Category: Blogs and Blogging Culture

Web of Influence is an article by Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell in Foreign Policy, November/December 2004. It is an excellent and long article on blogging political influence. It has links to other articles and to the blogs mentioned. Thanks to Matt Patey for this.

The Word Spy has an entry for nanopublishing – a narrowband publishing model aimed at a specific audience. Sounds like an academic journal to me. I prefer “nonnopublishing” which is aimed at granfathers.

scribblings & musings @ sgs online is my colleague StÈfan Sinclair’s new blog. (More properly it is a blog he has had for a while which he is bringing out into the open.) Readers of my blog will recognize StÈfan as one of the people who introduces me to neat stuff.
StÈfam recently joined McMaster so I am fortunate to also have him as a colleague. Check out his blog and his neat HyperPo project.

Martialis is a site where Nick is translating an epigram a day of Martial. What an interesting idea of what to do with a blog – pace yourself in a volunteer task of use to others.
Continue reading Blogging Translation

Thanks to Matt K’s blog I just discovered that Andrea Laue has a blog, just a text. She was one of the bright ones in Viriginia when I was there.
Jan. 4, 2004: Andrea has just sent me a note that quiotl.net (her service provider) has gone out of business so her blog is no longer accessible. I will post a further note if she gets it up again.

Blogging made it to the cover of The Globe And Mail in an article by Graeme Smith titled, “Bloggers learn lesson: Don’t trash your boss”. The story, which ultimately is anecdotal and uninformative, tells about a woman fired from her job with the Nunavit Tourism agency when she posted pictures that were not complementary.
Much more interesting, and the lead article of the Educause Review, is an article by Stephen Downes on Educational Blogging (September/October 2004,†Volume 39, Number 5. p. 14-26.) This article has one of the best short histories and discussions of what blogging is that I have read, but you have to get past the opening section on school children using blogs for the meat. Downes gives a good list of educational uses.
Continue reading Blogs are news

Distributed KM – Improving Knowledge Workers’ Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing,by Martin Roell, is the a paper he presented to BlogTalk 2.0 in Vienna in July 2004. He starts with a point that can’t be made too often, knowledge is human, it is not an attribute of information systems or a fancy version of information. More importantly, knowledge is not a collection of objects, it is an aptitude or capability in humans to re-create on appropriate demand.
Roell then swerves off to talk about “knowledge workers”, a horrid phrase that should be banned. The paper redeems itself by turning at the end to blogs and how researchers can use them as open filing cabinets. I like the idea of “knowledge journals” – it suggests that knowledge has a narrative rather than being a system of fact-jects. Whether research blogs ever lead to collaborative projects or not, they capture fragments of the path, which in the humanities is all we have.

Polarfront is a fascinating experiment using an interactive tree-graph view of a site, including blogs, as the interface to the site. You can click, scrub, and dismiss things. While it takes a while to get used to, I particularly like how the author handles images in the section “Japan 2002”. Is this an improved interface for a blog? Not sure, but it works for me for image navigation.
Continue reading Polarfront: Graph Blog

Wired News: Bloggers Suffer Burnout is a story that StÈfan Sinclair pointed me to about how blogging can become drugery. The story describes the experience of blogs that took off to the point where authors felt the habit was too demanding.
For readers of this blog (all 5 of you) I want to assure you that I don’t expect to get burnt out.
Continue reading Blogger Burnout

Matt Patey has suggested I look at blosxom a simple clean blogging tool which uses flat files to edit entries and the file structure rather than a database for linking. Matt’s one of the smartest I know about these things, so it is worth looking at.