jill/txt

Is anyone using Twitter? As with most of these social sites I’m not sure how useful it will be, but I’m curious as to how it works. And again, you need friends on it to figure it out! I’m intrigued that it seems happy to send me SMSes to my international mobile phone to update me on my friends’ activities without charging me a thing. So far I only have one friend (thanks Elin!) but I suppose with a lot of friends the SMS thing might get a bit much. We’ll see. Anyway, if you’re on Twitter, let me know!

(And yes, I am still writing my DAC paper, it’s just that I needed another example of a social networking site and well, when I write I need to intersperse it all with little expeditions online. And I’ve revised all the way up to page five now, only three and a half to go, and really, it’s looking a lot better than feared though of course it still has heaps of potential for improvement…)

This week is the school winter break, so I’m writing with my ten-year-old sitting in the sofa watching cartoons. Go outside, the weather’s beautiful, I say, as I type hunched over my computer, carefully ignoring the dishes piled on the kitchen counter and the dust highlighted by the sun shining in through the window again after a long winter. Today is the deadline for the DAC paper, and thank goodness, late last night it started making sense to me again instead of just being a bunch of isolated bits and pieces. I have an argument and a contribution. I think. And a lot of words. I think I can pull it all together today.

At four I’m taking my daughter to see Night at the Museum, and then we’re going up to the Natural History Museum, armed with torches for a special museum in the dark experience. I’ve tried to scare my daughter telling her the whale might come to life, but she just laughs and says it’s only bones, anyway. Isn’t that even scarier, I say? Nah, she replies coolly.

We’ll see. Now I just need to finish this paper before four.

Update: I finished it!!! Hooray!!!

Thanks to a discussion in our research guild, I now know about this comprehensive list of in-jokes and cultural references in World of Warcraft. There’s a lot!

Oh dear. I’m writing my DAC paper, and I’m at that stage where I have no idea what I’m doing. The abstract looks so interesting, and was cleverly constructed to use stuff I’m doing anyway for the blogging book but with a twist - but now I can’t figure out how to get from abstract to paper and I’m worried the abstract looked cool because it’s a small idea that is simply better in brief form. Like blog posts. I’m good at blog posts.

I also had reviews back from the first Very Good Journal I ever submitted an article to. I got a “revise and resubmit for a second round of reviews”, with lots of criticism but also lots of encouragement, and all in all I’m rather happy with it. One of the more amusing (and comforting) criticisms was that the paper didn’t engage enough with current research on blogs and social software, and that I should look at Jill Walker’s work. Heh. Sure, I can do that. Don’t ya love blind reviews? Of course, maybe the reviewer figured out who I was and wanted to be friendly. But I prefer the theory that he/she has no idea who I am. And that’s why I’m not posting the content of this paper or of the DAC paper - I think I’d quite like to preserve whatever blindness there is left to those review processes.

The DAC paper though, currently looks nicely formatted but god knows where it’s going. I try to comfort myself by telling myself that writing always feels like this - and usually it works out fine with perseverence.

I’m sure I’ve seen statistics showing that 38% of Norwegians have been on television, but I now that I want to cite that, I can’t find the stats. Argh! Any ideas?

My point is that even mainstream media is very participatory these days.

For the second semester running, I have not succeeded in getting my students enthused about blogging. Let’s be frank: most of them hate it, only a very few of them actually post assignments on time and only the guy who already was an active blogger uses it as I’d intended. And this is in a course where the topic of the first half of the course is blogging, where they have to include two blog posts in their portfolios at the end of the semester, thus contributing to their grade, and where I’ve worked hard to make sure there are interesting assignments, we’ve blogged in class, I’ve posted feedback, asked them to give each other feedback etc etc etc.

Basically they just ignore it all. And they’re smart interested students. Who are bizarrely enough writing papers about blogging while saying they don’t really understand blogging. Because you’ve only posted three posts to your own blog, I tell them, tearing my hair out.

Kara Dawson thinks the initial novelty of blogs, that made students enjoy them a few years ago, has simply worn off:

Sure, blogs have changed the face of communication, and brought new opportunities, new relationships, new forms of recognition, and even new earning potential to many people. But not to everyone.

Certainly not to my two classes of graduate students who ended the fall semester blogged down and blogged out. In the past, when I had required students to write blog postings in my courses, the assignment was at least a novelty. But last semester, it just seemed a snore.

To my surprise, after our American and Canadian exchange students showed the class FaceBook, most of them signed up and are using it quite actively. Perhaps simply because it still has that novelty?

Oh I so want to go skiing! I want to learn snowboarding! And go downhill and cross-country and everything skiing! Next week is the school winter holidays and everyone is going to their mountain cabin. Me, I’ll be stuck in Bergen writing my DAC paper, and trying to keep my ten-year-old entertained while school’s out and all her friends are in the mountains.

And look at this: Anders and the PaP (Participation and Play in Converging Media) gang in Oslo had a seminar at Geilo, which clearly involved a lot of skiing and snowboarding as well as work.

I want to attend a seminar at Geilo too!

Lisbeth links to a wonderful blog, techPresident - this is a group blog monitoring how US presidential candidates are using blogs, social software sites and other web 2.0 things in their campaigns, and how bloggers and other web users and sites and processes are changing the debate. In addition to frequent and interesting posts, they have a hilarious statistic on how many “friends” each candidate has on MySpace. You can also find useful charts, such as how frequently each candidate is mentioned in blogs. Here’s the chart for the Democrat candidates:

The blog is run by the Personal Democracy Forum, which is also hosting a very interesting-looking conference on May 18. The program isn’t up, but they have a great list of speakers. Here’s last year’s program. I’m thinking I’d love to go, would make perfect sense for the book I’m writing on blogs - and I have the funding - but it’s one day and the trans-continental flight would suck for the environment. I don’t so much mind the flight or the jetlag, I generally do quite well with those. And I like the frequent flier points. And New York.

Does anyone have experience with these conferences? I wonder whether I could just as well get the info from reading on- and offline or whether attending would really make my chapter on blogging and the public sphere significantly better? They had podcasts last year - but apparently only of short interviews after the official sessions.

(And what utter luxury to actually be able to choose whether to fly to New York like that. I’m lucky.)

Norwegian-speakers who are interested in the question of how blogging relates to journalism (such as those of my students who have chosen the “Are blogs journalism?” assignment) would do well to look at Olav Anders Øvrebøs report on this matter:

Øvrebø, Olav Anders. 2006. Under medienes overflate: Et forskningsprosjekt om blogging og journalistikk. Available from http://www.oov.no/prosjekter/undermedienesoverflaterapport.html.

Reading Charlotte Hägström’s chapter for our World of Warcraft anthology, I found this quote:

A person’s identity is not to be found in behavious. Nor - important though this is - in the reactions of othersm but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. (Giddens 1991:54; emphasis his)

And I’m sure that has something to do with blogs. Charlotte’s chapter, btw, is wonderful, all about names in WoW, and excellently written.

Today my students are bringing three copies of their first drafts to class for a first round of peer feedback and feedback from me. I just received an email from one student who wrote that his/her printer was out of paper and could I print the draft for him/her?

So individually this isn’t a big deal. But what the heck - I’m not supposed to be a secretary for students, or their mother or something. Imagine when they all expect me to print out their papers for them?

Fortunately I remembered before replying that students can print stuff out here at the University. So I told him/her that he/she could do that.

Was I mean? What would you do?

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. But it does look a little bizarre: John Edwards, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton - they all have Facebook profiles. Now Hillary and Barack barely really have anything on their profiles except for who supports them - instead of the “Add friend” link there’s a “Support Hillary” link, and her network is “Election 2006″. Maybe they were added by the Facebook team rather than deliberately? I hadn’t heard of Evan Bayh, another would-be-president, but had to chuckle when I read his Interests according to his Facebook profile:

Energy Independence, National Security, War on Terror, Iraq, Veterans and Military Personnel, Education, Middle Class, Poverty, Environment, Racial Equality, Economics, Business, Globalization and Trade Policy, Elections, Indiana Politics, Indiana Sports, Democratic Party, Phi Kappa Psi, Football, Colts, Pacers, Graeter’s Black Raspberry Chip Ice Cream, Cherry Pie, Apple Pie, BBQ

Bizarre. I wonder if it works? I suppose it might make more sense than setting up a stand in a college - if this is where students are, that’s where these candidates want to be, I guess.

If you want more, go look at John Edwards’ list of social network sites where he has a profile. He has busy campaign workers, that’s for sure!

The topic for today’s class is blogs and journalism. We already talked a bit about the development of newspapers when we were talking about Habermas and the public sphere. Today we’ll be more specific. Some of the matters we’ll touch:

• We’ll start by watching Epic2015
• What is Google News? What’s up with this “no human intervention=objectivity” thing?)
• In his book Gatewatching, Axel Bruns argues that we’re witnessing a shift from the gatekeeping of traditional media to the gatewatching of participatory media. A review of the book summarises somewhat.

Gatewatching hasn’t yet arrived at the University Library (mysteriously enough) but I have a copy if anyone’s curious.

• The report We Media is online in its entireity: “We are at the beginning of a Golden Age of journalism — but it is not journalism as we have known it. Media futurists have predicted that by 2021, “citizens will produce 50 percent of the news peer-to-peer.” However, mainstream news media have yet to meaningfully adopt or experiment with these new forms.” The report describes the situation and proposes ways for traditional media to respond to these challenges.
• Academic paper by Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell: “The Power and Politics of Blogs“
• Journalist Paul Andrews’ discusses whether blogs are journalism.
• Norwegian students should look at journalist, blogger and researcher Olav Anders Øvrebø’s research report on blogging and journalism His weblog, Undercurrent, is in English and often deals with blogging and journalist.
• Cyberjournalist.net is a fairly popular blog “that focuses on how the Internet, convergence and new technologies are changing the media.”
• Search Google Scholar and find lots more.
• Story dated yesterday: Associated Press are trying their hand at citizen media

Here are some examples of blogs that might (note: might) be thought of as a form of journalism:

• Salam Pax, the Bagdad resident who blogged during the initial attacks on Bagdad in 2003. His blog is still active, and the Wikipedia article on him gives the full story. Back in 2003, a lot of people doubted his authenticity, which has since been confirmed.
• Christopher Allbritton was an independent journalist who collected $15000 of donations to fund an independent trip to Iraq in 2003. That that even worked is sort of amazing. He has since been hired by mainstream media due to issues of safety - being alone in Iraq is lethal.
• There are many US soldiers who blog and post photos and videos while in Iraq. Is that a form of journalism?
• How about this Swedish woman who blogs while in jail? Here’s my blog post about her blog.
• Or all the Iranian bloggers who are banned from criticising their government but find ways to do so anyway online?
• What about someone like Drusilla who regularly picks apart articles in mainstream media?
• Or a website like Outside.in that tries to cover all the hyper-local news that mainstream media can never get to?
• And of course, bloggers scalped Dan Rather

Found at Tawnygrammer.org, in a discussion of the sudden disappearance of the trAce archives:

In the future, perhaps, when redirects fail and old links have all broken, will we be able to make discoveries in abandoned regions of the web akin to uncovering the fragmented tablets of Gilgamesh or the manuscript of Beowulf?

Usually I only think of backups when it’s too late. But today, when I discovered that my Endnote bibliography was corrupted and wouldn’t open, I only fretted for five minutes before remembering that after that wicked water incident I started using Backup which automatically backs up various files - and the bibliography is one of them! For the first time ever (lucky I guess) I restored a file, and good old Backup had the last twenty versions of it easily available. Now I’ll never again be annoyed at its nagging that I enter my keychain password so it can connect to dot mac.

And you know, if I hadn’t had automated backup with no human intervention my most recent backup would have been four months old, like last time…