Writing Online

Cameron Marlow, in an MIT openDOOR interview, talks about how weblogs affect social ties and the spread of information on the Internet. He says:

The recent insurgence of weblog adoption can be attributed to the new forms of interaction that it provides. A new weblog author who engages other webloggers will suddenly find themselves embedded in a new social network of people that share their interests. These individuals are a constant readership that motivates the author to keep writing — their new audience of friends.

And with “a new social network” and “friends” comes a re-shaping of one’s identity.

If the New York Times is any indication, newspapers will eventually stop the printing presses and go fully online. From an article by Richard Koman (Silicon Valley Watcher),

NYT pub Arthur Sulzberger suggests that the debate over how far online newspapers must go is over in an interview with Haaretz.com. He sees his job as shepherding the times onto the Internet while maintaining profit margins – and “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.”

It seems “real” world publishing is integrating fully into a “virtual” world.

Elia Powers’ article “A lesson in viral video” (Inside Higher Ed) looks at how knowledge of Wesch’s video, “The Web is Us/ing Us,” was seen by the initial 10 colleagues to whom he sent the link to 91,000 within two days. Some of the video’s main points are:

The difference between HTML and XML, the formation of blogs and the nonlinear quality of digital text are topics addressed in Wesch’s piece. The title, “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” is a reference to a point made in the video — that we are teaching our computer new ideas every time we click on a link. As Wesch says: “The more we are aware of the machine, the better we can make it serve us.”

And as he writes in the video, “Digital text is no longer just linking information. The Web is no longer just linking information. The Web is linking people.”

Wesch said the video is meant to remind the programmers and techies that they have a “profound impact on societies” with their ability to write open source software. He said it’s also intended to remind the policy wonks and politicians who debate Internet privacy and copyrighting that “the media we are responding to is constantly changing.”

As we are now looking at blogs, blog genres, and blog criteria a good paper to frame our investigation is Danah Boyd’s paper, “A Blogger’s Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium,” published in reconstruction: studies in contemporary culture. From the conclusion:

Early definitions of blogs focused on the structure and content of the output, often using metaphors to connect the emergent with the understood. This approach introduced analytic biases that complicated people’s ability to follow the evolution of blogging and how the practice and values of bloggers shaped the output. By shifting focus to the practice, it is possible to see how blogs are not a genre of communication, but a medium through which communication occurs. This reframing offers a framework in which to analyze how blogging has helped blur accepted distinctions such as between orality and textuality, corporeality and spatiality, private and public.

Key points to keep in mind are that to understand blogging, we must look not only at the product but also at the practices and culture that produces the blog, and how blogging crosses boundaries.

Danah Boyd is a doctoral candidate at Berkeley who researches online communities. She has quite a few papers

Josef Kolbitsch and Hermann Maurer are writing a seven-part series of posts on “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasting, Social Networks and File Sharing: How the Web is Transforming Itself” (via Using Wiki in Education):

To date, one of the main aims of the World Wide Web has been to provide users with information. In addition to private homepages, large professional information providers, including news services, companies, and other organisations have set up web-sites.

With the development and advance of recent technologies such as wikis, blogs, podcasting and file sharing this model is challenged and community-driven services are gaining influence rapidly. These new paradigms obliterate the clear distinction between information providers and consumers. The lines between producers and consumers are blurred even more by services such as Wikipedia, where every reader can become an author, instantly.

This paper presents an overview of a broad selection of current technologies and services: blogs, wikis including Wikipedia and Wikinews, social networks such as Friendster and Orkut as well as related social services like del.icio.us, file sharing tools such as Flickr, and podcasting. These services enable user participation on the Web and manage to recruit a large number of users as authors of new content.

It is argued that the transformations the Web is subject to are not driven by new technologies but by a fundamental mind shift that encourages individuals to take part in developing new structures and content.

The evolving services and technologies encourage ordinary users to make their knowledge explicit and help a collective intelligence to develop.

For an hour-long video documentary about blogs, see Blogumentary. The author states:

BLOGUMENTARY playfully explores the many ways blogs are influencing our media, our politics, and our relationships. Personal political writing is the foundation of our democracy, but mass media has reduced us to passive consumers instead of active citizens. Blogs return us to our roots and reengage us in democracy. Shot in candid first-person style by Chuck Olsen.

Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology, has a fascinating, 4 1/2 minute video (Web 2.0 … The Web is Us/ing Us) on the influence of digital text, and thus, the web, on us, and vice versa (via jill/txt). In particular, the separation of content from form (i.e., the code, such as html and xml) has enabled easy web authoring, blogging, wikis, and other online writing tools. The video shows how it isn’t just information that is linked on the web, but people as they collaborate and link to one another. What does that mean with respect with differentiating between “real” and “virtual” reality, online and offline identity, authorship and copyright, …?

Jon Udell has an interesting post, Who can see which parts of my published surface area?

To describe the various projections of ourselves into cyberspace, I use the following metaphor: we’re cells, and we’re growing the surface area of our cellular membranes. Every time I write a blog item, or post a Flickr photo, or tag a resource in del.icio.us, I enlarge the surface area of that membrane. I do it for two reasons. First, because I want influence to flow from me to the world. Second, because I want influence to flow the other way too. I’m soliciting feedback and interaction.

I monitor that feedback using an array of sensors that works surprisingly well. All of the parts of my public membrane can be instrumented with RSS feeds. By tuning into those feeds, I know — fairly immediately and comprehensively — who has touched which parts of my exposed surface area.

What I can’t do very easily, though, is visualize that entire complex surface. If somebody reacts to something I published years ago on some site I’ve forgotten about, I’m reminded that part of my surface area extends to that site. But it’s only a reactive thing, there’s no proactive way to review the totality of my published corpus. That’d be handy.

He then continues on about how computers might eventually help us see our full selves in Cyberspace. But I wonder, We don’t see all of the inner workings of our conscious mind, much less our subconscious. So, what would it mean to be aware of all that we had published on the web?

Copyblogger has posted “The 5 Immutable Laws of Persuasive Blogging.” They are:

1. The Law of Value
2. The Law of Headlines and Hooks
3. The Law of “How to”
4. The Law of the List
5. The Law of the Story

Not considering whether these “laws” or immutable or limited to just five, how would you compare them to print writing? Similar? Different? Some are similar, some different? In what ways?

Fred Stutzman, a PhD student in Information Science, has a compilation of links to research on Facebook. These articles cover concepts like identity, networks, and other ideas we’ll be covering in class.