I didn’t do a whole lot of work on the BAWS project this weekend– unless you count going to the office supply store for materials I think I’m going to need to keep track of various articles and talking with Steve B. and Bill HD about putting together a survey and getting the paperwork done for human subject review while golfing. I did come across a couple of links to keep track of though:
- “What Part of Bomb Don’t You Understand?” This is a link to a free mp3 for the Chicago Public Radio show This American Life; the story of interest to me here is “chapter 1” of the show, about ten or so minutes into it. Basically, it’s a story about a woman named Rachel North who was on one of the subway cars (in British, that’s tube carriages) in the London Bombings and she started blogging about the experience. She became very popular for this, and ultimately was a target of various conspiracy theorist and ugly comments on her blog. Interesting stuff, which also brings me to this:
- Ellen Goodman’s recent column, “E-male.” On the one hand, part of it seems to be Goodman taking on the role of old school newspaper writer contemplating this new-fangled blog thing. On the other hand, she makes some very good points about the “maleness” and “masculinity” of blogs– maleness in the sense that most bloggers (at least of the political kind) are white male, and masculine in the sense that the mode of discourse in blog forums tends to be aggressive. To quote one paragraph: “Now, after what’s been a long, low rumble over demography and diversity, a grass-roots rebellion is finally surfacing in the netroots. At Yearly Kos itself, home of what Jennifer Pozner described on Huffington Post as the “blustering A-list boys of the ‘netroots,’ ” there was the panel titled gamely: “Blogging While Female.” The question for the panel was this: “The blogosphere was supposed to be a place where gender didn’t matter and voice was all. So what happened?”” I tried doing a search for “Blogging While Female” and didn’t come up with much. Maybe later.
- Two links from Jill Walker, who appears to also be working on a book about blogs (dang, I hope it’s different than my currently imaginary book): first, there’s this, a PDF of a study (summary, I think?), “In 2006, the Top 50K Blogs Generated $500M in Ad Revenue.” Second, this post called “on ads and readership,” in which she discusses a web tracking service called Alexa (which actually isn’t that interesting to me because it only works for the “top 100,000” blogs) and the role of advertising on readership. Interesting stuff, and it makes me think, happily, that Jill and I are approaching the blog elephant from different ends.
Morra Aarons had a post about that panel at TechPresident called, aptly, Blogging while female. She notes that 51% of all bloggers are female, and also links to a bunch of political blogging women – while noting that yes, most of the DailyKos bunch were white men.
As for books, well, you know, I think there are a lot of books to be written about blogs. Mine’s supposed to be a sort of introduction for upper-level undergrads or grad students and scholars new to the field. And it’s also supposed to be finished very soon – I’d better get back to work!