Via John Walter’s Facebook page (I think this Facebook thing might catch on, btw) comes this link to a glossary of media theory terms. It looks like something that was started (but not finished for some reason) as a project associated with something at the University of Chicago. Kind of an interesting resource that might be useful for research and/or teaching.
Weekend(ish) link round-up, mostly BAWS
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.
Fun with databases and RefWorks; a possible BAWS tangent
There was a conversation a few months back on a mailing list– I think Tech-Rhet– where some current PhD student was asking about the best software options for compiling a bibliography. Frankly, I didn’t pay much attention to it, mainly because I didn’t have time but also because it had not even occurred to me that I would need/want to use such a beast, even as I was embarking on my BAWS project. I guess I’m like that old dude who runs the shoe repair business on the corner and doesn’t understand why he’d need a computer to keep track of his receipts since the filing cabinet has been working great for that for 50 years already.
Well, I decided to change my ways a bit and I’ve started to experiment with some options.
I do like zotero a lot and I have it installed on the browser on my desktop computer, but I wanted something that I could access from any computer. I have a CiteULike account and I might be using it more in the future, but it seems to me that it wants you to manually write up most bibliographic information, which is less convenient. EndNote is apparently the “industry standard,” but I don’t do “industry standard” windoze computing, and besides, it’s expensive.
At EMU, we have this service called RefWorks, so that’s what I’m going to try for the time-being. It is not the most user-friendly thing in the world, but it seems to be able to import bibliographic data from other databases reasonably well. For example, I can look something up in the MLA database via the EMU library and click a button that more or less exports that info into my RefWorks database. Within my database itself, I can add notes, alter the citation information so that it matches up different style guides, etc. It’s sweet. Well, sorta sweet. The import features are far from perfect, and there is always the danger that, with the seemingly never-ending budget cuts at EMU so we can prop up the football team and thus improve our image around the country (no kidding, this is more or less the Board of Regents’ strategy right now, apparently), the library will be forced to discontinue its subscription to RefWorks. But for the time-being, it’s nice.
While working with this and also WorldCat (an example of how the import features into RefWorks from databases is far from perfect, and also an example of a database that I should have used before but hadn’t), I came across a surprising number of pieces of fiction involving blogs, most of it adolescent novels. I’m not entirely sure what to do with this and it would be an enormous tangent, but what does it say about the potential of blogging as a writerly space when it is fodder for fiction? I don’t know, maybe nothing at all; maybe a lot of people who blog a lot fancy themselves to have the sort of power they lend to their characters? maybe a lot of readers of these books are hoping for the same kind of power? I guess I might have to read one of these things to see…,
"Too Old for Facebook?"
This is a Business Week article (I don’t know if it’s just on their web site or not, “Too Old for Facebook?” by Rachael King. The basic point is that a lot of people “born in the 70’s and earlier” are starting to discover things like Facebook in large numbers. This might be something worth including in my teaching, in large part because I have a lot of students– particularly at the graduate level– who either actually were born in the 70’s and earlier, or they feel like Facebook is the kind of thing that only “the kids” do.
Of course, there are two other reasons why I’m linking to this now. First off, it seems like many friends and family (my wife, for example) have just recently discovered this new-fangled Facebook thing and that is kind of amusing. And second, I realize that I have become so old that I fall into the “and earlier” category.
"School boards: The Internet is safe and we should use it more"
Here’s a great link/reference to cite the next time I am indirectly or directly in a conversation with someone about the dangers of the Internets for K-12 teachers: via boing boing, “School boards: The Internet is safe and we should use it more.” This discusses and links to some other discussions of a study from a group called the National School Board Association (which seems a tad on the conservative side, actually) that basically says that a lot of the things that have been cited over the years by schools for being afraid of the internet is bogus. Here is a link to a PDF version of the report, though I couldn’t find any direct/indirect mention of it on the NSBA web site. Here’s a quote of a quote from boing boing on all this:
In light of these findings, they’re recommending that school districts may want to “explore ways in which they could use social networking for educational purposes” — and reconsider some of their fears. It won’t be the first time educators have feared a new technology, the study warns. “Many schools initially banned or restricted Internet use, only to ease up when the educational value of the Internet became clear. The same is likely to be the case with social networking.
“Safety policies remain important, as does teaching students about online safety and responsible online expression — but student may learn these lesson better while they’re actually using social networking tools.”
A good thing for things like 516, and probably a link to send on to my colleagues in English Education.
Michigan state government Republicans censor blogs
This is pretty much a local (as in Michigan and in the Michigan blogosphere) story, but I thought it’d be worthwhile to post here, especially for anyone coming across the site from outside Michigan: “Senate Republicans block access to left-leaning web site.” Here are the opening paragraphs:
LANSING, Mich. — Lawmakers and staffers using the state Senate’s Internet server no longer can visit or post to a left-leaning political Web site, prompting backlash from bloggers and others who say it is blatant censorship and a violation of free speech rights.
Republican Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop’s chief of staff, Matt Miner, late last week asked the secretary of the Senate to block access to http://www.bloggingformichigan.com.
Bishop spokesman Matt Marsden said Monday that the decision was made because using “state time and taxpayer money to surf sites not applicable to the jobs staff were hired to execute is not an acceptable use of state time or funds.”
Senate Republicans, however, did not block other political Web sites such as http://www.michiganliberal.com and a conservative-leaning blog, http://www.rightmichigan.com. The block came after Republicans apparently saw stories posted to the site they did not like. Marsden said Bishop’s office also is reviewing other sites that could be “overtly political in nature.”
The move and potential for blockage of other sites drew charges of censorship from Democrats, who said blogs are a legitimate method of communicating directly with the public.
“It’s a very arbitrary, unfortunate and rash decision made by the Senate Republican leader’s office,” said Senate Minority Leader Mark Schauer, D-Battle Creek, who called for Bishop to change his mind.
Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of talk about all this at Blogging For Michigan.
Frankly, I don’t follow political blogs that closely, and I certainly don’t follow blogs about state of Michigan politics. So all I can guess is that this particular blog has had enough readers to significantly piss off Bishop’s staff manager. It does seems to me to be one more example as to the power of blogs, but I guess that’s something that is a lot more easily assumed nowadays than it was a couple years ago.
Just passing along some good links…
One of my favorite blogs to read for ideas about all things electronic is Charles Bailey’s “DigitalKoans.” Why? Because he posts things like this, “Web/Web 2.0 Tools,” which includes around 500 links to goodies about WordPress, social networks, CMS-es, PDF stuff, Photoshop stuff, etc., etc. Obviously, I haven’t looked at a lot of these things yet, but I can imagine there being some handy teaching stuff in here.
Unionized blogging
Via TechCrunch comes this discussion, which is itself discussing an Wall Street Journal piece, “Is Blogging Ready for a Unionized Workforce?” I think the short answer is “no.”
As someone who is in a profession that is mostly not under the umbrella but who is actually in a faculty union, I have profoundly mixed feelings about unions in general and mine in particular. I don’t want to rehash all of that now, but I guess I’ll say two things, both of which I think applies to the idea of unionized bloggers. First, while I think the union for the faculty has done a good job at doing things like providing guidelines on procedures (e.g., how tenure and promotion works, a mechanism to complain about things, etc.), it doesn’t exactly reward individual achievement. Want to see smoke come out of a hard-core union person’s head? Talk about merit pay. And ultimately, I think one of the main reasons to write in blogs is individual achievement.
Second, I don’t exactly feel like I’m in a field that needs the protection of a union to prevent exploitation. I suppose this is all relative since lots of very well-paid workers have unions: airline pilots, professional athletes, etc. But when I think of people who most need unions, I think of occupations like factory workers, coal miners, truck drivers, and other performers of unpleasant work. The same is true with bloggers.
On the TechCrunch site, there’s some interesting points and discussion here, but I think the last paragraph sums up my feelings on this when it comes to the exploitation of bloggers:
As long as the supply of labor that will accept low rates exists, no amount of organization will create a marketplace that provides pay rates that are equal to that of comparable fields such as journalism. Exploitation only exists where those being paid do so because they have no alternative; bloggers have many alternatives, although most do not involve blogging itself. A fair wage is a noble cause, but one that will always be undercut as long as there are more potential writers than positions available.
And again, it raises some questions about why people blog in the first place– at least in terms of my assumptions about why people blog. In BAWS, I intend to primarily examine blog writers who are not doing it for the money; on the other hand, I suppose if one actually makes something that resembles a living, I suppose that too is a factor in considering the reasons to write, the audience one writes to, when one writes, etc.
Blogs for teachers/turning your blog into a book
While cleaning up the official blog roll this morning, I came across a couple of things I thought might be worth returning to later:
- Charlie Lowe has “version 2.0” of his helpful guide to teachers about blogging, “For Teachers New to Weblogs: An Introduction to Blogging.” I could have used something like this about a month ago, actually….
- Via Will Richardson’s blog comes a link to SharedBook, which is a software package/service (?) that can basically take your blog writings and other electronic content and change them into a print book. Hmm….
A book I just ordered
Those suggestive amazon.com emails sometimes work, I guess. I just pre-ordered Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture by Geert Lovnik. I’m told by amazon.com that Lovnik is an “internationally renowned media theorist and ‘net critic,'” though I’ve never heard of him. We’ll see how his book is soon.