogroll on all things blog which is quite handty for those either new to it or who are beginning to think about what they are and mean.
Blogosphere News is another way to skin the cat.
::
Sven (of Blogwise) at
Notanotherblog :
Wed, 03 Aug 2005 11:23:15 +0100
Last night at the cinema, a trailer was played for a movie called The Perfect Man. Remarkably, the trailer started with lead Hillary Duff writing an entry into her blog (the voiceover/narrative of the post began 'Dear fellow bloggers...'). Yet another confirmation that the word blog has entered mainstream media.
Ah well, that means my screenplay will not be the first overt reference to a blog. However, this will one not be the last. Email on screen and (even in the title) is frequently used as a device and is becoming a bit of a commonplace.
How many times have you seen a fairly up-to-date movie that has a very old-style GUI? Maybe the camera man kept on saying: "Nope. everytime I zoom in you can see the pixels..." so they had to get some archaic PC out to do that "I've accessed the database" bit.
To blog or to TiddlyWiki?
Everyone else seems to come across the tiddlywiki yonks ago. Since discovering it a few days ago, I am keen to start one because the style seems to fit more with my pattern of posts e.g. moleskine modality.
The weblog lost a lot by having no direct page to page internal links (though that is what category links serve as). replacing your weblog with a tiddlywiki solves one set of problems but leaves another set. For example, do you allow your wiki to work traditionally with full public access? If so, you will not retain the integrity of your posts. As yet have not found out how complicated it is to run one (ftp,server space, etc), but the editing is a dream. Anyone reading your TW can order posts they want to see linearly. This example has no public editing in the traditional wiki.tiddlywiki
Blogging is not dead...
But
Steve Vincent sure is....
It is said that the article he got published in the NYT was the straw which broke the Islamist back. Why they bother to say such things without being sure, who knows? He did talk of seeing this white vehicle which had become the stuff of legend in Basrah. And his translator survived the shooting.
it is still possble to write cogently about Iraq without getting knee deep in the Byantine intrigues which outsiders will never truly grasp.
Sorry to see you go Steve. Wish you had taken more care.
weblog survey by Singapore students
students at
School of Communication and InformationNanyang Technological UniversitySingaporehave carried out a
weblog ethics survey (graphs and 1 data table)
Of the 1,224 bloggers who completed the survey, personal bloggers made up 73% while non-personal bloggers were the remaining 27%.
which may tell you something !
Notes on rhetoric by Mark Kaplan
Useful having this in an adjacent tab while haranging some poor hapless blogger for not coming up to your standards. Reminiscent of Stephen Potter, but in no way replacing him.
What Brit of a certain age can forget Terry Thomas in School for Scoundrels (1960) being followed around by tutor of the Yeovil College of Lifemanship, as he marked his student as he put the course on Oneupmanship into practice. For those of you unfamilair with Potter's work, try this, as a taster:Brainy Quotesreferences:
biographyarticle on Potter by
Raphael Tennenbaum
refsbiography
Golden rules for Blogging clever
The Sunday Times 29 May 2005:Doors: Golden rules for Blogging clever : Robbie Hudson
quotes Simon
(as in life)
extremism beats moderation and emotion beats logic. If you want reasoned discourse, prepare to die in oblivion. If yu want invective and il-considered responses, what the hits come in.
This is the same sort of mentality that rules commercial media. Try to ufck peoples' minds, its good for them...
beg to differ on this my friends. The blog is the place where all types of discourse are invited and each writer or reader will find his own company. It can be a game, a popularity contest, but as we know you're top of the polls one day and down ant the bottom the next, because the intemperance is matched by low attention span, fickleness, flightiness: the whoola hoop, Rubik Cube, or soon maybe xbox of the bit stream.
blogs obsolete?
Reading Matthew Kirschenbaum on technologies of writing brought Slices of life , from Spiked IT which has a great many links to this vexed subject of putting you life online.Fine as a vehicle for tweeking the software. Software ought ideally be produced in response to a need, not created with a general idea of what it might do, then handed out. If Gates had worked his software strategy that way, Windows and Office would be constantly criticised by the men on the ground for being less good than they could be.In no matter what form of public access website, or in real life {IRL, as the acronymologists would write} every man and woman should know what to say and what not to say, whether it be in the bedroom, kitchen, street, or office. If they are not sure then just look and listen to what others do. To tell all then wonder why you lose you job or are being stalked by some weirdo, is ridiculous. But there is a deep desire to divulge which has been better expressed in the article .Three points from it:[1] These new technologies look like a mixed blessing. They can be useful tools to help individuals to organise their lives. But they also have the potential to be used for solipsistic and narcissistic ends, with people turning inwards to obsess over their everyday experiences.
[2] What you ate, who you spoke to, what you saw - this has already become the staple diet of the millions of blogs that populate the internet. 'On Sunday we basically did nothing. I phoned my aunt Jenny in Scotland, I read about 200 pages of Harry Potter, Mel slept till 3pm whereas I woke up at 10am', one young blogger reports. Sociologists such as Anthony Giddens describe this self-monitoring as 'reflexivity', with individuals dwelling on the tiniest aspects of their lives. 'At each moment, or at least at regular intervals, the individual is asked to conduct a self-interrogation in terms of what is happening', writes Giddens. This includes questions such as 'What am I doing? What am I feeling? How am I breathing?'. This was taken to extremes recently by a man who wrote down every thought that he was thinking. 'You will be immobilised for the duration of your commitment', he warned other would-be recorders.
[3] Yet inflated expectations are being invested in these technologies. There is an idea that they can provide people with a firmer sense of identity, at a time when people often find it difficult to see a coherent narrative to their lives, and experiences often seem insubstantial - not quite 'real'. According to Lindholm, this could be one of the attractions of the Lifeblog: 'You can see very clearly a narrative of your life; some sort of chronological sequence gives meaning to people. It really allows the user to go back and reflect on what a person's life looks like.' The idea is that this birthday or that holiday is photographed and ordered, month by month, and you can see it all before you.
The litblogs are a refinement of this process, where the blogger might do book reviews as a way of expressing herself in writing, while presumably hoping that the writing was good enough to merit notice and even praise content and style: expression and ideas.
Some litbloggers, or blitts as I like to call them, after blog litteraire, are straight up attempts to demonstrate writing skills. Most are pretty discreet about personal lives, as all webloggers should be because there are some nasty people out there.
Putting stuff up for public viewing for the writery type is only another version of having to read out your essay in class, after all. It is a good way of testing whether you have the nerve for criticism. It can help to make you write better.
There will be many who think they can write anyway, wanting to get paid for it as well, seeing the weblog as the best and simplest way of advertising their abilities. A few have been successful.
The idea of the personal narrative is o.k. if it more like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress than a soap opera: evidence of a process of moral improvement through what one had done, though, read, coming off the page. It works less well as public therapy: who wants to read someone moaning about their existence who hasn't got the funny bone of a Woody Allen?
blog to wiki in the academic world
Blogging clicks with colleges according to the Washington Post, 11 March 2005.
You may need to register to read it.
Students are driving the methods used and the staff are running to catch up.....
Wikis are catching on : the e.g. is Prof. puts up poem, student can link to their weblogs, or, make their own comments right there.
Blogdex 6 March 2005
Cyberjournalist asks whether there should be a code of ethics for Blogging, suggesting
oneThe temptation is to ask about dogs and stopping and cocking legs.....
The pedantic, though serious, point is:
- Laws are made so that individuals don't have to argue about making rules which aren't enforceable
Discover social bookmarks, apparently:
spid.ero.us4 categories: fresh /popular / recommeded / Japan (ese)
each divided, e.g. fresh : del.icio.us / FURL / SPURL
Absolutely no idea whether it is useful
Jason Kottke goes pro
Iranian Bloggers
Links courtesy of
Harry's Place the on-going story, sorry story of Iranian repression, when next door Iraq is moving in the opposite direction.
From the BBC
22 Feb 05
Global Blogger action day called The global web log community is being called into action to lend support to two imprisoned Iranian bloggers. The month-old Committee to Protect Bloggers' is asking those with blogs to dedicate their sites on Tuesday to the "Free Mojtaba and Arash Day". Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad are both in prison in Iran.
23 Feb 05
Iran jails blogger for 14 yearsAn Iranian weblogger has been jailed for 14 years on charges of spying and aiding foreign counter-revolutionaries. Arash Sigarchi was arrested last month after using his blog to criticise the arrest of other online journalists. Mr Sigarchi, who also edits a newspaper in northern Iran, was sentenced by a revolutionary court in the Gilan area.
21 Feb 05
Committee to Protect bloggers referring to its
13 Feb 05
Free Mojtaba and Arash Day appeal
Sacked bookseller back stacking
Splendiferously named
Blit*
Maud Newton [well done, Mum, or shoud it be Mom : Ox. Ref., 1) a Scots shepherd's grey striped plaid. 2. a travelling rug like this.] reports :
Forbidden Planet has hired Joe Gordon, "the blogger famously sacked last year by his employer Waterstone's [a U.K. bookseller] for comments made about the company" on his blog, The Woolamaloo Gazette. His new job at the sf-related megachain is to "improve their graphic novels and SF books side of the business".
*
Blog litteraire, blit, hence 'bliter' [ not be confused with, blighter, Brit. colloq., a person [esp. as term of contempt or diparagement]
15 February 2005 - Blogs and Jobs
CNN Money under :
Have a Blog, Lose your Job? runs through it all again, using the Mark Jen and Elli Simonetti examples.
Anil Dash, yesterday,
Non-Blogger Fired for BloggingIn this sense, Eason Jordan got fired for blogging. Except, of course, he's not a blogger. And nobody's ever been fired for blogging.
Quoting
Rebecca BloodIt is a collision of expectations that is at the root of the whole incident.
As far as blog sackings are concerned, despite the well known Waterstone's case in the UK, it seems to me this is a cultural thing. The majority of blogsacks are Americans. Americans like to say, "Hi my name is John, I come from Delaware" when they meet you. They are open and friendly. But they have got the blog thing completely wrong. They can't see that it is a category shift to go from telling a complete stranger, on the street in Paris or London, their whole life story, including career progress and marital history, to divulging the same and/or their grievances about their work over worldwide medium.
These UK weblogger seem to have kept their jobs:
The Policeman's Blog everyday policing and other things besides
Random Acts of reality London Ambulanceman
Tom Reynolds says:
All opinions on this website are mine alone, and may not reflect those of the L.A.S or other ambulance crews - Blogging is a good vehicle for the whistleblower
It is surprising how much information people give away on their sites. Right at the beginning of my personal weblogging, I noted the surge of elation similar to that well-attested feeling when someone produces a piece of software that really works. Later doubts about quite what was behind the desire to blog and whether is was overall "A Good Thing". Human beings in genral are full of the desire for self-projection (the musician, artist, novelist, politician extreme exampes, requiring unbouded confidence and ego) and, let us be honest, a sense of powerlessness ordinary folk feel. Robert Creely, American poet, author of 1963 novel "Island":
A suspiciously simple sense of life is that it is in, in any one person conclusive... people try with an increasing despair to live, and to come to something, some place or person.
They want an island in which the world will be at last a place circumscribed by visible horizons.
14 February 2005 - And another One, And another one....
Really need to get the words of this song...
The Charlotte Observer lists the more famous examples of
Bloggers who complain about jobs often lose them.
Brings to mind the English (policeman or ambulance man? Find it later) who has no trouble retaining job, because he describes what goes on in his life without being too judgemental. Will public sector work bloggers get the sack as frequently as private sector bloggers?
The link came from
AnonyMoses [Blogdex # 27 14 Feb o5] :
a blogroll a long as I have ever seen!
A quick scroll makes me think he' done a lot of my work for me.
This from Editor & publisher came from him too:
Newspaper 2.0: The Blogging Revolution by Jesse Oxfeld.
Tasters:
(1)
"I think there's a real role for blogs in the future of online journalism," says Doug Feaver, executive editor of washingtonpost.com. But how exactly to handle them, he says, "is one of the main questions for mainline news sites." For starters, there's the question of terminology. "We're going to have to call them something else," Feaver says, noting the "baggage" the term carries with some newspaper editors.
(2)
Len Apcar, editor in chief of The New York Times on the Web, agrees. "We're an edited institution," he says. "If someone blogs for us, there's always another pair of eyes looking at it."
(3) USA Today's Wilson sees a middle ground, a system that acknowledges concerns about both immediacy and responsibility. "In the case of the Olympics and election blogs, where time was of the essence, we were actively reading behind the person, as they were writing," he says. Other blogs there are lightly edited before they're posted. And in Spokane, Ken Sands follows his own logical system.
"If we have given someone a blog on our staff, we're pretty comfortable that they're not going to screw it up. So we read behind them; we don't edit before publication on the Web," he says. "For people who are outside the staff, our policy has been to edit them before publication," which, he says, consists mostly of catching typos.
Blogdex 12 January 2005 - And another one bites the dust
Mark Jen at
Ninetyninezeros appears to another employee who got the sack because of his Iblog.
Robert Scoble , who works for Microsoft, and so far hasn't been booted out, explains where Mark went wrong.
Personally, I never trust a person who won't capitalise..
Here, a flavour of Mark from a post or three back:
so lots of people have been asking me what my job actually is. contrary to some people's beliefs, my job is not to blog about google; that's what i do in my free time. i'm actually an associate product manager on adsense. that means i'm sandwiched in between being the customer advocate and harnessing all the cool stuff happening through engineers' 20% time. in my opinion, this is the best job in the industry, especially given that i'm a google customer too. so basically, i spend the bulk of my time thinking of new features or products that customers would want (read: stuff that i want) and then i organize people to build it. it's great!
On that post he segues into a story about his time at Microsoft:
before i left microsoft, i chatted with a lot of people and there was one theme that they always touched on: microsoft knows how to ship software, we know how to turn the crank. at the time i thought, yup you're right, microsoft has shipped many versions of windows, office, visual studio... the list goes on and on. for the past 15 years, microsoft has been a software shipping machine and it has become very good at it. my friends at microsoft argued for me to stay so i could absorb this knowledge and learn the "the microsoft way".
but i figured something didn't seem right. in the past few years, everyone's seen microsoft's software shipping machine start to break down - schedules have been slipping, features are getting scaled back and there's the need for a huge patching infrastructure. the system isn't working as well anymore and despite the billg's internet memo years ago, the microsoft machine hasn't reinvented itself at all.
for as much as google is confident, microsoft is stubborn in its ways. they know one way to ship software and it doesn't work as well as it used to. the microsoft way, with its huge milestones and bi-annual releases (if you're lucky), just doesn't jive with the unlimited bandwidth, unlimited memory, unlimited computing power world that is quickly becoming a reality. the future of computing isn't on the desktop, it's on the network.
i remember when i was at microsoft, i'd propose trying new engineering practices: pair programming, unit-test driven development, iterative development. these ideas were shot down quickly and the response was always, "we've been developing software like this for 20 years and look at where we are. $50 billion in the bank, dominance in multiple markets... we're one of the most successful businesses in all of history. why would we change the way we make our bread and butter?"
contrast that to google, where reinvention is almost in its blood. there's no remorse about throwing away dead code; people work however they feel makes them most productive; and now, another critical part is here: there's a product management core that can help harness that creativity and productivity into products the world loves to use.
anyways... enough commentary for today, but i'll leave you with this: while microsoft focuses much of its resources and struggles to meet its deadline for longhorn, google can easily add, enhance, reinvent and distribute products seamlessly through this new computing landscape. in a nutshell, it's the dream of the dot-commers, finally come true.
What more do you need to say abou the wonderful world of I-blogging? If you think they can't see you picking your nose at the traffic lights....
Wood's Lot to Lurkers and BlogWalking - 8 February 2005
If you have been here before and are wondering why this post keeps changing, it is simple: the links are notes. I come back to fill out the gaps as and when I feel I am getting some notion or other. This post has two changes [ today 10 Feb 05].
It is simple. All good stories usually are. Switch on, log on and wonder what to do. A post, a Google or a Blogdex? No, today it will be checking blogroll sites on one of my weblogs, Moleskine Modality. Strangely, and satisfyingly, it only required one, Wood's Lot - which itself has a mostly untapped blogroll - for me to go on another one of my famous journeys of discovery, which are slightly more than a surf, for one reason: after a while a definite pattern or direction of search goes on. Surfing is a bit like a journey on an ever increasing spiral. What I do seems like juggling a set of Venn diagrams moving around, increase and decrease in size, linking and unlinking, according to the emphasis put on one or other, till there is a small set of interlocking circles which I know will lead me to something worthwhile when I go back to it.
Ton Lijlstra's Interdependent Thoughts caught my eye because of the word lurker. The piece goes:
Lurking and Social Networks The most obvious characteristic of a lurker is that he’s at the fringe of a group, listening and observing. Being at the fringe may seem like a bad place from the core, but in fact is a good position to build bridges to other groups, and be aware of other groups in the vicinity.
Someone's using an ordinary word as terminology again, I thought, which is bound to completely confuse everyone. Better check this out. Dictionary definition has some negative connotations: "linger furtively or unobtrusively". I wonder what the technical definition is? And anyway, why would anyone see this as worthy of study?
Can often see where projects are leading before I've even finished reading about them. There are masses of people concentrating their little grey cells on comparisons of internet behavior, related to weblogs in particlar, with other social networks. The problem with all this is the necessity for researchers from all sorts of areas to blur the boundaries in order to get some of the action. If you are trained in some ICT area of say in Communications Studies [whatever they are], how are you going to work effectively on such comparisons in what to a large part is the domain of social psychology and/or sociology?
Ton gives a definition : "Lurker" - someone who reads your site (usually a weblog) but doesn't comment, therefore doesn't "join in". A further suggestion that the "lurker " might be only two or three nodes away. In a sense therefore the lurker is the opposite of a troller.
Lurker seems the wrong word to use because it is vagely reminiscent of "stalker". It hints at exclusion. I read a lot of other weblogs without leaving comments and I don't consider my self to be lurking so much as learning. The suggestion is implicit in the lurker usage of hanging about where one is not wanted. The notion that public access sites are the territory of a certain "clientele" specified by the type of site, or what it contains, is madness. If you only want a certain category of response [commenting or lurking], make your weblog an IntraLog (I just made that word up).
Certain weblogs do become the domains of certain types of people. But this is no different from saying certain pubs, clubs or university departments are where certain types of people hang out. The differences come when someone designs software that allows a different type of interaction than existed before. Many researchers say that weblogs and other types of social software are allowing this to happen. The debate on social software clogged by the opacity of academic and technical language. Instead of answering questions terms are being coined, which are deemed necssary to make further progress.
The current journey I am taking goes on through Mathemagenic the personal weblog of Lilia Efimova. Lilia is rare amongst academic types in explaining what she is up to in simple words. Her January 28th post mentions (a) that she had been chatting with Ton. Curious about what she had said to Ton (and of course who exactly Ton was) I went to his weblog at Interdependent Thoughts (Ton Lijlstra). With a very quick scan down the page, seeing the word Blogwalk as I did so, thinking I ought to go back to try to find out what it meant (my mind seems to be keyword orientated and always on the look out for something new), I find Ton's 30 December, 2004 entry is a sizable cut and paste of a 29 December 2005 post by Stuart Henshall at Unbound Spiral on Giving up traditional Blogging.
At last I seem to be in territory that (a) I understand (b) can contribute to, and so, do less lurking about in.
On 1 June 2004 in Baghdaskies2 I had gone over some of this ground (all bloggers get to it in the end) in a series of separate pieces. One section refers to psychological research reported by Daniel M Wegner under the tile The seeds of Our Undoing (1999) which deals with what he terms ironic processes in mental control.
Wegner's earlier article, Pink Elephant tramples White Bear: the evasion of suppression (1994)
runs through the idea more simply.
BLOGWALK
At this point it seemed important to backtrack to find out what this neologism was. Below are the raw links and a couple of pastes which I will flesh out later.
The Gurteen Knowledge Website
Under the title:
Hosting grassroots conversations between knowledge activists
BlogWalks are very small scale, practically zero-budget, gatherings of twenty-odd people, who may or may not know eachother from on-line encounters (in this case usually through our weblogs).
Then, oh my God, someone has set up a Wiki for Blogwalkers! Here it is:
BlogWalkWiki
Collective space for all Blogwalkers
and there is a a Blogwalk channel in TopicExchange
At this point I veered off to a site called Knowledge Jolt (which I noted had a lot of Business related blog topics which might be worth visiting another time). Then seemed to arrive at something more interesting:
Coniecto ==> Gabriela Avram's weblog on weblogging & social software, etc, which again, though full of terrible jargon, I thought might have some nuggets of useful information.
There are links to Sematic Web, the brainchild of Berners-Lee, which I take to be trying create an automated metadata system, going by the flow chart Gavriella has posted.
Remind myself to re-research this: remember reading some months ago there were those who considered the dream of the Semantic Web doomed and there seemed to be echoes of the false dawns of Artifical Intelligence research. I have a feeling the remnants of AI groups slid into Social Software! And who could blame them? There are plenty of ways to get grants and the work is quite simply endless. All you have to do is make sure the person giving you the money has no clue at all what you are trying to find out by using lots of terminology.
Gabriela's resume
I am not saying her work specifically come under this category but this text gives idea of where this sort of stuff originates [ a far more interesting area of study in a way] from and how people can earn a living doing it, when at a first glance it seems to be 80% guff and waffle.
Need to come back again to check through what I have written after a bit more reading around the topic.
Blogdex 5 February 2005 - Backtracking explained
Looks as if this might be the one which finally makes sense of it:
from Movabletype, written by Mena and Ben Trott.
Don't forget the set of links to further articles on backtracking at the bottom.
Blogdex 2 February 2005 - link spammming
Though not exactly sure what this amounts to it, seems important:
The Register
Interview with a link spammer Charles Arthur Monday 31st January 2005
Spamming websites and blogs with text to pump up the search engine rankings of sites pushing PPC (pills, porn and casinos)
Andrew Sullivan is too busy to keep his weblog up on a regular basis
This shows how no one has found a way of making money with a weblog
Blogdex 16 January 2005 - tagging posts
JoHo the Blog
explains how individual blog posts can be tagged to allow e.g. Technorati to categorise posts
One way
looks pretty easy :
add this line (I have used "post tagging" in the http: and called it "Blog post tagging" on the visible link)
[open angle bracket]a href="http://technorati.com/tag/post tagging" rel="tag">Blog post tagging [/a in angle brackets]
Blog post tagging
Technorati
explains tagging:
What's a tag?
Think of a tag as a simple category name. Peope can categorise their posts, photos, and links with any tag that makes sense......
Blogdex 13 January 2005 - Blogger, Dismiss (ed) !
In at # 5 = today, quite high considering it is a UK story, Guardian reports sorry tale of Waterstone Bookshop Edinburgh, employee, Joe Gordon, 37, (don't worry Joe, you'll get a better job than that - why not write a book about your experiences? "Scots 'Salman Pax', puts boot into book chain....").
A sage reflection from the first entry of moleskinerie, way back in January 2004:
I can tell my Moleskine everything. The things I did over the new Year? The Moleskine knows it all. But I wouldn't dare write about that here. Titillating tidbits [sic.ed.], perjhaps, but not the whole enchilada.
Not his moleskin, by the way, but Moleskine
