Category: Blogging about blogging

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Congrats to the waiter

“The Waiter” at waiterrant.net has a book coming out. waiterrant.net is a very well-written blog that is just that, a waiter ranting (and in other ways discussing) the life of waiting tables at a nice restaurant in NYC. What I’d really like is if this guy would agree to be a case study subject for my BAWS project, but so far, the folks who have signed on for either the survey or the case study haven’t had the level of success of this guy with their blogs. I certainly haven’t been able to talk with anyone yet whose blog writing translated into a book deal.

Anyway, congrats to him, and check out waiterrant if you haven’t done so before.

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Not the greatest blog article ever, but…

… not a bad summary of blogging in general: “Blogs,” by Sarah Boxer in the New York Review of Books. I don’t agree with all of it for all kinds of different reasons, and I think it is an example of the classic mistake that the popular press always seems to make when talking about blogs– that is, they try to define them in some kind of relationship with journalism, and it is usually defined in negative terms. But it would probably be a good introductory reading to assign to get the “what are these blog things, anyway?” conversation going.

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I don’t speak drupal…

… but I know a lot of people in the computers and writing community do. So I thought I’d pass along this link to the Drupal Cook Book | Nancy’s Information Site. I have no idea if it is any good or not, but I do know it exists, and I might be looking at it more closely when (or if) I get time. I’ve been thinking lately that some of the options that drupal offers might make it worth it for me to abandon emuonline (the local tool for online teaching) in favor of something I run myself, either something like drupal or something like moodle. We shall see….

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My thoughts on pseudo-identities

I’m not sure if this is the sort of thing I should be posting on my blog now or not, especially with the project I’m working on, but I think it is awfully spot on: it’s an entry from Design Observer, “What’s in a name?” I mean, part of my research has to do with the ways in which bloggers and commentators portray identity online, and I guess I should appear to be neutral on that. But as this and other posts from the past suggest, I’m not neutral on this, and my experiences as the sitedad over at EMUTalk.org have made me even less neutral. Anyway, a long passage that sort of sums up the problems here:

A rose is a rose, and a real name at the end of a blog post is an indication that the person who authored the statement is taking responsibility, indeed ownership of the words — it is a simple act of honesty. For too long bloggers have been given license that is not tolerated in letters-to-the-editor columns of newspapers and magazines (except in extraordinary circumstances). If one is willing to expound, exclaim, or critique it should be done under a real name and with links to a valid email or website address. If transparency on the web is the new black, then there should be no secrets.

Pseudonyms like “miss representation” or “Xman” or “Pesky Illustrator” or “Inaudible Nonsense,” or even the passionate, erudite “DesignMaven,” are not cute, they are cowardly. This indictment holds true for those who only use their first names as well (the many known only as Nancy or Chris, Dan or Steve). If a blogger or responder does not have the courage to own up to his or her ideas then why should readers accept or respond to them? Having a pseudonym is not about, as some argue, building a brand story or mystique; it is about masking identity, which is inherently deceitful. Unless one has a good reason — like being on a black list or having a life in peril by a repressive government — the practice of anonymity should be considered unacceptable.

Maybe this will show up in a book chapter on identity eventually– maybe with some counter-arguments from the “pro-pseudonym” camp.

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“The Life Cycle of a Blog Post”

“You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web.” Well, if you’re lucky. “The Life Cycle of a Blog Post” is a kind of fun/kind of informative Flash (I guess?) animation on Wired.com. Via Weblog Tools Collection.

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Blogs as peer review

Computerworld (and other sources, I think) is reporting that a “Professor uses blog to get peer review of academic book.” The professor in question here is Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and he’s an assistant professor in communication at UC-San Diego, and the blog in question is Grand Text Auto. Here’s a link to the blog post where Wardrip-Fruin kicks things off. And there are some other links in the article to sites like if:book. Actually, the Future of the Book folks make what I think is one of the key observations: this is being done with the complete blessing of MIT Press.

Of course, I like to think that this is all an idea that others had before, at least in theory.

Wardrip-Fruin’s book sounds like an interesting read. I’m more than a wee-bit swamped with things I’ve assigned to students, essays that need some responses, etc., etc., but it might be kind of fun to stop in on the GTA discussion.

Oh, duh. This was also in the CHE.

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A week of school done/some links from the week

This has been one of those weeks where stuff has piled up and then cascaded by me. One thing after another, and yet, not really that much of significance at the same time. If that makes sense. The one thing that I did learn/remind myself about is that “time management” with any kind of release time, sabbatical lite or otherwise, because I felt like I spent way WAY too much time getting my class in line, way WAY too little time working on my sabbatical lite project, and basically no time blogging.

So, in an effort to at least get caught up on the blogging, I offer a variety of links to stuff I’ve been reading lately:

And then today, I came across a couple of handy videos. First, there’s this one on Facebook:

Kind of interesting, though some of the connections they’re making here between the Facebook crowd and the CIA seem like they might be a bit of a stretch to me.

And, on a more cheerful note, this CommonCraft video about Online Photo Sharing:

Definitely a teachable moment here….