nytimes on warblogs

draft of my talk. go away. I had to keep it somewhere - this way I can get at it from work/other computers.

On The Internet, Everyone Knows You’re a Blog

insert cartoon.
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find a good study blog.
after each FAQ, put in a list of links to relevant places.
need: scrolling blog background with ability to bring up the actual pages I want to talk about.

30 minutes x 60 seconds x 3 words/sec = 5400 words? I can't possibly talk for that long. need to add in an analysis of a typical blog. this is about 2,200 words at the moment.

OK, correct me if I’m wrong: this being the Victorian Association of Teachers of English conference, I’m assuming you’re all English teachers, or at least people who care about the teaching of English?

* insert joke *

I’m going to start with the basic stuff – what’s a blog, how they work, what do people do with them, why they’re so popular, that kind of thing, then talk a bit about where they’re placed as media and as a form of literature.

Yep, I said literature. I’d bet my copy of Postmodern For Dummies that blogging will eventually be recognised as a distinct writing form, and probably the first that’s evolved purely for the Web.

Then I’m going to throw around some amateurish ideas on how blogs can be used to meet the goals of English teachers – that’s if your goals are to have students who enjoy writing, understand referencing and sourcing, draw on a wide range of sources, have a strong sense of their own identity and voice and can read other people’s material critically and in a wider context.

I’ve put the text of this talk and all the relevant links up on a Web site, and there’s a links list available …. so you don’t need to scribble anything down. I’ve left a few minutes at the end because I ran out of material, to allow for questions.

Frequently Asked Question #1: What’s a blog?

The only thing I can come up with that defines a blog absolutely is that it’s on the World Wide Web, and it’s a log – Web-Log equals “blog,” for short.

Some common, but not necessary, characteristics of blogs;

-A consistent Web address

-Regular new “posts” or entries.

-Links – permanent and in posts, to supporting material and/or other blogs.

* slides go here.

-A theme, however rough. A blog can be personal – just about the author – or it can stick to a topic, whether it’s a personal interest, like pop music, a project underway, like the blog of a … or more objective, like a news blog that collects reports on say AIDS research from all over the world.

-Datestamps: these are usually automatic.

Blogs can also have “about” sections defining who writes them and why, images, a comments function for reader talkback, archives for past entries, ..

Many are attached to larger Web sites, and serve as an update on the day-to-day affairs of the Web site owner or organization.

A lot have “hitmeters” that record how many visitors they get – this can range from one or two to tens of thousands every single day …. example**



Frequently Asked Question # 2: What’s the difference between a blog and a Web site?

So the Web’s been around for ages – at least eleven years now. Why have blogs taken until now to become the meme of the minute?

The most obvious answer is that it’s suddenly got much, much easier to make and publish a good-looking Web site.

In around 1999 and 2000, a slew of “blogging” services were put up on the Web. Blogger, Pitas.com, Diaryland, MoveableType are all free blogging services that allow users to set up a perfectly working blog in about five minutes. Things can get technical after that, but there’s no reason they have to.

But the cool technology isn’t enough to explain the hundreds of thousands of blogs that have appeared in the past two or three years. There are lots of new Web technologies that go nowhere.

Blogging, though, is becoming almost compulsory for any frequent Web user.

Some bloggers put a huge amount of work into the design and appearance of their blogs; others have multiple blogs for different purposes * - work blogs, study blogs, family blogs, writing blogs.

Comments areas become de facto discussion boards and virtual communities of bloggers form between people with like interests. Mutual admiration societies have sprung up in a world where the ultimate compliment is to put another person’s blog on your list of links.

….

One thing that I think makes blogs unique is that they have their footnotes built in. *???Unique?

We know that hypertext writing programs have done this for a long time. Since Michael Joyce’s Afternoon made nonlinear narrative real, stories and non-fiction that rely on the reader making choices have become more common. Computer games are arguably the state of the art when it comes to texts that respond to the “reader” - but these all tend to be closed systems, with the choices limited to what the authors put in, plus perhaps the actions of other players in online games.

Blogs, by contrast, get a lot of their energy from outside sources, by linking to news reports, sites that prove a writers’ point and to like-minded people.

That in itself isn’t new. Since the Web was created, a written piece that links directly to its sources has always been possible – but to do it, you needed to be able to write HTML, to FTP and sometime even to ASP (have I lost you yet?).

What blogs do is to make that linking process a simple cut-and-paste exercise, and that

Frequently Asked Question # 3 Who reads blogs and why?

Blogs can do several things for readers:

· they can provide a sense of community – the classic case is when teenagers read each other’s blogs to find out what they’re thinking, and to help them realise that they’re not alone in their teenage angst. * example

·they can provide an expert guide to a topic If I want to know what’s going on over at the powerful Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, I might look at their Web site – or I might go to ICANN blog, a news digest and commentary
· They can provide firsthand information; the blogs of New Yorkers gave me a much more “on the ground” feel for the events of September 11 than the TV reports with their big-picture footage of crashing planes and George W Bush’s speeches. New Yorkers uploaded photographs and wrote of their experiences before sunset that day.
· Along the same lines, they can provide insight; never before have so many people gushed out their feelings on so many personal topics so personally. To get ahead of myself a bit, if you want your students to get an idea how it feels to be, say ***put example in here*** blog in about one minute on Google.

Frequently Asked Question # 4: Who blogs and why?

This is an easy one. Anyone can blog about anything, for any reason; think of it being as a slightly more sophisticated way to bang on about yourself and your pet topic, with a theoretical audience of millions and you’ll know what I mean.

The practical applications of blogging can be as a study tool or journal, keeping a record of a project underway, as a forum for users to have conversations (especially in “shared” blogs)

More and more blogs are being written by professional journalists and writers, who use them as a cross between a soapbox and a filing system.

I like this quote, from science fiction writer and commentator Cory Doctorow:

“I consume, digest, and excrete information for a living … As a committed infovore, I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy.”

Doctorow says that blogging is a way for him to make quick and dirty sense of the information he comes across, to put it in context and make it available for future reference.

Artists like Melbourne’s Looby Lu (an actual “award winning” blogger – there are already blogging Oscars, believe it or not), use their sites as visual diaries, regular diaries and as a promotion for their work. (A guy in New York called Jorge Columbo)


But there’s something more to it than the practical. I think that a large part of the appeal of the blog goes to the topic of this session: What about me?

Blogs do what personal home pages were supposed to do; they give their owners a place on the Web that’s uniquely theirs. Personal pages did this all right, but they tended to do it with photos of the person’s dog, kids or car, a few lines about their hometown and a hopelessly outdated resume. The Web is littered with abandoned “home pages” that were set up and never touched again.

A blog, on the other hand, is easy to make (have I mentioned that?), and by its very nature demands regular updates. There’s no need to write lame “about me” sections; a blog can work perfectly well without you ever knowing whether the author is male, female, American, African, 17 or 74.

Because blogs can be about a topic instead of just about the person, but at the same time don’t demand expert knowledge, and because of the time-based, journal element, they tend to have a certain momentum of their own.

The way I’ve seen blogs used most often (partly because these are the kinds of blogs I like most) are as traditional diaries with a performative twist. Their authors know that other people, perhaps friends, perhaps complete strangers, will be reading the blog.

At the same time, the blogging culture as it’s developed so far doesn’t necessarily demand good grammar, perfect spelling or even having something particularly interesting to say. (This might not satisfy your immediate goals as teachers, but it does mean that students can blog without feeling the pressures they might feel writing an assessable book report or essay. )

Frequently Asked Question # 4: Aren’t blogs just another Web fad?

Yes.

When a new Web toy or tool comes along, or when people first start using it, you almost always get a period of infatuation, followed by burnout, followed by a more measured pattern of use.

So many people have told me how when they first got on the Internet, they were using it night and day, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff that was there.

The attraction might have been chat rooms, online games, a community of like-minded gardeners, the ability to follow a hundred links to a hundred sites about their pet topic – but almost always, it eventually wears off and they get back to their normal lives.

Blogging is a “killer app” – a technology application so attractive that it can get people who hadn’t seen a reason to be on the web, using it.


Not so frequently asked question # 1

How can blogs help teachers?

There’s a phrase you come across on the Internet, usually in discussion lists where people are hotly debating a contentious point. It goes: “IANAL, but…”
That stands for “I am not a lawyer, but I’ll tell you what I think the law says on this point anyway.”
so: “IANATE, but...”

But I think blogs can be a tool to get students writing, and to help them order their thoughts, and

It’s worth saying this again: blogs are not technology, any more than an essay with footnotes is technology, or a diary is technology. You need to use a keyboard to write one, and often to make links to other things on the Web, but that’s a basic literacy in 2002, and the free publishing services make it as simple as possible.

A literature teacher once advised me to read with a pen in my hand; to take notes as soon as a thought occurred, and to make sure I read them back later.

This is potential blog teaching function number one: as a topic-specific study journal.

I’ve used a blog this way, for a Melbourne University writing and criticism subject. Apart from making it easier to find my links, it had the advantage of being accessible from anywhere; I could put down thoughts or look them up from home, from the library or at work.

In *this example, * the blogger …

Blogs as a topic of study:


Blogs as a personal writing space:

Some of the most entertaining, well-written blogs that I read come from surprising authors.

I’m sure many of these people would not be the types to keep paper-based journals. For them, blogging has provided a form that allows them to write, and write well,


Going back to the “online identity” t


What not to do if you decide to get your students to blog?

I’ve come across a few blogs that read a bit like this:

“This is my first post. I have to make a blog for my ninth grade project, and this is it.”

That’s it. That’s the whole blog, from beginning to end. These students may just not enjoy talking about themselves – but more likely they are being asked to make a blog without knowing what it is, or

Some students are shy; they think a blog is a kind of diary that their teachers will read to get at their secrets, and naturally they refuse to open up.

as on my other blog, I had to kill the template and start with a new one to fix that. a bit like rebooting; drastic, but usually effective. this blog's job is not to look pretty anyway. I did come here to work on my VATE presentation, but I think I've run out of steam, what with this and figuring out how to work PowerPoint (not)

Ok. if you really want to see my archives, you need to take one "archives" out of the URL that pops up when you click on a month on the index page. I don't know what's happened, and Blogger won't let me get to my template to fix it. but that's how you do it.

test post to see if this revives my archives. bet it doesn't