Category: Blogging about blogging

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Google Reader Boo-Boo

I use Google Reader as my RSS feed reader, though I will certainly be careful to not use its latest feature, which allows users to mark particular things as articles to share with each and every person on your contact list, regardless of who that person is– friend, work colleague, or, in my case, one of the hundreds of people who I email about something having to do with our writing program. As this user said, quoted in this article, “Google Reader Making More Enemies Than Friends,” “What genius at Google thought that this same list, consisting of hundreds of people from all sorts of parts of my life, would be the same list I’d want to share my Reader entries with?”

The article goes on to make the connection with the problems Facebook had with Beacon (which I never used personally but which also shared a bit too much), and for me, both of these things suggest two closely related things. First, contrary to a lot of concerns from various privacy folks, many– maybe most– users of services like Google Reader and Facebook are savvy enough to realize that there are things that they don’t want to share with just everyone. I think about this with Facebook frequently enough, and certainly with my own blogging habits. And second, there is a line out there– fuzzy though it may be— which, if crossed, users will raise flags and backlash against companies like Google and Facebook. So far, these providers have been willing to respond to those customer needs, too.

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Catching up on a boatload of online readings

I have about 15 tabs open in my browser with things I have been meaning to read and/or blog about. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this now, so here’s a whole bunch of stuff that might be useful and/or interesting later, mostly in terms of teaching but some scholarship, too:

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SuprGlu might be cool

Somehow I stumbled across Kevin Brooks’ web site today (I think I clicked on his name while looking again at that blogosphere online book), and I noticed he’s using something called SuprGlu to support his site. To quote from the SuprGlu site:

Do you already use services like del.icio.us, flickr, blogger, typepad, etc? SuprGlu is a new way to gather all your content from those sites. In a nutshell, SuprGlu:

  • gathers your content from popular webservices and publishes them in one convenient place.
  • presents your content with simple, great looking templates which you can customize.
  • is FREE to use!

    • It might be useful for teaching, but there is something about how sometimes this kind of stuff makes writing on the web too easy and too opaque.

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    Does anyone out there speak Finnish?

    At least I think that’s the language in question here…

    I noticed in the “Incoming Links” part of things on my blog that “ePro SEPPO” has recently linked here and to my article “When Blogging Goes Bad,” which, up to this point of my career, seems to have become my calling card, academically speaking. I’ve seen/read discussion about this article in other places before, but it’s been a while (that article came out a few years ago now), and just the other day, this showed up.

    The problem for me is that it is in a language I certainly cannot read that I think is Finnish, so I have no idea what this person is saying. It could be “Krause is the greatest thinker of our time,” or it could be “what a goofball, this Krause guy.” If I was a betting man, I’d pick the second one.

    In any event, I might end up emailing the blogger in question here, but if anyone in the meantime has any idea what they’re talking about here, let me know.

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    At least two U.S. Presidential Cabinet members have blogs

    I came across this Associated Press article (hosted by Google? I didn’t realize they were doing that nowadays), “Two Cabinet Secretaries Start Blogs.” The secretaries in question here are Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. The story says that there’s a State Department blog too, but they don’t have a link to that one.

    Leavitt’s blog seems a little more real to me than Chertoff’s:

    “I’ve decided to wade in a little deeper into blogdom by writing one for the next month or so,” Leavitt wrote in his first entry. “I’m going to see how I feel after that time period. I may continue; I may not.”

    Leavitt says he writes every blog entry himself, often late at night in hotel rooms when he is traveling. He is concerned that his entries are too long; on Aug. 20, he wrote 2,444 words about his trip to an orphanage in South Africa.

    Chertoff began blogging in September so he could “open a dialogue with the American people about our nation’s security.” Chertoff comes up with an idea for a blog entry, then someone in the department writes it, and Chertoff heavily edits it, said Jeff Ostermayer, a department spokesman who oversees the blog.

    The article also quotes Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, who is pretty critical of these sorts of blogs:

    Public officials usually are promoting policies and not offering honest reflections of what is going on, Delli Carpini said. The key to a successful blog is to make sure the information in the blog is honest, accurate and serving a public purpose. “The very same technology that can make things more democratic can also be used for manipulation and propaganda,” he said.

    I see Caprini’s point, but I’m not entirely sure to what extent the typical, “garden variety” blog is “honest, accurate, and serving a public purpose.” I mean, many blogs are written under a pseudonym, and I would argue (at least I think I am arguing in BAWS) that bloggers shape their identities through their words, what they choose to discuss and not discuss, in response to an audience, and to meet their own needs as a writer. That’s not the same as what Carpini is talking about.

    A lot of blogs– including these two– are popping up nowadays that are more or less PR pieces. It seems to me that the extent to which this is a “problem” has a lot to do with one’s definition of a blog. But I don’t have too much time to get into that this morning….

    Incidentally, I spent about 5 minutes skimming through these two blogs, and I would say that Leavitt’s seems a lot more “real” than Chertoff’s, though Chertoff’s isn’t really just his blog, either.

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    Happy blog action day

    Today is (or so I am told) Blog Action Day, a day where bloggers everywhere are supposed to be writing about the environment. I guess this is a good idea, and as much as anything else, what I like about this project is that it links to a whole bunch of different blogs that I might not have looked at otherwise.

    BTW, I’m for the environment.

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    Mom's blog (but I won't call them moggers or bloms)/Messy Media on making money

    From one of my google alerts comes this kind of cheezy article, “A blog of one’s own: Blogging moms find a way to have their say,” from the Press and Sun-Bulletin of Greater Binghampton, NY. It’s nothing too brilliant; just a feature piece trying to claim that the new “soccer mom” is the “blogging mom.” This is a typical quote: “Call them “mogs,” “moggers” or “bloms” — whatever you like — one thing is certain: A slew of blogging mothers are finding that writing a daily or weekly dispatch online makes them feel better about it all.”

    Also from my google alters comes this, “Messy Media hopes blogs will be money makers,” from Press Gazette UK. It’s another one of these stories about bloggers hoping/planning on making money from their efforts, though the twist here is that Messy Media is a start-up with some former print journalist making the jump to blogs and the like. And there are a few numbers here about how much money people can (or, as far as I can tell, can’t) make from commercial blogging.

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    Blogging scholarship competition/Blog World Expo

    I found via Alex Halavais’ blog that there’s a blogging scholarship out there. It’s being sponsored by what I guess is a commercial enterprise, College Scholarships.org, though I don’t really know how you make money by giving away scholarship money. In any event, the prize money/scholarship here of $10,000 will go to one college student’s blog based on a list of 20 finalist that they came up with in some way.

    If nothing else, I’m interested in this list of bloggers as potential study subjects. I think. Lately, I have been thinking that I am less interested in blog writers who have a large and adoring audience or bloggers who blog to make money and more interested in the vast majority of bloggers who have a tiny tiny audience. And as bloggers who happen to be students, these folks might cross into the “academic” realm of bloggers which I’m also trying to avoid studying. Still, this is a good list of what at least one group described as “good blogs,” and that might fit into a teaching experience like ENGL 516 or ENGL 444.

    Incidentally, there is also an ad on these sites for something called the Blog World & New Media Expo. It is rather cheap– especially compared to the conference I mentioned the other day– and it would automatically be fun because it’s going to be in Vegas. But it sure seems to be nothing more than a conference on how to make money with your blog. I guess “making money” has always been a motivation to write, but I think it’s fair to say that this is a pretty naive motivation. I went to a reading last night given by a former EMU colleague, Jeff Parker, who has a new novel out from a very small and literary press, and one of the questions from one of the young people in the crowd was along the lines of “how much money are you going to make from this?” Parker kind of looked around, and without directly answering, more or less said what was true, “probably none, but lightening does strike once in a while.”

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    Blogging, free speech, and reporters without borders

    Very interesting little piece on Wired’s blog that might figure into my BAWS project– it would at least be good in terms of scholarship: “Only you can prevent censorious firewalls.” The article is really talking about the international organization Reporters Without Borders. According to them, there are 13 countries which seriously censor Internet content that is critical of the government, and there are 61 people around the world who are in prison for posting “subversive” content on a blog or a web site. Reporters Without Borders is trying to organize an international protest about this through their web site in early November.