Kevin Lim is one of 20 bloggers up for a $10,000 annual blogging scholarship. Many of the other blogs are also quite good, but Kevin–who is a former student of mine–has the best one, and deserves to win. If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, you know that I’m a regular reader of Kevin’s blog, and often find interesting stuff there that I wouldn’t otherwise find.
Unfortunately, it looks like they are deciding who to award it to based on the inherently flawed internet poll. Not only is the willingness to vote a bad indicator of real popularity (if popularity, rather than quality, is their major criterion), let alone quality, but there is far too much opportunity for fraud. Not that I am impugning any of the finalists, only indicating that it’s a bad way to judge things. Right now, for example, the number of votes cast for each blog has no relationship to the Technorati ranking or PageRank, which suggests something is fishy. Moreover, it’s clear that more popular topics are going to win out over more academic topics in broad popularity.
But, who am I to complain, since I encourage my students to court an audience. Good luck to Kevin, and to the other entrants. And bravo to Collegescholarships.org for offering money to student bloggers. Yes, it’s a commercial for them, but this is marketing I can get behind.
Get outa town: Internet Research 8.0
Next week is conference time. No, not CMJ–that’s right here in the Big Apple. And not 4S either–are all the conferences in Montreal these days? No, I’m making my regular trip out to the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, appropriately entitled Internet Research out in Vancouver. I had initially intended to make a detour down to my old stomping grounds in Seattle, to visit old friends (like Nasai Teriyaki ^_^ ), but I’ve cut that short since it’s hard enough to be away for a week during the semester.
The natural question is “What’s that conference about?” Luckily, this year I can answer that, since registrants were (mostly) kind enough to tag their interests. And so I present the Internet Research 8.0 official tag cloud! For those of you unfamiliar with these things, the size of the font corresponds to the number of people who tagged their interest that way. Also, in this case, if two terms are close to one another they are more likely to have co-occurred. (This is far more true of the very top of the list than the bottom, where it’s generally isolates.) You can click the image below, or go to an HTML version. Oh, and IR8.0 isn’t a tag–it’s a title.
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