What is a Good Weblog?
Posted 02/02/2003 under
research •
Alison ponders the very subjective question of “What is a good Weblog?” by admitting at the beginning of this short article that the question itself is a strange one.
category - research
The Art of Blogging - Part 1 & 2 by George Siemens
Posted 19/01/2003 under research •
Part 1 is described as Overview, Definitions, Uses, and Implications while part 2 is devoted to Getting Started, “How To”, Tools, Resources. Read extracts from both parts in ‘More’.
Part 1
“What is blogging?
Blogging, as with any new (or in transition) concept, is difficult to define - it has not yet fully become what it will be. Here are some attempts to define blogging:“If we look beneath the content of weblogs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share—the format. The weblog format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences, enabling the social interactions we associate with blogging…These tools spit out our varied content in the same format—archives, permalinks, time stamps, and date headers.” (Meg Hourihan)
Dave Winer defines weblogs as being: personal, on the web, published, and part of communities.
Halley Suitt details multiple characteristics, including: last place on earth to tell the truth, watching brains at work, a love letter, a diary, an open head - for the reader’s convenience.
“But what bloggers do is completely new - and cannot be replicated on any other medium. It’s somewhere in between writing a column and talk radio. It’s genuinely new. And it harnesses the web’s real genius - its ability to empower anyone to do what only a few in the past could genuinely pull off. In that sense, blogging is the first journalistic model that actually harnesses rather than merely exploits the true democratic nature of the web. It’s a new medium finally finding a unique voice.” (Andrew Sullivan)
“The best description I?ve read regarding blogging is that ?it?s somewhere between writing a column and talk radio.?” (Cass McNutt)
“A blog is defined as a Website with dated entries, usually by a single author, often accompanied by links to other blogs that the site?s editor visits on a regular basis. Think of a blog as one person?s public diary or suggestion list. Early blogs were started by Web enthusiasts who would post links to cool stuff that they found on the Internet. They added commentary. They began posting daily. They read one another?s blogs. A community culture took hold.” (Jay Cross)”Part 2
“Getting Started
The best way to learn to blog is to blog. Fortunately, getting started is fairly simple. Three main options exist: hosted, remote server, and desktop.A hosted service is the easiest and quickest way to start. Services like Blogger allow new users to set up an account (for free or a premium version for $35 per year) and begin posting literally in a matter of minutes. Blogger can host the blog, or the user can post to his/her own site.
A remotely installed blog is perhaps the most involved to setup. Movabletype allows users to install on a server (free for non-commercial, $150 for commercial). Some technical skills are required to configure the blog and database. Documentation, however, is excellent for Movabletype. Installation is also offered for a fee.”
Giants and Dwarfs
Posted 02/01/2003 under research •
A group blog written from the campuses of Harvard, Chicago and Oxford about academia, culture, and more. Described as being high culture, low politics, and everything in between.
Weblogs and Blogging - Part 2 - By Laurel A. Clyde
Posted 20/12/2002 under research •
As noted in the first part of this article, many commentators have suggested that Blogger and similar programs have resulted in even more unreliable or mindless content on the Web than there was before.
However, Tim Archer, while acknowledging the truth of this observation, prefers to think that weblogs are an empowering phenomenon; they make it possible, he says, for “everyone” to publish and to have other people read and respond to what they say. Well, you have been warned! At one end of the scale, there are weblogs that provide daily news updates from authoritative commentators in their field. At the other end are a range of personal weblogs whose titles, such as Absolute Piffle, might be said to accurately reflect their content.
http://www.freepint.com/issues/160502.htm#feature
Weblogs and Blogging - Part 2
“Weblogs and Blogging - Part 1” - By Laurel A. Clyde
Posted 20/12/2002 under research •
In just one month, January 2002, some 41,000 people created new weblogs using Blogger (wired) - and Blogger is only one of the weblog development tools now available. Depending on your point of view, weblogs are either one of the most important Internet phenomena of recent years, or possibly the silliest. On the one hand, it is claimed that weblogs are empowering because “anyone” can create one to share their thoughts and ideas with the world. On the other hand, it is also claimed that weblogs add considerably to the already large amount of “vapid” content on the Web, making it harder to find valuable material (blogger.com news). There is a sense in which both perspectives are true: there are some well-maintained, high-quality weblogs that provide a valuable service, but there are also many weblogs that serve no apparent purpose apart from providing the owner with an online public space. Sheer numbers, though, suggest that weblogs cannot be ignored.
