Category: Blogging about blogging

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Past Tense Blogging

One of my quasi-productive/quasi-procrastination projects right now is going back through my previous unofficial blog and official blog (both of which I haven’t kept in over three years because I kind of combined them both here) and seeing what’s there worth saving before I delete that database to make a little more room for other databases/projects on stevendkrause.com.  I suppose I could take the time to figure out how to merge those past databases into this one (I don’t think it would be that hard to do), but it’s not all worth saving and it’s kind of therapeutic and fun to go back and read through all these old posts.  So sooner than later, I’ll delete those old blogs and redirect them (maybe) to a wordpress.com site I’m calling Past Tense Krause.

A few interesting (to me, at least) observations in looking through a bunch of old posts:

  • I’ve been blogging for a long time now.  I guess I knew that already.  I kind of was blogging right after my CCCOnline 2002 article “Where Do I list this on my CV” piece came out, but I think it’s fair to say my more formal blogging began in August 2003, wondering around with blogger and then MoveableType on my own server space, and then back to a domain name of my own (aka, here).
  • It is amazing how writings that are less than 10 years old seem super-duper out of date now.  Internet time, especially in talking about anything having to do with technology and tools.
  • Facebook has replaced a lot of the posts I used to make, especially just posting links to things, and especially on my unofficial blog.
  • A lot of what’s worth saving might come in handy for other chunks of writing later (or not), which I guess is one of the points of keeping a blog in the first place.  Of course, it’s pretty useless to say that if you never go back and look at old posts….
  • It’s amazing to me the number of links I have from just a year or two ago that are gone, and some of these are for pretty big sites that seemed at the time to be promising services/ideas or something that you would think would still be around.  All of which leads me to think:
  • The thing about the internets is that while it is true that it’s hard to “get rid” of something online once it has been posted there, simultaneously, it is so often so hard to find things from the past that no one bothered to save.  So while I do agree that putting anything out there on the ‘net means that it could come back to haunt you forever (I’m talking to you, Anthony Weiner), it is also can be a haystack full of needles.  I talk about this paradox a bit in version 2.0 of “Where Do I List This On My CV” piece here, but basically, while the web allows for access to text to zillions of people, the low access paper text has a better chance of “living” “forever.”  Lots of people (still!) stumble across my dissertation online and I suspect it has never been checked out of the BGSU library; and yet with a few shifting server spaces here and there, my online diss would be gone and the print would be left (note to self– move diss to stevendkrause directory).  I can still lay my hands on diary entries and old clips from 20 years ago that are in a box in my basement, while some of these internet files are a kicked plug away from vanishing.
  • Which makes me think that one of my other projects will be to print some of that Past Tense Krause out and stick it into a binder….
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“I’d like to thank the academy” and other prequels to C&W 2011

The other day, I received an email informing me that I’ve won the John Lovas Memorial Weblog Award for 2o11. Go figure!  This comes after I’ve decided (or, employing the passive tense, it was decided) to shelve my research on blogs as writerly spaces, and at the conference where, on a panel I organized around the question “Are Blogs Dead,” my answer is “maybe” (see below).

But in all seriousness, I am honored and thankful for the recognition, and I am happy to once again point to the memory of a blogger that influenced many of the past winners of this award, John Lovas.  I touch on John’s blog in my presentation briefly:  his work (along with a lot of the past winners of this award) represents a very different kind of blogging then what I see going on now.  If you look at John’s blog from way back when (this link is from the Wayback Machine) just for a moment, I think you’ll see what I mean.  John’s blog (and many others from back then, including my own) have a decidedly more autobiographical, “diary-like” turn to them, more than ones nowadays, I think largely because of Facebook.  So it’s interesting for me to be getting this award about “Weblogs,” something that sure seems a lot different to me now then it was back then.

Anyway, thanks again.  And I also really want to point people to what I think is my most successful blogging project, EMUTalk.org, which receives many many more hits and comments than this site and which is devoted to local issues about Eastern Michigan University.

In other prequel for C&W news:

I’m of course looking forward to the fact that the conference is about seven or eight miles from my house and in a town that I know reasonably well.  I kind of will miss out on some of the dorm/hotel/late night “hijinks” I suspect, but it’s always nice to sleep in your own bed.

Either before, during, or after the conference (I don’t know which), check out the “unconference” space I put together with some of my former students, something I’m calling “Is There a There There? A Meta-Review and Meta-Analysis of a Meta-Performance Video.” We’ll see what happens with that.

Thursday, I’m planning on golfing– which I mention because if there are others out there who are interested in potentially joining us, let me know.  Right now we’ve got a 3-some, and I could probably get two tee-times if there’s interest.  I’ll probably get us on at either the EMU course or at a more user-friendly (read “easier” and “cheaper”) course in the area.

Friday, I’m going to conference stuff, and Saturday morning, I’m chairing a roundtable I set up called “Is Blogging Dead?  Yes, No, Maybe, Other.”  It’s at 8:30 AM, and it is going to feature Aaron Barlow, Bradley Dilger, Virgina Kuhn, Carrie Lamanna, Liz Losh, Brian McNely, Brendan Riley, and fellow local and certainly non-academic blogger Andre Peltier.  We’re going to stick to a strict three minute (or less!) opening statement format followed by lots of discussion.  I think it’ll be pretty good. Here’s my talk, all YouTubed and captioned:

By the way, adding those captions was bizarrely easy.

Saturday night I’m thinking about getting out the word to convince some folks to come over to the Ypsi side of things– Depot Town, The Corner, etc.– though that might be a hard sell since there’s plenty to do in Ann Arbor and I am sure that plenty of people will not have a car.  And then there’s bowling, too.   So we’ll see.

And Sunday?  Well, the conference goes on Sunday, though I may or may not partake.  Depends on how far behind I fall in my pesky spring term teaching.

Anyway, looking forward to seeing various C&W types soon.

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Yet another collection of miscellaneous links

With all the news about delicious going belly-up (or not?), it seems more important than ever for me to park some links here that I want to keep track of:

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Misc. Browser Links

I’ll post sooner than later (yet this weekend, certainly) about Thanksgiving at home this year, but in the meantime, it’s time once again to post a ton of links to stuff open in my browser that I want to and/or need to come back to sooner than later.  In no particular order here:

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A mini CFP for a roundtable at C&W: Blogs are Dead: Yes, No, Maybe, Other

Proposals for the Computers and Writing conference are due tomorrow, and I don’t have a proposal together yet and I’m undecided as to whether or not I should propose something.  Oh, I’ll be going to the conference, of course; but because it is so local– just across town, really– it isn’t going to cost me anything more than registration.  I’m sorta/kinda already involved in the planning, and I’m also sorta/kinda involved in the “unconference” discussions that have been going on about an alternative to the online conference.  And I need another conference presentation on my CV like I need another hole in my head.  So it might be interesting to go to the conference just to, you know, go.

So I’m on the fence here.

But while I was contemplating what to propose (or not propose), I decided that it might be interesting to throw out there something on the end of blogging.  The title I have in my head right now is “Blogs are Dead:  Yes, No, Maybe, Other,” or maybe just “Blogs are Dead:  Yes, No, Other.”  I have some sense of what I would say about that in a 15 or so minute presentation, and it might actually motivate me to do something with my mostly abandoned “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project.

And then I thought that maybe this would be a fine roundtable sort of presentation that was more of a debate and made up of as many current and former bloggers interested in C&W that I could muster.  I’m imagining something like a 75 minute panel where each participant would have as much time as possible to talk given the need to leave at least 20-30 minutes for discussion.  In other words, if it’s three participants, everyone gets 15 minutes; if it’s 10, everyone gets four and a half minutes; it it’s some number in between 1 and 10, then the time will be somewhere between 15 and four and a half.

So, I emailed a half dozen or so people who have blogs I read occasionally.  I got back some answers rather quickly, though most of these folks are already committed in one fashion or another. So then I thought “hey, why not throw up a blog post that tries to drum up some interest quickly?”

And so I wrote this post.  Which, I should point out, I’m also sharing with the world via the tech-rhet mailing list, Twitter, and Facebook, which I suppose speaks to why I personally think the answer to the question about the death of blogging is both complicated and interesting.

In any event, if you are reading this now, if you do (or you used to) keep a blog, and if you were thinking about going to C&W this year, then it seems to me there’s a chance that you too might be interested in participating in this.  If so, add a comment and/or send me an email, skrause at emich dot edu.  We need to get this together very soon though!

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And in more link catching up news

Again, in no particular order– just things I want to keep track of that I have left open in my browser for a while now:

  • “Reading in a Whole New Way,” which is a very readable/accessible piece about how technology has altered the sense of “book,” from Smithsonian.com. And this is a link to the article itself, where there is worry about the iPad.
  • Speaking of which:  “Revisualizing Composition:  Mapping the Writing Lives of First-Year College Students” is a WIDE whitepaper/study about the way that students use writing technologies to write in different aspects of their lives.  There’s a lot here, but I was struck by the idea that students write as often for “personal fulfillment” (with Facebook, texting, etc.) than for school.
  • “Nine Important Trends in the Evolution of Digital Textbooks and E-learning Content,” from something called “xplana.”  I think these trends are debatable at best, but I like things that speculate about the future of publishing, especially when they are horribly wrong.
  • I really liked this cbd post “Taking Notes,” and I wanted to keep a link– a note?– of it for future reference.  Lots of good stuff here.
  • To be honest, I don’t know if this is worth passing on, but I will anyway:  From Inside Higher Ed, “An Adjunct’s Novel,” which in some ways seems amusing but in many ways seems rather predictable to me.
  • Here’s a link to an iPhone app I might try out later, something called the Sleep Cycle alarm clock. Though the whole thing seems a bit problematic to me.  First off, I set an alarm for a particular time not because it is the “best time” for me to necessarily wake up, but because it is the time that I logistically need to wake up to go on with my day.  Second, I don’t get how this app could possibly work, and I guess what bothers me most is that the reviews suggest that it does indeed work.
  • I might get this book called The Whuffie Factor:  Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business because it does sound pretty interesting.  But to be honest, between stuff I’m reading for school and for fun right now, this is going to have to go down the list a bit. Still, for the Kindle (iPad, of course) edition, it might be worth it for the next time I’m on a plane.
  • What’s the point of an iPad?  How might it be used in the “real world?”  Here’s a link from Apple to tell us. I’ve pulled my iPad out a couple of times in my first year composition class and what I think is interesting is that my students in that class seem pretty dismissive of its usefulness.  So much for “digital natives” understanding this stuff so much better.
  • Speaking (again and again!) of the iPad:  I recently won an iShine give-away from PadGadget by being early enough on Twitter to retreat an article from the site PadGadget.  Here’s a review of the iShine, which I mostly agree with.  I prefer to have my iPad in its Apple case because it’s easier to prop it up and such, but the iShine bag is handy and easy too.
  • Finally, this is something I really ought to do with my laptop:  from Lifehacker comes “Starting from Scratch:  A Step-by-Step Guide to Reinstalling Your OS.”
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The “ground zero mosque” and maybe why blogs (and their “writerly spaces”) still do matter

Earlier today– I can’t remember if it while I was on my bike ride, grading/wrapping up stuff for the summer term, reading my Google Reader feed, or what– I had this feeling that my long suffering and delayed project, Blogs as Writerly Spaces, had kind of run its course.  I mean, I haven’t done anything with it in months and months (I have poked at it more recently than my link above might suggest, but still), and I kind of have a bit of a “milked dry” feeling about the whole thing.  I’ve worked my survey data (such as it is) and other research into at least five different presentations over the years, and it has been feeling a little wrung out to me.  Besides, blogging is kind of “been there, done that” nowadays, right?  How do I write a book-length project (or hell, even a decent article-length essay) about this phenomenon that has either become irrelevant in the shadow of Facebook, Twitter, and whatever is next?  Who cares about a medium that has either faded away or has been subsumed/consumed by MSM to the point where even freakin’ Stanley Fish has a “blog” as part of the New York Times?

Anyway, this was all in the back of my mind while listening to the radio on the way to Costco and I was listening to “Here and Now” and they had a story (mp3) about this story in Salon by Justin Elliott, “How the ‘ground zero mosque’ fear mongering began,” and I had a tiny twinge of second thoughts on my project.  Maybe there’s something there there after all.  Elliott has a time-line how this mosque/community center/whatever it is controversy got so out of hand, and how a right-wing conspiracy theorist blogger named Pamela Geller (her blog is called “Altas Shrugs”) started and fueled this whole thing.  Elliott has a time-line and corresponding links to Geller’s blog to make a pretty compelling argument how her blog made this into a story.  Granted, Geller is more “connected” than most bloggers (her bio points to appearances on various news outlets, and she was apparently on Hannity’s radio show, etc.), but I think Elliott makes a pretty compelling argument that this non-story turned into a story in part because of Geller’s persistence and blogging.  Take a look at Atlas Shrugs now and it’s clear that she’s still using this story, or it’s still using her.

The politics here are interesting in a way, but the dynamics of the rhetorical situation are much more interesting to me.  And maybe I ought to not completely close up that book project yet.

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Enough of the wigs…

Time to change the header to a picture from Sleeping Bear Dunes from last summer. Alas, I am beginning to wonder about the chances of my Traverse City class making….