This sort of post has now become a staple, but here are some things I’m doing instead of blogging. I’ll try to post a little bit about these projects as they progress.
* Finishing up my new book, Search Engine Society. I’m putting the finishing touches on the index. All of it was desperately out of date the moment I wrote it, but that was inevitable. Luckily, Polity has been very good about turn-around timing on this. It’s due out in October, if the gods of printing allow. Indexing is more annoying than I thought. Can’t we just Google it?
* Research for a paper about Digg, and ratings. I had originally planned on writing this up in the form of a Dr. Suess book, but I think I’m headed for something a bit more traditional at this point. This actually follows a line of research from my dissertation, lo, so many years ago.
* Research for a paper about the use of hyperlinking in the rhetoric of extremism (and particularly racism) on the web. Again, this is a project that I’ve been thinking about for about a decade, but I’m only now getting things together for it.
* Early stages of planning to take the initial ideas I presented in a paper at NCA last year, about collaborative filtering, netroots, and the public agenda, and apply them to the presidential election. I want to finish this up sometime in, say, November.
* Organizing materials for my next book. Will be working on it over the next year or so. There are a three separate ideas I’ve been working on, but I think I’m going to look at the nexus of networked communication, learning, creativity, and government.
* I’m revising my “Intro Interactive” course. No, really. This will be the first time I have revised a course rather than starting pretty much from a clean slate. Very exciting. Hoping to outsource some of it, and interview some friends and former students to get a look at the interactive industry.
* I’m rewriting “Communication, Media, and Society” from scratch, trying to provide the means for doing my “students design the class” thing and still having it work for an online version.
* Early stages of planning for my spring courses: “Web Programming” and “Something Else.” There are several possibilities for my special topics, including: Search Engine Society (duh!), Surveillance, Virtual Worlds,
* I’ve been doing some prep on a major project, which will be my top priority when it launches later this year. Laying the foundation and doing some planning over the next few months. I’ll announce it formally on my birthday later this month.
But I haven’t been blogging. I’ll try to do better. Oh, and if I owe you something (refereeing, emails, invoices, money, the head of your sworn enemy), I’ll get to it. Just a bit bogged down right now.
So, I was watching a BBC show on the “Secrets of the Sexes” (below), and realized that I hadn’t done a self-indulgent online quiz in a while. So, I went over to
Bryant Park Project killed off
I think it would be fair to say that I was a skeptic of the Bryant Park Project when it started up. Inherent to any project that tries to make the image of an organization more hip, it smacked of trying too hard. After all, NPR has a market psychographic, and they should stick to it. Despite this skepticism, I found myself listening to the show on my commutes up to Connecticut, and found it engaging, amusing, and enlightening. As a radio show, it succeeded brilliantly, I think, at reaching a demographic that was on the edge of NPR already–a group of educated GenXers who won’t be dead (mostly) in the next decade. That they jumped into social media with both feet, allowing it to pervade their program without the programming being necessarily about social media, made it a great example to bring up when people asked the “what to do?” question: go see what BPP is doing.
Unfortunately, it looks like BPP won’t be doing much of anything as of next month, which is really a shame. As the 200+ comments on this posting suggest, BPP had assembled a loyal and interested following. They also suggest that the following was deeper than it might have been wide, but there is no way to know this. Given another year, I suspect that BPP would have brought more non-NPR listeners into the fold; it’s too bad we won’t get to see that happen.
On a personal note, I feel guilty now for not listening. Now that it’s summer, I’m not making the commute up to school, and I generally don’t listen to talk radio while I’m working (too distracting). But I’ll make an exception for the rest of the month, listening to the last of their shows.
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