a thaumaturgical compendium

I had grand plans for being able to keep up with the blog (and thus the class) while I was away. Unfortunately, real life intervened. So this posting is an effort to get us back on course, so to speak. In it, I will lay out the coming week’s topics and readings. Next Tuesday (10/5) will be the first “day of reckoning,” and I will be sending out individual emails to each person in the class, with a brief evaluation of your work and a grade.

Checking up on the Joneses

Have you been watching what your peers are doing with their blogs? I have. Last week in Brighton, Kaye Trammell suggested that there were two ways to teach using blogs, the “boot camp” approach where you detail precise assignments, and the more open approach in which you give students a free hand. Although there will be a few more recommended and required assignments this week, I obviously fall into the latter camp.

But it looks as though several of the groups are already coalescing around themes and ideas. That’s great! I recognize it takes some time to get used to the new format, but much of what I’m seeing is fairly encouraging. This week, I’m going to push you toward some more of the common blogging practices, and hopefully we will see even more on the content side.

This is not a competition, but just as an FYI, the top 5 most visited blogs on the server are (in order): The Best Blog, Smurf’s Garden, Blog on Blogs, My First Steps (not our class), and UB Undressed.

What to post about

It seems, though, that some people are still at a loss for what to post about. In the past, when people have asked about what would be good to post on their blogs, I’ve answered “what you are passionate about.” And then, some have said “I’m not passionate about anything.”

?

The problem, in this case, is not with the blog. You need to find out what your passions are and pursue them. If you don’t know yet, don’t worry. Many people haven’t yet found what they are passionate about. Until you do, you need to be trying as many things as possible to find out. Go jump out of a plane (with a parachute). Go to a talk. Go to a concert. Stop watching TV. Start a minor revolution. Go do something and tell us about it. Don’t write yet another boring blog.

Original content is good, but if you need a starter, go out and find something on the web that you feel strongly about, link to it, and say something useful about it. One of the assignments this week is to create a “watch list” of blogs you find interesting, and posting commentary on your own blog. I “watch” a couple hundred blogs, but you can start small!

Topics

This week we will finish with the part of the course in which we talk about the process and practices of blogging. We will, of course, be looking at “blogging in action,” during much of the rest of the course, but I want to get through some of the mechanical parts this week. In particular, we will be looking at:

• Basic Design Issues
• Editing & Posting images
• Blogging “Services” and Environmental Scanning
• Personal, and Blog, “Brand Management” and Reputation

Readings

I’ll repeat these in the relevant posts, but at a minimum, you should be looking this week at:

• What is a blogroll?
• Google loves Blogs
• Google Time Bomb
• What’s Your Google Number
• Try Self-Google
• What are RSS Feeds?
  (Don’t worry, they’re short!)

For the grads (and wannabe grads):

• Efimova, L. , and de Moor, A. (2005). Beyond personal webpublishing: An exploratory study of conversational blogging practices. HICSS, Kona. [pdf]
• Marlow, C. (2004). Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community. ICA, New Orleans. [pdf]

More bolding fun. I’ve bolded the ones that apply. It makes me feel… inexperienced. I’ve also italicized the ones I’d like to do sometime soon. Er… and some modesty prevents me from answering. (via Liz.) I won’t make this a requirement for my class, but it would be good practice with your tags :).

01. Bought everyone in the pub a drink
02. Swam with wild dolphins [Came very close, but no cigar.]
03. Climbed a mountain [Several times :) ]
04. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
05. Been inside the Great Pyramid
06. Held a tarantula.
07. Taken a candlelit bath with someone
08. Said ‘I love you’ and meant it
09. Hugged a tree
10. Done a striptease
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris

My recent trip to Britain left me without much time to do more than conference. Luckily, the night before I left to return to the US was also the night that the Victoria & Albert museum was open late. I still get that little thrill at going to the V&A that I used to get as a kid visiting museums. I have a lot of museums I love, but the V&A is always at the top of the list. On this visit, I asked myself, “Self, why do you like the V&A so much.” I answered thusly:

1. It’s a museum of style. OK, officially is is a museum of “design and art,” but at its heart, it is all about the history of style, from a very particular perspective. This is a guide to the cosmopolitanism of distinction: an appreciation of other cultures that cements the visitor’s position in his or her own.

I walked by a young couple (it seems that it is also a “date” spot) in their late teens or early twenties, as they peered at a set of samurai armour. “So, this is art, too, then.” “Of course.” “Does it have to be ugly to be art?” Not if you are “cultured,” I think, reading the girl’s exasperation.

2. It’s a museum of the real. The focus is heavily on the decorative arts, the kinds of things uneducated eyes like my own recognize as an art of the everyday. There is a gallary dedicated to fashion; of the 1700s and of the 70s. There are musical instruments, locks, and pillow boxes.

3. It’s a museum of consumption. The museum browser finds himself perpetually on the edge of stumbling into Home Depot. An entire exhibit of mosaic tiles that are stunningly beautiful somehow would look just perfect in the new sunroom. An eighth-mile long gallery of cast and wrought iron, strangely torn from the garden and placed on pale white gallery walls, lacks only price tags. A similar feeling spills into each gallery. I walk by an older couple, woman on the arm of the man, as the quickly pass judgment on early Chinese teapots, some of them marked as fakes that have been passed off as original and then given to the museum. “Oh, that’s simply horrible,” says the woman. “How could anyone have thought it was real?” “Oh, it’s not that bad,” says the gentleman through a thick mustache, with the obvious intent of irritating.

4. It’s a museum that places experience first. Not only is it dedicated to the decorative arts, but it uses the decorative arts to decorate. There are foldable stools to be picked up at the head of some galleries, in case you decide you need an impromptu sit. Generally, seating throughout the museum is designed to match the exhibit as closely as possible. There is expansive space between exhibits, and the maze-like intersection of galleries invites strolling. The interactive video displays, now ubiquitous in museums, are actually as informative and interesting as the exhibits themselves.

5. It’s free. There is a suggested £3 donation, but it is not as insistent as such donations seem to be at other museums. For the patron like me, who visits only once every few years, this doesn’t really matter, but as I went through the museum, I noticed that some people came to eat their lunch, or when they had only an hour free.

6. It’s a museum that is more than a building. Of course, all museums try to integrate with the community, but the V&A offers seminars and lectures, integrates with schools, and provides an image database via the internet.

Some of these comments might seem to be sniping in part, but they shouldn’t be taken that way. Visiting the V&A remains an exciting experience for me. It’s hard to focus on one exhibit for too long, as the rest of the museum seems to want to pull you along to see more, and you are never quite sure what corners of the building have remained hidden away this time. There are a lot of museums and other tourist attractions that really are worth seeing in London, but next time you are in town, you should definitely add the V&A to your list.

I don’t believe this for a minute, but I still think it’s pretty funny. (via Froomkin)

Amazon is again playing with viral marketing. If you try their A9 search engine, then buy something at Amazon, they apply a ^π_/2% discount. They then hope that users will pass along this information, as I have here. (I’m not the only one: e.g., here.) The ^π_/2% bit? Someone’s busy memecrafting. I wonder if anyone has a memetic engineering consultancy yet.

Hm. Selling a product made with 100% wind? Why didn’t I think of that? I wonder what the sunshine market is looking like these days? Or hurricane-affected sand? Maybe tulip bulbs?

When I first arrived at the University of Sussex for the Internet Research conference, I ran into Steve Schneider (SUNY IT), and Randy Kluver (Nanyang). One of the first things Steve said was “You’re going to be disappointed.” This seemed an odd way to start off the conference, but it quickly became clear that the reason was that there was very little connectivity available. There was no wireless, no broadband in the rooms, and even the presentation computers were, by and large, not networked. He was right, that was disappointing, and Steve wanted to make sure that Randy knew this in his official capacity (on the executive committee for the association), as well.

The funny thing is that unlike many research conferences, you just don’t see that many laptops here. So, my guess is that the requirement that you go to a lab to use the computers was not an onerous one for many. For those of us who live our lives online, however, it was very difficult. Being disconnected from the “outside world” might seem like a good thing in some ways, allowing you to concentrate on the material at hand. But our need for access illustrated one of the points made by Sara Kiesler in her keynote. While the net and real world have always been interpenetrated, they are to such a great extent today that it is not possible to consider “the internet” as an object of study. (I’m not sure many people really have done that, but that’s beside the point.) It was really hard to coordinate even local events and keep up conversations without having networking available.

An immediate result of the wireless has been a lack of blogging even from the regular bloggers who were there, and there were many of us. This represented a lost opportunity for collaboration in at least one venue.

During one of the sessions on the last day of the conference, Nancy Baym, president of AIR, suggested that someone was going to set up a web page with postings related to the conference. This followed her request at one of the keynotes that people write up their notes and post them to the AIR-L list. I noted that Lilia had already set up a Topic Exchange channel to collect bloggers’ thoughts. At the end of the conference, I ran into Nancy again at Falmer Station. She noted that most of the posts so far were just complaining about the lack of access. “Don’t worry,” I said, “when people get back to somewhere with access they’ll post.” As I watched her cross over to the other platform, I thought: what a stupid thing to say.

When people get back to wherever they are going, chances are good that their minds will have switched gears and they will have more current things to post about. I am sitting on notes not only about AIR (which I will post since they are required reading for a class I’m teaching), but on notes from a conference on Informatics a week earlier. Blogging, as a practice, tends for many people to be off the cuff, and the values of timeliness that apply to journalists everywhere apply even moreso to bloggers; we operate on a 30 minute news cycle. I think it’s fair to assume that under those conditions, most people won’t post-post the conference.

More importantly, I think that most of the people who attended who were bloggers were looking for sessions that were blogging and social network-related. As a result, the view will be skewed toward those topics. And bloggers only record what they think is interesting which is often other bloggers.

In the end if AIR wants web publicity in Chicago next year, they will need to think about ways to make the conference more blog-friendly. It’s not really that hard: just make sure that there is a surfeit of Wifi and power. I get the feeling, though, that many of the old school researchers consider bloggers and blogging as somehow beneath their dignity. Maybe that is a misperception on my part, but I don’t think it is a difficult thing to read from them.

I think we need another conference. No, not another blogging conference—there is already BlogTalk and Kaye mentioned something was in the works for the Big Easy—but one that looks generally at the social edge experiments and the communication technologies that support them. Only presenters will attend, and there will be no parallel sessions. It will be somewhere sunny, with good food (I’m thinking Mexico here, or maybe somewhere Caribbean), with good Wifi and power, margaritas, and plenty of time to talk. All those in favor?

[With apologies to the fabulous Professor Walker for theft of her likeness.]