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writing or discussion - what are bloggers doing?

Posted 20/05/2003 under research

There are many bloggers who are adamant that they blog for the love of writing. There are just as many other bloggers who say that they blog because they like to connect with others and be involved in a discussion. Perhaps there is a great percentage of the blogging community who consider that they are doing a bit of both or perhaps they simply blog away and don’t really give it much thought.

The true story of this new form of textuality is yet to be developed and it would not surprise me to find that the true nature of blogging is as varied as there are numbers of bloggers.


The WhyIlog

Posted 02/05/2003 under research

whyILog is a site devoted to quotations from bloggers explaing just that. Why they blog.

whyilog


31 Flavors of Blog

Posted 11/04/2003 under research

During the month of March - ‘WebRaw: digital sushi for your mind’ presented 31 blogs, all of differing genres. These examples are said to provide a good cross section of the vast variety of blogs available on the Web.

go to site


matt jones | work & thoughts

Posted 10/04/2003 under research

Interesting definition/discussion about ‘social software’.

“Social software = software that’s better because there’s people there”

go to the article


blogosphere.us : A Systems Explanation for the Blogosphere

Posted 10/04/2003 under research

Here Nick describes the Blogosphere as a self organising dissipative system. He describes how an information gradient can be said to exist between those who have the information and those who want it and that weblogging allows the bypassing of the traditional ‘information gatekeeper’.

Traditionally, the transfer of information between these “people” would have to flow through an information gatekeeper before it could reach the person who wanted it - an analogous process to “conducting” the information from source to receiver. However, as the information gradient between individuals strengthens, that “base” system for transferring information reaches its full potential. If the information gradient continues to strengthen, some sort of dissipative structure has to emerge from the surrounding information environment to more efficiently deal with the differences. The Blogosphere can be thought of as a dissipative system for dealing with a strong information gradient. Instead of being conducted from first hand source to gatekeeper to audience, information in the Blogosphere is capable of traveling directly from the source to the audience - eliminating the limiting factor in the information transfer.

go to article here

 


The Social Capital of Blogspace - on Ross Mayfield’s Weblog

Posted 10/04/2003 under research

No… I’m not referring to Ross Mayfield’s Weblog as the social capital of the Blogosphere. But Ross has provided an improved picture of ‘The Ecosystem of Networks’ into which he has tied the idea of ‘Social Capital’.

Ross aligns the three modes of weblog use, Publishing, Communication and Collaboration with Sarnoff’s, Metcalfe’s and Reed’s Laws. 

Social Capital of Blogspace

Perhaps we are in the Network Age [Ming], following modernism and post-modernism.  After obsessing about construction, then deconstruction, we now value the links between deconstructed bits.  When those links are between people, they can be valued as social capital.

Robert Putnam, in Bowling Alone, popularlized the role of social capital.  Francis Fukayama, in Trust, principally discusses the correlation between social capital and the prosperity of nations.  He defines social capital as the ease in which people in a culture can form new associations.

image

Read the rest of the article in ‘more’ or go to the article here

 

As previously described in the Ecosystem of Networks, people use weblogs in different modes: Publishing, Communication and Collaboration.  By dramatically lowering the cost for these modes on the public internet—they are rapidly increasing the value of social capital.  Each mode provides different valuation methods:

Publishing: Sarnoff’s law says the value of a network is proportionate to the number of subscribers.
Communication: Metcalfe’s law says the value of a network is proportionate to the number of links.
Collaboration: Reed’s Law says the value of a network is proportionate to the number of groups.

Now Sarnoff + Metcalfe + Reed does not equal a valuation methodology, but centering on the value of different kinds of relationships reveals where investment would provide greater return.  Enhancing communication and ties between collaborative groups enables exponential growth of social capital.

The above image also recasts the Ecosystem of Networks with the individual as the center, as preferred by many…

From Zack Lynch’s forthcoming book:

...Unlike many of his contemporaries, the insightful UC Berkeley sociologist Manuel Castells in his ambitious two thousand page trilogy, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture [retitled the Rise of the Network Society] provided a comprehensive assessment of the impact of information technologies have on culture and global society at large. Castells? extensive analysis of how “our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self? will remain an important perspective for some time to come. Here, the ?Net? stands for the new organizational formations, social and cultural, based on the pervasive use of networked communication media…

Perhaps we are living in a Network Age, building a Network Society.  Perhaps Emergent Democracy is as significant as a Second Superpower.  But at the least, we are building new relationships—a connectedness that we should value.


On-line Journal for University Course

Posted 28/02/2003 under research

Blog City has been chosen as the venue for students at Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus enrolled in the third year CyberStudies course, “Digital Production Methods” (3805ART), to conduct their on-line journals.

The running Journal is an assessment item and represents 40% of the overall final mark. Assessment of the Journal will involve assessment of the students’ ability and skills in documenting the technical and artistic problems encountered and the creative solutions employed to overcome these restrictions in digital production.

The Digital Production exercises assess the students’ ongoing ability to comprehend and respond creatively to a variety of applications and production issues and the use of software as a tool for expressing content.

The Journal assesses the students’ ability to develop an evaluative process for their work, and to be able to identify weaknesses and strengths in the software and in their own art practice. The journal should also reflect the research carried out by students to supplement their practical development, reviews of media on CD-Rom or Web site surfing.

The use of Blogging software should facilitate students maintaining a regularly updated Journal during the course of the semester. It is required that the Journal contains content that is relevant to both the course and their own personal experience.

http://royhornsby.blog-city.com/


Dennis G. Jerz:?On the Trail of the Memex. Vannevar Bush, Weblogs and the Google Galaxy

Posted 19/02/2003 under research

Dennis Jerz is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin?Eau Claire, teaches technical writing, electronic text, and literature. Since May, 1999 he has maintained the Literacy Weblog. He is also the author of American Drama 1920-1950: Soul and Society in the Age of the Machine (2003) and guest editor for TEXT Technology 11.2 (special issue: interactive fiction).

Read ‘more’ for the introduction to this latest excellent essay by Dennis Jerz…

go to essay here

Hypertext as mediated by the Web browser has not proved to embody the qualities of the ideal post-structural text longed for by literary theorists such as George Landow; neither has the World Wide Web fulfilled the document-association function of the memex, the hypothetical research tool Vannevar Bush described in his 1945 essay, As We May Think. Bush?s memex was not merely a form of photo-mechanical hypertext, but also a means for the full-scale transfer of complex collaborative thought processes, as encoded by individual researchers via their own personal document association schemas. While weblogs, the most influential textual genre truly native to the World Wide Web, do facilitate the exchange of information across the Internet, that information must be carefully filtered in order to be useful. Google?s February 2003 purchase of the popular weblogging platform Blogger signals a shift towards content production that may create a conflict of interest; nevertheless, Google?s proven ability to mine the data encoded in annotated trails of linked documents may create the synergy necessary to fulfill Vannevar Bush?s vision.

go to essay here


Web log - Wikipedia

Posted 18/02/2003 under research

The definition of the term ‘weblog’ as presented by the multilingual, open source free encyclopedia begins with “A web log (also known as a blog, see below) is a website that tracks headlines and articles from other websites. They are frequently maintained by volunteers and are typically devoted to a specific audience or topic.”

The definition of ‘blogging’ commences “Blogging is the process of creating weblogs (weblogs, or “blogs” for short). “Bloggers” are people who keep weblogs.”

Why not add your input to this extraordinary project?

go to wikipedia/weblog
go to wikipedia/blogging


Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

Posted 09/02/2003 under research

Clay Shirky has written an essay keeping in mind the inevitability of power laws that develop within social systems. According to Barabasi, all Webpages follow a precise mathematical expression which has been called a ‘power law’. In the normal course of events, natural occurrences follow a bell curve distribution but occasionally, nature produces quantities that follow a power law distribution instead. Every power law has a unique exponent and this exponent can tell us, for example, how many popular Web pages exist out there relative to the less popular ones.

Shirky investigates what he terms ?A Predictable Imbalance? amongst weblogging sites?..

A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we’ve seen with MUDs, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on.



go to essay here

Reference - Barabasi, A. 2002, Linked: The New Science of Networks, Perseus Publishing, Cambridge. back


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