Lorelle VanFossen is guest blogging on Problogger, stating,
Blogging is about writing. Many claim that content is king. If content is king, then the army that protects and defends the king is the written word.
She has a list of 30 nuts-and-bolts points on writing better posts.
Darren Rowse (Problogger) recommends “Clear Blogging,” a comprehensive book on blogging by Bob Walsh. Darren writes:
While I did only skim most of it – I was quite impressed with the depth and breadth of what Bob managed to cover in the book. It’s the most comprehensive book I’ve seen on the topic of blogging and well worth the read. I’d recommend it to any new blogger wanting both theory and practical advice about everything from the setting up of a blog through to the running of one.
It’s also possible to get a free sample chapter to see whether you would want to buy the book. Just go to Amazon.com’s page for Clear Blogging, and scroll down a little less than half the page until you see the author’s note “Free sample chapter of Clear Blogging.”
Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen), reviewing the book A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink, applies the six attitudes of the book (Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning) to making a presentation. It seems to me that they can be applied to designing a website or maintaining a blog, too.
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.
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
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.
It’s worthwhile to read jill/txt, a blog maintained by Jill Walker, an associate professor at the University of Bergen who researches online story telling. A recent post on an assignment for her students asks them to look at their own blogs individually and as a group using the criteria of
- content
- layout
- writing style
- kinds of accessories (blogrolls, link to facebook profile, comments, etc?).
With these criteria, the students are to determine if their blogs are in the same genre or different ones, and how they match other genres in “art, film, television, or literature.”
Neva Chonin interviews Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator (at the age of 18) of LiveJournal, now a community of 8 million users. Chonin notes the differences between LiveJournalers and bloggers:
There are differences between the worlds of blogs and LJs. LiveJournal’s user base skews young, drawing a large proportion of teenagers, whereas blogging tends to attract users in their late 20s and early 30s. Additionally, LJ is seen as a private space for networking and interpersonal discourse; blogs are viewed as one-person publications directed toward a larger audience. A growing number of people maintain both an LJ and a blog, but the two camps traditionally don’t mix, with some bloggers dismissing Journalers as trivial kids and Journalers mocking bloggers as wannabe Web stars.
Fitzpatrick and the Trotts hope to erase some of those assumptions, especially after Six Apart introduces its Comet platform — expected out next year — which will combine the public platform of blogging, the community interaction of LiveJournal and the networking of sites like my MySpace.com.
In looking at the genres of websites, blogs, and other online environments, we might expect interaction among them (and print) that generates new genres.
The blog “waggish” has posted “Genre: Thoughts on blogs and genres” and concludes:
Blogs are not content-focused, in that the content rolls by too quickly to be lasting. (Yes, they provide content, but when it’s so subject to being missed or disorganized, the structural integrity of the content is not the focus.) But nor are they personality-focused. If Josh Marshall started writing exclusively about Andrei Tarkovsky tomorrow, he would lose much of his audience, who would nonetheless stick with Kevin Drum. Not to say that they’re the same, but they are not unique in the way that novelists are. They can be replaced.
Blogs, then, are topic-focused. (And by topic I effectively mean the definable gestalt of the blog.) Individual content matters less in a blog than sticking to a consistent topic over time. And this is where the analogy to 30s romantic comedy seems apropos; these movies too stuck to a remarkably consistent topic, and the individual variations were practically indistinct. To put it another way, it was up to the individual to distinguish what variations they preferred, because the level of homogeneity was so high. And so it is with any given blog, or even with a blog genre. The difference is that the medium makes it that much more difficult to ever separate out individual works for praise, and so the gestalt is left to stand on its own. In the 30s, people could see one movie and remember it well, whether it was good or bad. In the medium of blogs, that’s not really possible; you absorb an entire gestalt as you consume them.
This produces two diverging effects: either people get lost in the mass of repetitive, homogenous content and process what they happen to run into, or they abstract quite heavily to synthesize large amounts of data into a graspable gestalt. Sort of like reading Balzac.
What do you think?
Note that waggish has two more posts on blogs: Thoughts on genre: Blogs and improvization and Thoughts on genre: Blogs and practice.
