http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Web-Design/Writing/Blogging A listing of the most recently indexed works about Articles and Web Design and Writing and Blogging in the field of technical communication (and technical writing). en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Web-Design/Writing/Blogging http://tc.eserver.org/31393.html http://tc.eserver.org/31393.html If ever there were a perfect tool for the corporate communication expert, blogging is it. Think of a blog as the 3D version of your capabilities, one in which you provide context and meaning to your work experience and expertise. So let's talk about how to blog well. http://tc.eserver.org/29253.html http://tc.eserver.org/29253.html A response to Jakob Nielsen's 2007 "Write Articles, Not Blog Postings." Nielsen's article is also chock-full of bad information. Why bad? Because most of it is made up. The length of the article requires you to really read it. You can't scan it. The problem is, most people scan online. http://tc.eserver.org/25641.html http://tc.eserver.org/25641.html This paper first situates adolescent diary weblogs and their implied audiences and then applies a typology of audiences for personal narrative performance to a sample of diary weblog posts to ascertain if the typology fits the implied audiences present in the weblog text. http://tc.eserver.org/25590.html http://tc.eserver.org/25590.html While the weblog tends toward esoterically personal content (as evidence in the examples above) and often delivers some contextual account of the author’s life and activities, the obvious exceptions to this rule preclude understanding the form simply as an online diary. Likewise, the structural and technical definitions many in the weblogging community focus on fall equally short of describing what is a complex, earnest, and distinct literary form. In other words, it is insufficient to explore the weblog exclusively at the level of content, and equally insufficient to focus wholly on the technical delivery of that content. Accounting for the diversity of weblogs and webloggers—yet still maintaining some larger sense of what they have in common—requires instead a careful look both at what weblogs do, and how they do it for both writers and readers. http://tc.eserver.org/25587.html http://tc.eserver.org/25587.html With little exaggeration it might be claimed that the primary emotion associated with popular thinking about blogging is anxiety. The number of bloggers and blogs is unwieldy and amorphous: to my mind a sublimity that is often associated with the innumerable swamps journalistic and other commentators who believe that one must, perforce, make some generalization about blogs, all blogs, every blog. Is there something that could be said about every blog? Where would one start? http://tc.eserver.org/25584.html http://tc.eserver.org/25584.html Weblogs and knowledge-logs, or 'blogs' and 'klogs,' have emerged into the post-dot.com bubble online world as a notable (and often non-commercial) social phenomenon. While some hear echoes of Web homepage voices from the mid-1990s, the blogging phenomenon during the Iraq war may have taken Web cybercultures in new directions. http://tc.eserver.org/25582.html http://tc.eserver.org/25582.html Looking at blogs as rhetorical artifacts allows scholars to examine the ways in which they contribute to changing what it means to communicate online. To this end, the articles presented here view the blog through the lens of their social, cultural, and rhetorical features and functions. Through study of the language, discourse, and communicative practices of bloggers, the authors provide insight into weblogs as a means of representing and expressing the self, forming identity, facilitating student-centered learning, building community, and disseminating information. http://tc.eserver.org/25589.html http://tc.eserver.org/25589.html As yet there has been little empirical examination of the claim that blogs are 'democratic,' or that blog authors represent diverse demographic groups. http://tc.eserver.org/25561.html http://tc.eserver.org/25561.html Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don't know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this. Until I started blogging. http://tc.eserver.org/25575.html http://tc.eserver.org/25575.html Notwithstanding the fact that lexicographers have come up with definitions for blog, if you asked a few dozen bloggers what makes a blog a blog, you would probably get a few dozen answers. http://tc.eserver.org/25560.html http://tc.eserver.org/25560.html Every day it seems another article about weblogs appears in the press. At first, most of these stories seemed content to cover the personal nature of blogging. But more and more I'm seeing articles that attempt to examine the journalistic and punditry aspects of weblogs prominent in many of the so-called 'warblogs,' or sites that began in response to the events of September 11th http://tc.eserver.org/25553.html http://tc.eserver.org/25553.html Weblogs are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore for those of us who spend much time reading the Web. Also known by the inscrutable nickname 'blogs', weblogs are something of a hard nut to crack. Compounding the difficulty is the fact that a great deal of weblog content today is about weblogs and weblog technology. What are weblogs? What's the big deal? Why should we pay attention? We attempt to answer these questions in the essay that follows. http://tc.eserver.org/25555.html http://tc.eserver.org/25555.html A lot of people in the weblog world are asking 'How can we make money doing this?' The answer is that most of us can't. Weblogs are not a new kind of publishing that requires a new system of financial reward. Instead, weblogs mark a radical break. http://tc.eserver.org/25552.html http://tc.eserver.org/25552.html There are, I'm sure, as many reasons to keep weblogs as there are weblogs authors, however, some common threads surely exist between them. What could motivate someone to keep a public journal of their innermost thoughts? What possible reasons would someone have? http://tc.eserver.org/25496.html http://tc.eserver.org/25496.html W znaczeniu społecznym blog jest czymś więcej niż tylko narzędziem: jest wirtualnym miejscem skupiającym ludzi, gdzie można przebywać i realizować się społecznie, nawiązując relacje z innymi ludźmi. Blog jest tzw. Trzecim Miejscem zgodnie z teorią Oldenburga, który uznaje, że dopiero w trzecim najważniejszym miejscu (po Domu i Pracy/Szkole), człowiek może tworzyć "prawdziwe" relacje społeczne, które nie są zbudowane na hierarchii emocjonalnej lub strukturalnej (jak w przypadku rodziny i firmy) lecz powstają dzięki posiadanym cechom charakteru, zainteresowaniom czy stylowi życia w grupie. http://tc.eserver.org/25491.html http://tc.eserver.org/25491.html Despite the timeliness of the issues, many bloggers are wondering whether their craft can be taught in journalism school. http://tc.eserver.org/25493.html http://tc.eserver.org/25493.html Weblogs (blogs)--frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence--are the latest genre of Internet communication to attain widespread popularity, yet their characteristics have not been systematically described. This paper presents the results of a content analysis of 203 randomly-selected weblogs, comparing the empirically observable features of the corpus with popular claims about the nature of weblogs, and finding them to differ in a number of respects. Notably, blog authors, journalists and scholars alike exaggerate the extent to which blogs are interlinked, interactive, and oriented towards external events, and under-estimate the importance of blogs as individualistic, intimate forms of self-expression. Based on the profile generated by the empirical analysis, we consider the likely antecedents of the blog genre, situate it with respect to the dominant forms of digital communication on the Internet today, and advance predictions about its long-term impacts. http://tc.eserver.org/25492.html http://tc.eserver.org/25492.html The 'blogosphere' has been claimed to be a densely interconnected conversation, with bloggers linking to other bloggers, referring to them in their entries, and postingcomments on each other's blogs. Most such characterizations have privileged a subset of popular blogs, known asthe 'A-list.' This study empirically investigates the extent to which, and in what patterns, blogs are interconnected, taking as its point of departure randomly-selected blogs. Quantitative social network analysis, visualization of linkpatterns, and qualitative analysis of references and comments in pairs of reciprocally-linked blogs show thatA-list blogs are overrepresented and central in the network, although other groupings of blogs are moredensely interconnected. At the same time, a majority of blogs link sparsely or not at all to other blogs in the sam-ple, suggesting that the blogosphere is partially interconnected and sporadically conversational. http://tc.eserver.org/25489.html http://tc.eserver.org/25489.html Explores the notion of the blogosphere by using recent studies to soberly refocus the actual size of the blogosphere and the extent of the blogging phenomenon. http://tc.eserver.org/25438.html http://tc.eserver.org/25438.html Innovations build on existing perceptions and structures - at least until the new ideas are fully manifested. Then, the innovation discards the shackles of the old model and stands on its own merits and strengths. The development of video is often used to support this phenomenon. Video was initially used only to tape existing live stage performances - a new concept built on the perceptional structure of the existing. True innovation in this medium did not occur until someone recognized the uniqueness of video, and the limitations of live stage shows. http://tc.eserver.org/25439.html http://tc.eserver.org/25439.html The best way to learn to blog is to blog. Fortunately, getting started is fairly simple. Three main options exist: hosted, remote server, and desktop. http://tc.eserver.org/25435.html http://tc.eserver.org/25435.html Like all media forms, the blog is not transparent. The technological code of the software contains affordances that filter and, in part, determine the constitution of the private/public Self represented in any weblog. And so, what kind of Self (or Selves) are made possible or enabled by typical blogging practice? http://tc.eserver.org/25441.html http://tc.eserver.org/25441.html The content management capabilities of blog software and the search options from Daypop provide incentives for information professionals to be aware, at least, of blogging. But for every blogger out there, there are probably a dozen or more others who prefer reading to writing. http://tc.eserver.org/25447.html http://tc.eserver.org/25447.html Reports the findings from an online survey conducted between January 14th and January 21st, 2004. During that time, 486 respondents answered questions about their blogging practices and their expectations of privacy and accountability for the entries they publish online. http://tc.eserver.org/25436.html http://tc.eserver.org/25436.html Weblogs (blogs) have been heralded as a new space for collaborative creativity, a medium for breaking free of the constraints of previous forms and allowing authors greater access to flexible publishing methods. This generalization seems extreme: genre studies done by Crowston and Williams (2000) and Shepherd and Watters (1998) lend credence to the notion that weblogs are evolutionary descendents of other visual media, such as newspapers and pamphlets. In this study, we apply content-analytic methods (Bauer, 2000) to a random sample of weblogs as a means of exploring current visual trends within the blogosphere. http://tc.eserver.org/25450.html http://tc.eserver.org/25450.html Assuming a Wiki is a weblog-like system that allows anyone to edit anything (I know some don't) then a Wiki represents an interesting amalgam of many voices, not the unedited voice of a single person. http://tc.eserver.org/25449.html http://tc.eserver.org/25449.html While blogs (short for 'weblogs') have been around since at least 1993, something in the stars and planets has just now come into alignment, making blogs rise above the horizon of notice. http://tc.eserver.org/25430.html http://tc.eserver.org/25430.html In some sense, weblogs sum up what's so great about the Internet. Like fanzine editors before them, weblog editors embrace a topic or theme and run with it. Weblogs are a great indicator of what's happening on the Internet and within the web community. http://tc.eserver.org/25245.html http://tc.eserver.org/25245.html Behind the scenes, in the limelight, ahead of the curve...'blogphets' have plenty to say to us mere mortals on what makes a blog 'tick.' http://tc.eserver.org/24589.html http://tc.eserver.org/24589.html Freedom of expression is not ruling the blogosphere, because insecure bloggers will block your attempt to post comments, or even read their blog, should they decide you are "too controversial" or "too different from me". Opinionated blogs are the worst culprits of cowardly post blocking. http://tc.eserver.org/24579.html http://tc.eserver.org/24579.html With over 4 million distinct blog voices in the blogosphere, how can you differentiate yourself? By being an interesting voice. Interesting voices are made, not born, and now you can learn some ways to become more interesting and influential in blogdom. CAUTION: not for boring blah blah blah bloggers who are smug and self-satisfied. http://tc.eserver.org/22738.html http://tc.eserver.org/22738.html Although blogs are generally linked with business, personal, and entertainment sites, Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles, thinks that blogs are evolving into a major academic tool for universities. Members of the academic community have discovered that blogs offer the classroom a cheap, sociable, and fast way for everyone in the class to actively participate in discussion. http://tc.eserver.org/21801.html http://tc.eserver.org/21801.html Blogger's primary advantage is its simplicity--if you accept the default settings and host on BlogSpot, you can be up and running within five minutes. Once you have your blog, you'll find it's just as easy to customize it. http://tc.eserver.org/20260.html http://tc.eserver.org/20260.html When did weblogs stop filtering the web and begin cluttering it instead? Rich Robinson on digital glut and creative solutions. http://tc.eserver.org/20223.html http://tc.eserver.org/20223.html Great writing can’t be taught, but bad writing can be avoided. Mahoney shares tips that may enhance the writing on your personal site.