9) Some challenges

Echochamber - A censorship of the commons?

1- Shelley Power's BurnningBird.net

7) The “blogosphere”

1 - William Quick coins word "blogosphere" in 2002
2- John Hiler's "ecosystem" definition

Historically Galvanizing Events
3 - 9/11 - http://www.nycbloggers.com/911.asp
4- US invasion of Iraq - http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/ http://www.cyberjournalist.net/great_iraq_conflict_coverage/

"Secondary Orality"
5 - Walter Ong - The blogosphere, with its time-sensitive texts, fleeting ideas, and fluid population at the margins with a solid core of participants keeping it constantly alive, is exemplary of a“secondary orality.”


8) The "microcontent" revolution

6 b) Working out the self while communicating with others

1 - http://suzie.livejournal.com/

"I love weblogs because they’re yet another way for people to express themselves online. Sure they’re full of links. They’re also full of lives. Look at the way Meg uploads her train of thought on a daily basis, or Tom tells us about his love life, or Jack tells his stories. These are real people putting their lives online." (Derek Powlek, 2002)

"For me, I blog for myself. It helps touch and experiment with my long dormant (and barely existent) creativity. It is an outlet for my angst and for my exuberance. It is a safe place for me to be self expressive." (Steve Goldberg, www.brewedfreshdaily.com, Jan. 28, 2004)

“Occasionally,…what I write touches somebody. Sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, but it caused a reaction in somebody else.” (Goldberg, Jan. 28, 2004)

“I choose to record my thoughts publicly on the simple, slightly selfish hope that what I write touches somebody, if even for a fleeting moment.” (Minerva442, July 2005)

"The first member of the audience for which I write is myself. But the…host of readers that makes up the rest…are also important because, without them, I might not challenge myself as much as I do…. Some of my readers are masters of the English language, others are remarkable thinking beings, and yet others are sensate to a remarkable degree. Many are all of the above and in writing to them, I feel like I am writing for an audience that deserves a record of my experience." (commonbeauty, Jan. 29, 2004)


7) The "blogosphere"

6) Blogs become the hubs of textual conversations

Blogging practices can be viewed as extending the blogger into the realm of the public while, at the same time, bringing the public into the private realm of the blogger.

1. BlogStreet - http://www.blogstreet.com/blogprofile.html
2. Seb Paquet - http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/
3. Stephen VanDyke - Stephen VanDyke’s textual conversation (2004)

6 b) Working out the self while communicating with others

5) The "post" paradigm

With dramatic consequences for the social possibilities they afford, blogs are technically and presentationally nothing more than web sites that have, at their core, “posts” rather than web “pages” (Bausch et al., 2002, p. 90).

That is, with blogs, the document-based paradigm of web pages has been transformed into the web post paradigm (Bausch et al., 2002; Hourihan, 2002)

1. Breaking down Joi Ito's blog (anatomy of a post)

6) Blogs become the hubs of textual conversations.

4) What sets blogs them apart from previous web tools?

What I’m going to discuss for the rest of the lecture…examples of how the practices are driving the technology and the technology also shaping the practices.

What sets blogs apart from other web technologies:

1. Blogs have introduced the web post paradigm of the Web over the page paradigm.
2. While there are photoblogs, videoblogs, audioblogs, and an amalgamation of these, blogs are mostly textual – it is mainly through texts that bloggers “write themselves into blogs,” work out their sense of self, and contribute to communal conversations
3. Blogs afford dynamic, two way interaction – which shapes the blogosphere, the political and the social
4. Affords a “bloggy way of doing things” (Alex Halavais).

5) The "post" paradigm

3 b) Blogs are an amalgamation of previous web technologies

That is, in the blog and the practices it affords we see both the “technicity” of its form and the “human purposes” – practices – behind its “usefulness.”

A blogs functionality then can be said to be enabling the social practices currently being witnessed in the “blogosphere”, such as:

1. http://drupal.org

4) What sets blogs apart from previous web technologies?

3 a) Anatomy of a Blog

1. Breaking down Joi Ito's blog. (Anatomy of a blog graphic).
2. http://www.chriscorrigan.com/miscellany/bijournal/blogger.html
   
3. http://jilltxt.net/
4. Seb Paquet
   

Links of Solidarity

5. Joi Ito's BlogStreet

• Alt version of Joi Ito BlogStreet
  

6 Joi Ito's "faceroll"

3 b) Blogs are an amalgamation of previous we technologies

3) My amalgamated definition of blogs

This definition centres on what I call the structure and practice definition of the blog:

• Blogs are basically web sites that have been dynamically overhauled to facilitate the practices of frequently writing and subsequently archiving posts, inter-blog linking, and commentary exchanges between “blogger” and reader .

1- Blogging Platforms - http://www.vieta.ca/graphics/blogging_platforms.tiff

• personal and now increasingly communally edited
• easy-to-use and manage dynamic websites that allow bloggers to
• post passages of text, graphics, links, and, increasingly, other multimedia files
• frequently, with the ability for others to
• comment on these entries, and with the capability to
• archive these files, posts, and comments so that they are
• easily retrieved by both the blog editor and blog reader
• blogs’ simple “look and feel” (i.e., presentation and navigation) and the reverse chronology of posts is what is initially noticed as, arguably, a blog’s two most common features.

3 a) Anatomy of a blog

2 b) How are blogs different from personal websites and other forms of online publishing?

• The formation of the self
• How community is expressed and engaged with online
• And how political life is engaged with

Two major notions must be kept in mind when understanding any form of social/relational technology like blogs: How the technical form affords the social practices and, conversely, how social practices then shape the technological innovations.

3) My amalgamated definition of blogs

2 a) Can we have one definition for all blogs?

How many blogs are there?

• Rebecca Blood states that in early 1999 there were less than 30 blogs on the entire Internet.
• By July 2002, blogger.com claimed that it had registered almost 800,000 blogs and that 1.5 blogs were being created on its platform every minute.
• By Oct, 2003, Perseus blog survey estimated that 4.12 million blogs were in existence.
• By late-2004 there were more than 10 million blogs in the blogosphere.
• By this weekend, Technorati estimated there were 30 million blogs on their blog tracking system

1. http://www.vieta.ca/graphics/technorati_blog_chart.tiff
   
2. http://www.blogninja.com/
3. http://www.perseusdevelopment.com/images/blogsurvey/agerange05.gif
4. http://www.lazygnome.net/
5. http://conscious-dream.livejournal.com/
   

“The popular conception of blogs reflects an unrepresentative elite [and] foregrounds selected practices and marginalizes others, [m]isrepresent[ing the] nature of blogging along with its future trajectory.” (BROG Project)

2 b) How are blogs different from personal websites and other forms of online publishing?

2) What is a blog then?

“What is a weblog? A weblog is a form and a format: a frequently updated website containing entries arranged in reverse-chronological order. But this simple form is infinitely malleable, and weblogs have huge potential for professional and private use. Easily maintained via computer or mobile devices, weblogs are organizing businesses, creating and strengthening social ties, filtering the World Wide Web, and providing a platform for ordinary people to publish their views to the world.”
~Rebecca Blood, 2000 (http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html)

“Web logs give voice to people whom just a decade ago, you never would have heard from. There are war blogs, peace blogs, food blogs, crude blogs, humor blogs, culture blogs to occupy your day. Geek blogs, freak blogs, teen blogs, mean blogs, fanaticals and radicals who like to rant away. Worker bees and histories, punditry and poetry, diversity, adversity and spicy verbal play. Optimists, pessimists, enthusiasts and hobbyists, journalists and journal-ists with something big to say.”
~Jennifer Balderama, 2002, “My blog, My self,” C/Net

1. http://www.rebeccablood.net/about/
2. http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/
3. http://blogoffiction.blogspot.com/
4. http://www.drudgereport.com/
5. http://marc.blogs.it/
   

2 a) Can we have one definition for all blogs then?

1 b) Answer...

I lied, none of them describe a blog, but some older self-writing technology.

1. The first one describes the ancient hypomnemata -- personal notebooks used by the ancient Greeks and the Stoic philosophers to “keep personal records and fomulate opinions about the experience of the self…. This new technology was as disruptive to ancient Greek society as the introduction of the computer into private life today. The hypomnemata served the growing cultivated public in many ways -- as account books, public registers, guides for conduct, and individual notebooks serving as memoranda (archiving)." (Wikipedia; Michel Foucault, Self Writing)
2. The second one describes a modern diary. (Wikipedia)
3. The third one describes the custom of pamphleteering dating back to 17th century. Pamphleteering was especially made popular after the perfection of and the widespread use of the printing press. The practice of pamphleteering was especially influential in the 18h century American Revulution to distribute news and ideas widely and polemicize the issues of the day, especially to spread the word about the benefits of independence from Britain and for recruiting the American guerilla forces that would eventually fight the British. (Wikipedia)

2) What is a blog then?

1 a) Which one of these three descriptions does not define a blog?

One of these three descriptions does not define a blog. Can you guess which one?

1. [Blogs] are…used to “keep personal records and fomulate opinions about the experience of the self….This new technology [has been culturally disruptive, changing the way we do things and communicate with each other]. The [blog serves] the growing cultivated public in many ways - as [websites of account],…guides for conduct, and individual [online] notebooks [for archiving and memory]. [Blogs are used for personal writing and to share with friends and the greater community of bloggers for self and communal growth and development.]
2. A [blog] is a book for writing discrete entries arranged by date. It can be used for recording in advance of appointments and other planned activities, and/or for reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period….There is a strong psychological effect of having an audience for one's self-expression, a personal space, or a "listener," even if this…[blog] is only read by oneself.
3. The [blog] is a one-man show. One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and "high-brow" than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals... [A blog] can include all sorts of writings -- treatises on political theory, essays on history, political arguments, sermons, correspondence, poems -- and they display all sorts of literary devices.

1 b) Answer...

8) The "microcontent" revolution

Blogs within the greater blogosphere are said to be introducing the “microcontent” (or “nanocontent”) age of the Internet (Paquet, 2002) where bloggers with little or no programming experience can now post frequent, brief, and timely commentary on their own websites, usually with many editorialized links pointing to information of interest throughout the Internet and, most notably, to other blogs.

Examples of the Microcontent Revulution

DIY Journalism
1 - Prof. Douglas Kellner comments on DIY journalism
2 - Markos Zuniga's "Daily Kos"
3 - Joshua Marshall's "Talking Points Memo"

Artful Blogs
4 - PostSecret

Meet-Ups and FlashMobs - Contemporary Situationists?
5 - http://www.flashmob.com/


9) Some challenges.