Tim Berners-Lee of WWW (HTML) fame now has a blog, see timbl’s blog | Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs. It is through the MIT Decentralized Information Group (DIG). He intends it “to be geeky semantic web stuff mostly.” Not much there yet, but could be interesting.
This is thanks to Ruth.
On Wednesday (November 30th) I participated in a panel organized by the Canadian Public Relations Society, Toronto titled “Wake Up and Smell the Blogs!”. I was the token academic on the panel chaired by Michael O’Connor Clarke whose personal blog is Uninstalled.
The focus was mostly on how to use blogs in public relations and how to get attention from journalists. Jack Kapica of the Globe and Mark Evans of the National Post, both have good blogs on the tech industry. Kapika’s is hosted by the Globe, Evans’ is not hosted by the Post. What does that say? John Oxley from Microsoft (see Canadian IT Managers) talked about Microsoft supporting bloggin by employees. There is a lot of anxiety about letting personal blogs loose and not being able to control the message of an organization, and he explained how Microsoft is trying to use blogs to provide a more personal and transparent face. Rick Segale (who used to work for Microsoft and is now a venture capitalist) spoke forcefully about the virtues of blogging and the need for passion.
I realized by the end that I am a very different blogger than the other panel members. I have a freedom to say what I want that most in industry (and yes, the media is an industry) do not. I also don’t have justify what I write in terms of attention – this blog doesn’t need to be read widely to be worth it. Finally, I realized, again, how blogging is not about the technology, it is about voice and engagement. It is a sign that web technologies are maturing when things like RSS and XML are not really the issue, it what you do with them and how they are hidden.
Continue reading Public Relations and Blogs
Judith sent me a link to Tag Tagger which proposes to develop a system for tracking and tagging tags. The proposal is a joke by The Silent Penguin (“Making a dent – somewhere”), but one which points to the infinite regress of information. Tags and links become information at which point they too need to be tagged and linked … see Technorati Tags. (No joke is too funny to be implemented.)
Which reminds to write about Tags, known to the rest of us as “keywords” or “subjects”. In some usability work we are doing on the TAPoR portal we found our users had no idea what “tags” were. Obviously they are not digi-literate enough.
The recent news from Iraq about the possible misuse of white phosphorus by US troops in Falluja has an interesting bloggin angle. The BBC News story by Paul Reynolds, White phosphorus: weapon on the edge (16 Nov. 2005) mentions how bloggers forced the Pentagon to admit they had used white phosphorus, despite denying it before when RAI first broke the story. Here is a quote:
This line however crumbled when bloggers (whose influence must not be under-estimated these days) ferreted out an article published by the US Army’s Field Artillery Magazine in its issue of March/April this year.
Setting aside the serious issues raised by this revelation, it is interesting how bloggers are taking on the role of public researchers – chasing down contradictions that the media don’t have the time to. Blogs are often presented as opinion, but in this case it was the research that made a difference.
In June I blogged a friend’s blog called Buckets of Grewal which is about the Grewal affair. (See the original post here, and at the The HUMlab blog). I note today that the Buckets blog has now surpassed Gurmant Grewal’s site, if you google “Grewal”, but not his wife Nina’s site. Also, this only works on the google.ca site.
Buckets says, “A rose between two thorns.” Or is it a bucket between two gruels.
Terry Flynn, who is an industry prof at McMaster in communications management pointed me to an article, What Blogs are Not by Kate Trgovac that reports on a talk by that title given by David Weinberger at the BlogOn conference.
The approach of what blogs are not (as in, they are not journalism) works well.
From HUMANIST an article in The Register on Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems. The article is by Andrew Orlowski (18th of October, 2005) and looks at the problem of quality (where many entries are terrible) and how (if at all) the wikipedia could rectify the situation. In particular the article discusses the way the wikipedia has become a “religious crusade” so that criticism is flamed.
I must admit that most of the stuff I have looked up was pretty good. Hmmm, I wonder if I am looking for a particular subset of things or have a low threshold for quality.
Continue reading Wikipedia quality issues
Well, Google now has a Blog Search that is in beta. It searches an index of feeds. You can’t submit a blog for them to index, but they are checking other updating services like Weblog.com. Most of the blogs they are tracking have been indexed since June, so you can’t search older entries. See the story, Google Launches Industrial Strength Blog Search.
If you’re wondering why I’m not blogging much – see The HUMlab blog – I am a guest blogger there.
Geoffrey Rockwell
Wayne Macphail of W8NC alerted me to the new rabble radio – fresh Canadian podcasts from the left channel. It is a new feature of rabble.ca for which Judy Rebbick is the publisher (and Wayne is on the board.) Given the CBC lockout, this could become an alternative source of “radio” news. Wayne did a series of podcasts for the McMaster Faculty of Engineering and has been developing interesting ideas about how to use podcasting.
Now, what could do with podcasting in the university?