In my first post, I asked, "Are corporations trolling blogs to gather personal, read consumer, information?" The Silicon Valley Biz Ink has a story about Moreover Technologies' enterprise grade Weblog search tool that pretty much does that. [Link][comments?][Karma: 15 ( + / - )]
One of the many bloggers who wrote about the second Iraq war was Salam Pax, a young Iraqi who wanted to reconnect with his two friends but wound up connecting the world to his view of the war. Entries from his blog Where is Raed? have been published in the book The Baghdad Blog. Salam still posts to his blog and still doesn't know where his friend, Raed, is. He shares his experiences about the book in an article posted in the online version of The Daily Telegraph. [Link][1 comments][Karma: 14 ( + / - )]
Tonight I came across Blogmapper, which is a Web-based tool you can use to link your blog entries to points on an image of a map. One example they post is a blog that maps worlwide SARS cases (you'll need Flash Player 6 to view it). If you don't know the exact coordinates of the location, you can use the Blogmapper locator tool to generate a tag that specifies the coordinates and paste that tag into your blog. This could be really useful in rearch, like the SARs blog shows, for online travel journals, or any kind of journal that refers to physical spaces. You can create an online journal with multiple points of view about hurricane Isabel by giving posting access to other people located along the East Coast. I'm too tired to think of really innovated uses, but you get the idea. The more interesting (to me) aspect of Blogmapper is that you don't have to use images of maps. You can use any image at all; the Blogmapper tool creates a tag that specifies the image coordinates of the point you choose. I wonder about the kinds of blogs you can create with different images. Hypertext poets, writers, and artists have created works that navigate through image maps (like Deena Larson's Stained Word Window), but like blogging software, Blogmapper can potentially turn more people into hypertext poets by saving bloggers from having to create their own image map navigation system. [Link][comments?][Karma: 12 ( + / - )]
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Russell Smith of Canada's The Globe and Mail wonders why anyone would read these laundry lists of people's lives. The San Diego Union Tribune offers an Associated Press article by Janet Pak that distinguishes between online journals and blogs: "... [U]nlike blogs, which are dated musings on certain subjects and often carry links to similar blogs, online journals are designed to be more like a coffeehouse, where a community regularly gathers, building friendships and connections as they share personal details." Are these the only characteristics that distinguish a blog from an online journal? These differences seem arbitrary to me. And aren't blogs communities, too? The blogs I read make me feel like I'm part of a community of people with similar interests. To me, the difference is that online journals are more free-form, where blogs are a bit more organized. [Link][1 comments][Karma: 9 ( + / - )]
As I was drifting off to sleep just now, I got to thinking that I should talk about the technology used by weblog writers. At first I thought of making the distinction between how early bloggers created their blogs by hand and how many of today's bloggers use web-based GUIs like Blogger and Journalspace. I was going to discuss how GUIs can serve to mask the more technical workings of blogs and open up the world of blogging to the masses. But I don't think there's a similar thread to be discussed about traditional diaries. So then I realized that I should instead think about how technology is used by both traditional diarists and bloggers. I've heard of traditional diarists creating their own code to hide their diary's content from prying eyes. This code is a technology the writer has developed in order to secure his diary. And, of course, there are those cheap little locks that some diaries have as a security device. But some traditional diaries were also distributed by their authors for others to read. I must research how the invention of print affected traditional diaries. The Web is a blogger's printing press and being able to programmatically grant only trusted readers access is a blogger's lock and key. [Link][comments?][Karma: 11 ( + / - )]
Rebecca Blood wrote an interesting history of blogs and makes a distinction between the filter-style and journal-style blogs. Journals facilitate self-discovery by providing us with a spot to informally explain one's self in writing. Writing helps us to reflect on our thoughts and to expand upon them. Ms. Blood notes that early in her blogging "career", she discovered that she was more interested in certain topics than she thought she was. She could quickly see that the links and journal entries she posted pertained to these topics. This feedback loop between a writer and her blog is one of the aspects of blogs that really interests me. While traditional diaries certainly allow writers to learn about themselves, they do so in a more gradual manner than blogs. Additionally, journal-type blogs teach others about who we are in an almost instantaneous manner. A writer can post her throughts as soon as she thinks them and know that someone will read them (and maybe comment on them) almost as quickly. Does having an audience help a writer to learn about herself differently than if she wrote in a paper diary? Is the discourse between blog writer and reader different from the discourse between two people talking with each other? Do blogs allow us to refine our discourse in a way that oral communication could never allow? Will blogs change communication and thought similarly to how the invention of writing changed them? [Link][comments?][Karma: 15 ( + / - )]
Welcome to This blog will eat itself, a blog about blogs and bloggers, by bloggers, and for bloggers. I am beginning my research for my Master's thesis, in which I will discuss blogs, their relationship with traditional diaries, and their affect on society (including privacy, communication, and research). In what better medium to collect my findings than a blog? Here, I will post my research findings, news, links, and other interesting information about blogs. Most importantly to my thesis, I will blog for the first time. After all, how can I write about that which I do not know and expect to be taken seriously? My hope is that this blog will serve not only as a research repository for my thesis, but also as a little experiment to show how a blog's community of writers and readers transforms the act of research. As I post my findings, news, links, and other interesting information about blogs, I invite you to post your own comments, questions, theories, and findings. You, the reader, will become a contributor and will help to steer our conversation (within the bounds of my thesis). You will not be doing my homework for me; rather, you will be participating in a feedback loop that will shape our conversation with every new posting. I want to write about blogs because although I am no expert on blogs, I read a handful on a daily basis (listed on this site). My sister blogs, and I live with a blogger, whose two siblings also blog. Reading blogs has become as big a part of my online reality as Googling and ignoring pop-up ads. My thesis will compare traditional diaries with blogs, using Pepys diary/blog as a framework. I'll be discussing communication and hypertext theory such as Jay David Bolter's theory about hypertext and the remediation of print. I'll also talk about personal web pages from the early days of the World Wide Web and how they morphed into today's blogs. For discussion, I'll be posing such questions as: How are people using blogs? What kinds of blogs are out there? Does blogging become less legitimate when everyone does it? Just how much privacy does a blogger give away? Is it more than just her life story? Are corporations trolling blogs to gather personal, read consumer, information? Does a blogger give up the right to her consumer privacy when she willingly gives away her personal narrative? How does the mutability of the Web affect how much privacy a blogger willingly gives up? Does the knowledge that Web pages become inaccessible to the public rather quickly help bloggers reveal all, knowing that their own blogs will eventually become inaccessible? But first, I'll post a list of links I've been collecting for a few months now. More about me: I'm working on my Master of Science in Professional and Technical Communication (MSPTC) at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and am hoping to graduate in May 2004. [Link][5 comments][Karma: 14 ( + / - )] |
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