http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Blogging A listing of the most recently indexed works about Blogging in the field of technical communication. 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/Blogging http://tc.eserver.org/35750.html http://tc.eserver.org/35750.html One of the most common pieces of advice for bloggers is to find a niche that you can dominate — the smaller the niche, the better, because all of the bigger niches are already dominated by bigger blogs. This advice is fine if you’re trying to sell a product to a specific group of potential customers, but if you’re trying to grow a blog with as big a readership as possible, I think niche blogging is dead wrong. http://tc.eserver.org/35624.html http://tc.eserver.org/35624.html When choosing a blog platform, you have a variety of options: Drupal, Movable Type, Typepad, Blogger, Joomla, Expression Engine, WordPress.com, self-hosted WordPress, and others. But when you start researching the options, WordPress seems to have at least 10 main strengths over its competitors. http://tc.eserver.org/35469.html http://tc.eserver.org/35469.html One appealing aspect of blogs over print media is the ability to comment and respond to comments. It’s the appeal of a conversation instead a lecture. http://tc.eserver.org/35384.html http://tc.eserver.org/35384.html How can you enable readers to naturally find the content in your archives? How can you make the hundreds of posts you write more visible and prominent, especially if readers are looking for it? This is partly what the field of findability is all about. You can implement several easy aggregation techniques to increase the findability of your content. You can add tags and categories to your posts, and readers can navigate your content this way. http://tc.eserver.org/35385.html http://tc.eserver.org/35385.html As you blog, remember that you have a relationship with your readers -- a relationship that requires you to disclose any important information, especially monetary, that might bias your views. Don't ruin relationships with those around you by revealing private details of their lives without approval. Ensure you don't represent your company in a negative light. And choose balanced, honest posts rather than sensationalism. http://tc.eserver.org/35372.html http://tc.eserver.org/35372.html Concepts, principals, and parts of User Experience Design can often times be difficult to approach—and this tends to create barriers with new bloggers. This begs the question: Do ordinary bloggers have to worry about UX Design? http://tc.eserver.org/35309.html http://tc.eserver.org/35309.html Being boring is sin #3 in my list of the seven deadly sins (which include being fake, irrelevant, boring, unreadable, irresponsible, inaccessible, and inattentive). Perhaps a more tactful way of saying something is boring is to say the writer neglects to “keep the audience’s attention.” http://tc.eserver.org/35258.html http://tc.eserver.org/35258.html This article examines the phenomenon of blogging as a way to create a cybernetic space that is defined by the digital/virtual space of the blog discourse and the real space where the blogger is located. By examining several blogs it is argued that for people who have to move from place to place and undergo the diasporic experience, the anxieties of movement and placelessness produced by diaspora can be partly managed by entry into the cybernetic space produced by bloggers. Specifically, this article examines blogs maintained by people of Indian origin who produce a sense of spatial identity through their blogs. http://tc.eserver.org/34996.html http://tc.eserver.org/34996.html Anti-employer blogs, those which criticize companies or their employees, are posing significant legal and ethical challenges for corporations. The important legal issue is the conflict between the employee's legal duty of loyalty to the employer and the employee's right to free speech. Although U.S. and state law describes what an employee may or may not say in a blog, corporations should encourage employees to contribute to the process of creating clear, reasonable policies that will help prevent expensive court cases. The important ethical issue concerning anti-employer blogs is whether an employee incurs an ethical duty of loyalty. In this article, I conclude that there is no such ethical duty. The legal duty of loyalty, explained in a company-written policy statement that employees must endorse as a condition of employment, offers the best means of protecting the legal and ethical rights of both employers and employees. http://tc.eserver.org/34913.html http://tc.eserver.org/34913.html How do you get fresh blog content even if you want a break, say a summer off of the routine of writing two posts a week? In this guest post, Anne Gentle discusses just that. The short answer? By tapping into your community or writing ahead. http://tc.eserver.org/34778.html http://tc.eserver.org/34778.html A technical writer’s blog on Wordpress Linking to external blog posts from our documentation with 3 comments At work, we’ve just started a new set of documentation pages called “Tips of the Trade“. The project is still in the early stages. I thought other tech writers might be interested, so I’m blogging about it now. There will be a page for each of the products we document. The pages contain a set of links to useful blog posts written by people out there on the www. It’s a way of giving our readers more information and a way of involving external bloggers, developers and authors in our documentation. http://tc.eserver.org/34623.html http://tc.eserver.org/34623.html The question is, what happens when your blog stops working? When your car quits, you take it to the junk yard. When your horse quits, you shoot it out of mercy. What are you supposed to do when your blog stops spreading your ideas? Simple. You do what thousands of bloggers do every day: You quit. http://tc.eserver.org/34584.html http://tc.eserver.org/34584.html An introduction to the Twitter micro-blogging web service, with quotes from people who use it for professional/business purposes. http://tc.eserver.org/34570.html http://tc.eserver.org/34570.html Devoted followers stay updated with each new post, podcast, or screencast, eagerly awaiting the next new one. They’re intimately familiar with your content and either comment regularly or regularly return to your site. http://tc.eserver.org/34571.html http://tc.eserver.org/34571.html Devoted followers stay updated with each new post, podcast, or screencast, eagerly awaiting the next new one. They’re intimately familiar with your content and either comment regularly or regularly return to your site. http://tc.eserver.org/34513.html http://tc.eserver.org/34513.html You can definitely apply some of the concepts of microblogging to crafting error messages. Like a good tweet or a http://www.identi.ca or a jaiku, a good error message must: be concise; contain useful information, for both the person reading it and technical support; and be easy to read and understand. http://tc.eserver.org/34415.html http://tc.eserver.org/34415.html Twitter.com is a web-based communications platform combining Instant Messaging and SMS that enables subscribers to its service to send short ‘status updates’ to other people. Beyond its hybrid platform, Twitter’s unique feature is its overarching question “What are you doing?”, which acts as a ‘guidance note’ on how users should phrase their postings. Although it is a ‘soft restriction’, meaning that other formats and styles are possible, this study investigates the extent to which users of Twitter are responding to the question. http://tc.eserver.org/34380.html http://tc.eserver.org/34380.html Blogger outreach has quickly become an integral part of many brands’ marketing efforts. The blogosphere enables interactive dialogue between bloggers and consumers, and blogger outreach opens the door for conversation between your brand, bloggers and consumers. For any company that is looking to leverage the blogosphere for your marketing or PR strategy, here are 5 benefits of blogger outreach. http://tc.eserver.org/34250.html http://tc.eserver.org/34250.html Almost everyone should forget about making money directly from blogging. It's so unlikely that it's a total waste of your time trying. I am actually shocked at how ubiquitous the idea is that blogging is a get-rich-quick scheme. Or even a get-rich-slowly scheme. It's not. Blogging is a great career tool for creating opportunities for yourself. But here are eight reasons you should stop thinking about money from blogging. http://tc.eserver.org/34253.html http://tc.eserver.org/34253.html The online transition to web 2.0, with its proliferation of blogs, wikis, podcasts, tweets, and other user-generated content, has posed a question for the state of help content. Should help material concern itself with web 2.0? Do users want to interact and contribute to help content in the same way they contribute and interact with web content? What is the technical writer’s role in relation to new media? http://tc.eserver.org/33926.html http://tc.eserver.org/33926.html Don't waste your money on a business blog (unless search engine marketing is an important piece of your overall marketing efforts and you're going to invest the time and effort into making it work). http://tc.eserver.org/33930.html http://tc.eserver.org/33930.html Forget about rivalries with MySpace and LinkedIn. Facebook's real competition is coming from upstart microblogging site Twitter. http://tc.eserver.org/33711.html http://tc.eserver.org/33711.html Yesterday a Twitter post (a tweet) by Mashable’s Pete Cashmore became so popular that traffic from Twitter crashed a blog. This sounds very similar to a common social media phenomenon originally known as the Slashdot effect (and later also the Digg effect), where a post on a popular social media site pushes more traffic than the target site can handle. An interesting thing here is the mechanics of Twitter, which is fundamentally different from Digg and Slashdot. It’s not a social news site, with a front page that all visitors go to. http://tc.eserver.org/33689.html http://tc.eserver.org/33689.html I’ve realized that having a blog helps me think more about my professional activities and interactions than I would otherwise. I give them more thought because I think about whether they’re something I can write about. http://tc.eserver.org/33630.html http://tc.eserver.org/33630.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. They are such an efficient tool for distributing the written word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity. It's intuitively appealing to believe that by making the connection between writer and reader more direct, weblogs will improve the environment for direct payments as well, but the opposite is true. By removing the barriers to publishing, weblogs ensure that the few people who earn anything from their weblogs will make their money indirectly. http://tc.eserver.org/33515.html http://tc.eserver.org/33515.html Twitter is now a must-have tool if you're publishing content, undertaking online marketing, or looking to keep up with the latest trends in anything web related. http://tc.eserver.org/33516.html http://tc.eserver.org/33516.html A few weeks ago Technorati came out with their annual State of the Blogosphere 2008 numbers. They revealed that 133 million blogs have been setup since January 2002. That means, on average, over 72,000 blogs have been setup every day since the blogging phenomena started. Staggering numbers! http://tc.eserver.org/33403.html http://tc.eserver.org/33403.html Blogs are the lifeblood of the "social internet" and with around 60 million blogs currently in existence they provide a large proportion of the content available online. This gives them huge potential as a tool for companies to engage with an audience in a way that hasn't really been possible before, but very few businesses seem to be taking advantage of the phenomenon. Why is that? http://tc.eserver.org/33408.html http://tc.eserver.org/33408.html To date, ROI hasn't been applied to blogs. This is partly due to blogging recent introduction to the marketing mix. Many blogging experts have suggested calculating a blog ROI is impossible. As a professor, I teach students how to tie marketing to the bottom line. Calculating ROI for a blog should be no harder than calculating it for other marketing components. To place ROI measurements in context, you must first understand how blogs fulfill different business objectives. http://tc.eserver.org/33409.html http://tc.eserver.org/33409.html Unlike corporate websites, b-blogs are cheap to launch and easy to maintain, thanks to powerful, easy-to-use tools. Unlike spam, or junk e-mail, b-blogs aren't intrusive; users must click to them. Done well, b-blogs provide a fast, informal way to share information -- project updates, research or test results, product-release news, industry headlines -- inside and outside your company. http://tc.eserver.org/33410.html http://tc.eserver.org/33410.html Sun Microsystems' policies about employee blogging: "You are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first, but we expect you to read and follow the advice in this note." http://tc.eserver.org/33411.html http://tc.eserver.org/33411.html I wrote in a recent report, that companies should have a blogging policy to provide guidelines for employees who want to have blogs. This primarily relates to employee's personal blogs and lays out the guidelines of what the company expects. As expected, policies will vary greatly depending on company circumstance. Here are a few examples and also, my variation. http://tc.eserver.org/33412.html http://tc.eserver.org/33412.html Below is a list of 15 companies that really get corporate blogging and produce blogs that are informative, fascinating, and a joy to read even for people who aren’t die-hard fans of the company. http://tc.eserver.org/33413.html http://tc.eserver.org/33413.html Maybe your business isn’t a massage clinic, but you are probably as passionate about the heart of your business as my client is about hers. I’m not talking about what you do. I’m talking about your business being an extension of who you are. For your business, I believe a blog is the answer. But not a stupid blog. http://tc.eserver.org/33414.html http://tc.eserver.org/33414.html How should we evaluate the corporate blogs that do exist? Laura and I have come up with this list of criteria that we think the best corporate blogs should have. This might change as we start working through the list as we, like you, may learn a few things about what can and should be done with corporate blogs. http://tc.eserver.org/33316.html http://tc.eserver.org/33316.html Twitter, often referred to as the water cooler of the Internet, teaches us the art of brevity by limiting communication to 140 characters or less. But unless you can compress instructional content in ingenious ways, you’ll find Twitter limiting as a method for delivering documentation. Instead, Twitter is better used for the following: eavesdropping on customer conversations; putting a personal face on your company; and increasing the reach of your announcements. http://tc.eserver.org/32912.html http://tc.eserver.org/32912.html So you have a blog, and you're worried that it might not be accessible to people with disabilities? Don't worry! A few simple changes can increase your blog's potential readership. http://tc.eserver.org/32827.html http://tc.eserver.org/32827.html "Self-Googling" -- searching for your own name on the popular Google search engine -- may seem like an innocuous act of vanity, but a University at Buffalo communications professor recommends it as a shrewd form of "personal brand management" in the digital age. http://tc.eserver.org/32720.html http://tc.eserver.org/32720.html In the showcase below we present 50 beautiful blog designs that literally stand out — either through their layout or through their design or through their attention to little details. Below you’ll find a variety of designs: clean designs, grunge, retro, graphics-heavy designs etc. Most designs presented below risk unusual approaches in the choice of design and content presentation. That’s what makes them different. Hopefully you will find some creative ideas which you can develop further in your further projects. http://tc.eserver.org/32350.html http://tc.eserver.org/32350.html When you search-engine-optimize your blog posts, you can increase your blog’s subscribers in a long-term way. You don’t have to stiffen your prose to apply search engine optimization — you just have to apply keywords in the right places. http://tc.eserver.org/32143.html http://tc.eserver.org/32143.html I'm amazed at how easily people can make sites look both professional and functional in a short period of time using WordPress. Clyde Parson, the STC-Suncoast chapter in Tampa, just redid the Suncoast STC with a new WordPress theme. It looks pretty cool. http://tc.eserver.org/31472.html http://tc.eserver.org/31472.html New technology is changing the face of internal and external organizational communication. Blogs are evolving at a tremendous pace and are not simply the stuff of boring journals and ideological rants. If you feel as if you’ve been caught napping while blogging has taken off, fear not. Blogs provide a way for organizations to bypass the media, to get quick feedback and to take on issues they would otherwise ignore or miss entirely. For an individual, a blog can be a way to set one’s own agenda and be heard. But it’s the political blog that’s fueling the trend so far—an intelligent PR tactic. http://tc.eserver.org/31427.html http://tc.eserver.org/31427.html First it was e-mail messages, next it was PDA messaging, and now it is blogs. These networking tools are all widely used by employees. They also sometimes become a source of contentious litigation when employers become concerned over the risk of corporate liability and public disclosure of confidential information that these new technologies pose. http://tc.eserver.org/31412.html http://tc.eserver.org/31412.html According to the report "State of the News Media 2005" from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, "more than a third of Americans, some 36 percent, are regular consumers of four or more different kinds of news outlets—network news, local TV, newspapers, cable, radio, the Internet and magazines." http://tc.eserver.org/31387.html http://tc.eserver.org/31387.html The world of blogging, also known as the blogosphere, is wild, highly viral, uncensored and unedited. It is also the newest and most critical tool in a business communicator's toolbox. Why? Because with blogs, communicators can quickly, regularly and easily deliver a variety of information to a highly targeted audience. A good blog will create a more personal relationship with customers and influencers by showing that the company is listening and responding to what they have to say. http://tc.eserver.org/31394.html http://tc.eserver.org/31394.html If you're a professional communicator, chances are good you've already asked yourself whether it's time to start your own blog. But there's another tech question that you probably have not yet asked yourself, and perhaps you should: Is it time to start your own wiki? http://tc.eserver.org/31392.html http://tc.eserver.org/31392.html New technologies are changing the ways we can achieve excellence in communication. Three new web-based communication tools have caught the imagination of innovators and early adopters. Blogs and wikis are proliferating all over the Internet, and podcasts look like they will soon be commonplace. http://tc.eserver.org/31399.html http://tc.eserver.org/31399.html When news reports announced that Apple Computer was suing unnamed individuals (presumed to be employees) who had allegedly leaked information about a prototype Apple product to several blog news sites, it raised a number of questions. What does the lawsuit mean for freedom of expression and the role of journalists who serve an information-hungry audience? How will the courts balance the fundamental right of freedom of expression against a company's claims that trade secrets have been violated on a blog? 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/31366.html http://tc.eserver.org/31366.html “We need to get global awareness fast,” says your CEO. “Make it happen.” When faced with the need to rapidly increase your organization’s visibility around the world, there are some daunting and expensive challenges, particularly if your company does not have a local presence in the countries it is targeting. Hiring local public relations and marketing communication talent, translating collateral into local languages and identifying and getting into both formal and informal business networks are just a few of these challenges. http://tc.eserver.org/31320.html http://tc.eserver.org/31320.html When bloggers attack, we, as trained communication experts, must be ready to respond, and must recognize bloggers as a new wave of reporters. Many are key influencers who can rally a community against you. Working with bloggers and responding quickly builds rapport and relationship. And gets you the bigger story—maybe even a more balanced story. http://tc.eserver.org/31333.html http://tc.eserver.org/31333.html In early March, The New York Times ran a story with the headline "Wal-Mart enlists bloggers in PR campaign." While the story itself is of interest as an example of how some PR agencies increasingly see blogs as legitimate communication channels, it is of greater interest to look at what the Edelman PR agency did in this specific case acting on behalf of their client—what went right and, more important, what didn't. http://tc.eserver.org/31317.html http://tc.eserver.org/31317.html For all the talk about corporate blogs, there still seems to be considerable debate about their value. As of early June, though, those questions should have been put to rest. General Motors illustrated just one of the benefits of blogs—bypassing the media and taking your message directly to the public—in its response to a column that appeared in The New York Times. http://tc.eserver.org/31326.html http://tc.eserver.org/31326.html We are hearing and reading a lot these days about the new age of transparency, in which organizations must go beyond traditional, tightly controlled communication and engage in a "naked conversation" with their customers, communities, employees and other stakeholders. http://tc.eserver.org/31308.html http://tc.eserver.org/31308.html The media interview seems like a pretty cut-and-dry experience. Reporter calls source. Reporter interviews source. Reporter uses portions of the interview in a piece and a lot more as background. Those of us who have been in PR a long time or have been interviewed by the press frequently know the drill. However, the media interview as we know it is going through a radical transformation, and it's starting not with the reporters but with bloggers. http://tc.eserver.org/31314.html http://tc.eserver.org/31314.html Has your communication department considered starting a blog about your company, or even getting the CEO to start his or her own blog? There's another department that usually frowns on such endeavors: the legal department. http://tc.eserver.org/31315.html http://tc.eserver.org/31315.html Whether you're grappling with how to reach out to bloggers discussing your industry or contemplating creating a corporate blog, it's vital for you as a communicator to understand what's being said about your company in cyberspace—and how to play an active role in the dialog. http://tc.eserver.org/31316.html http://tc.eserver.org/31316.html The influence of bloggers and their readers has erupted into campaigns that have affected large, well-known companies and brands—Wal-Mart, Kryptonite Locks, Land Rover, Sony. Smaller firms could suffer even more, like the New York camera retailer that went out of business. Don't let this happen to your organization. http://tc.eserver.org/31253.html http://tc.eserver.org/31253.html A debate continues to rage about how important and influential media such as blogs, podcasts and social networking sites really are. At the heart of this debate is the question, Is the blogosphere really an appropriate place for executives and others in positions of power who have everything to lose? http://tc.eserver.org/31254.html http://tc.eserver.org/31254.html As the publisher of CEO Blog Watch, I pay close attention the evolution of corporate communication, especially as it pertains to blogging. In fact, the mission of CEO Blog Watch is to chronicle the continued rise of corporate and CEO blogs. As someone who monitors CEO blogging, I can tell you that the most commonly asked question on the subject is, "Should a CEO blog?" Here's my take on the subject. http://tc.eserver.org/31233.html http://tc.eserver.org/31233.html Despite blogs’ potential for creating valuable online communities, many communicators are still uneasy with the blog format. Communicators worry about the possibility of readers posting negative comments and feedback on the company blog. Angry customers leaving stories of poor experiences for all to see or employees submitting bitter public complaints are nightmare scenarios for most communicators. So how should we respond to negative feedback on corporate blogs? The process begins with shifting our perspective to see the risks as opportunities. http://tc.eserver.org/31172.html http://tc.eserver.org/31172.html I'm convinced that even internal software, which never sees the light of WWW, still needs a blog as much or more than products sold online. Even so, numerous corporate restrictions, standards, and culture will present seemingly insurmountable barriers to blogs. http://tc.eserver.org/31089.html http://tc.eserver.org/31089.html The keywords that set off the Intercom editor's Google Alert no doubt included technical communicator, technical writer, technical communication, and Society for Technical Communication. http://tc.eserver.org/29742.html http://tc.eserver.org/29742.html A weblog or 'blog' is a Web site with content consisting of a series of discrete postings added sequentially and presented in reverse chronological order. Historically used for personal Web sites, blogs in fact represent a form of lightweight content management that can be adapted to virtually any topic, including technical communication. The recent explosion of blogs is in part a result of the availability of publishing tools that simplify their creation. These tools vary significantly in capability, setup, and ease of use, and each offers advantages and disadvantages. http://tc.eserver.org/29337.html http://tc.eserver.org/29337.html For the techno-savvy TechRepublic member, writing in some form or fashion is an almost daily occurrence. But how effective is your communication? In this interview, author Barry Rosenberg shares his thoughts about the current state of technical writing skills. http://tc.eserver.org/29283.html http://tc.eserver.org/29283.html Over the past 14 years blogging has evolved from crude and blunt internet ramblings, technical or inspired dialogues to a diverse and creative web phenomenon capable of calling the world's media to scrutiny, and no longer the province of late-night diarists but increasingly a platform and media release opportunity for industry and commerce. http://tc.eserver.org/29252.html http://tc.eserver.org/29252.html I have mixed feelings about this article in the New York Times about Usability Professionals: Technology's Untanglers: They Make It Really Work. I've read mixed feelings about this article as well. Had it been written 5 years ago, I'd be really pleased about it. But it isn't a very well written article and has some mis-information as 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/28823.html http://tc.eserver.org/28823.html Why Blog? Your personal presence, building goodwill, and enhancing your network. http://tc.eserver.org/28507.html http://tc.eserver.org/28507.html We reviewed and compared the seven tools most frequently used to create a blog. Which are easiest to get up and running, or to tailor to match your site? Which has the best comment moderation features? Reporting functionality? We'll give you all the details and recommend a tool for you. http://tc.eserver.org/28081.html http://tc.eserver.org/28081.html Corporate blogging is rapidly becoming another way for companies to communicate with their customers and increase internal communication. Learn about the advantages and future of blogging and how to get started. http://tc.eserver.org/28004.html http://tc.eserver.org/28004.html Michael Stelzner's Writing White Papers Blog is offers comprehensive look at all white paper related topics, from writing to marketing. http://tc.eserver.org/26875.html http://tc.eserver.org/26875.html Wikis and Web logs (blogs) make a big impact on the Web, but they can also be useful in an enterprise. A community is a group of people with common interests, goals, or responsibilities, such as a project team or an interest group. Combine wikis and blogs with existing collaborative tools to enhance the productivity and effectiveness of enterprise teams. http://tc.eserver.org/26688.html http://tc.eserver.org/26688.html In a broad sense that the weblog can be beneficial to the business world as a whole. More specifically, however, it provides technical communicators with unprecedented opportunites at innovation and leadership. http://tc.eserver.org/26630.html http://tc.eserver.org/26630.html Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author. http://tc.eserver.org/26301.html http://tc.eserver.org/26301.html Leaving a comment on someone's weblog is like walking into their living room and joining in on a conversation. As in real life, online there are some people who are a pleasure to converse with, and some who are not. http://tc.eserver.org/26293.html http://tc.eserver.org/26293.html I want to make two arguments. The first, a largely implicit one, concerns the life cycle of online scholarship and is marked by my added emphasis on the word 'article' in the opening sentence of this essay. My second argument, the explicit one, is about the value of blogging in the writing classroom. http://tc.eserver.org/26005.html http://tc.eserver.org/26005.html Blogs often consist of links to articles that readers might otherwise have missed, and thus make for informative reading. http://tc.eserver.org/25986.html http://tc.eserver.org/25986.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 quantitative 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 underestimate 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 suggest possible developments of the use of weblogs over time in responsgenres. 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/25586.html http://tc.eserver.org/25586.html In taking the costs of publishing to their near vanishing point, blogging represents one of the most democratic media or media formats in history. As such, traditional print journalism’s natural response has been to embrace the form, encourage it, proliferate it, and to use blogs to fulfill journalism’s mission of informing an electorate and, therefore, bettering democracy. Not quite. http://tc.eserver.org/25594.html http://tc.eserver.org/25594.html Maps of any aspect of the Internet call for different approaches than traditional cartography for two reasons. First, any attempt to map the Internet using the Internet as a medium changes the thing it sets out to represent. Second, Internet maps are more than pictures of static—or at least relatively slow moving—features but are representations of ever changing systems of relationships. The blogosphere is an example of explosive growth in the number and complexity of interrelationship and community made possible by the Internet. http://tc.eserver.org/25591.html http://tc.eserver.org/25591.html Blogs above the waterline—those which are frequently updated, widely read, and consistently linked—may represent the conception of blogs in the public mind, but they are not representative of blogs in general. 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/25595.html http://tc.eserver.org/25595.html If the problem with American public discourse is lack of access, then the blogsphere will do much to improve it. If, however, the problem is how people participate, if there is already too much stance-taking and not enough argumentation, the blogsphere will simply give more people easier access to a form of public discourse which actually has limited benefit. http://tc.eserver.org/25592.html http://tc.eserver.org/25592.html What makes weblogs a genre different from the autobiography, the diary, the researcher's journal or any other pre-Internet writing? While weblogs have many non-digital predecessors, blogs cannot live outside of the computer. They are ergodic texts (Aarseth 1997), and demand the assistance of technology in order to be created and used. 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/25585.html http://tc.eserver.org/25585.html The concept of genre, as developed in the work of rhetoric and composition scholars like Carolyn Miller, Charles Bazerman, and Richard Coe, offers a key to understanding both formal features and motivations for weblogging, and their view of genres as dynamic and evolving complements Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s theory of new media: remediation. Our goal in this paper is to bring some greater specificity to, and advance the understanding of, weblogs as educational tools relevant to any class that takes writing and reading seriously. http://tc.eserver.org/25596.html http://tc.eserver.org/25596.html Jurgen Habermas's theory of the public sphere provides a model of idealised democratic debate. Three major features of this model can be identified - universal access, rational debate, and a disregard for rank. This essay analyses the Slashdot model, and use it to examine Slashdot, a popular Web site, as an actualisation of public space. 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/25583.html http://tc.eserver.org/25583.html Native to the Internet and personal in approach, weblogs deliver bite-sized portions of information on a daily basis to an ever expanding audience. Weblogs are the conjunctions of the Internet: the ands, the buts the ors – they add to online conversations, refute them, or provide new perspectives altogether. http://tc.eserver.org/25588.html http://tc.eserver.org/25588.html There has been a great deal of buzz recently about the potential for Weblogs (blogs) to revolutionize journalism, to make it more democratic, and to help demystify the craft by exposing the wizard behind the curtain of the media establishment. These claims, however, are only partially correct and are derived more from speculation based on the potential of the medium rather than from actual results. http://tc.eserver.org/25593.html http://tc.eserver.org/25593.html In this essay I assess the potential impact of weblogs on the public sphere, using a model based on the work of Jürgen Habermas to provide an ideal against which we can measure the efficacy of weblogs as a public space. 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/25562.html http://tc.eserver.org/25562.html The O'Reilly Radar blog will track what we're tracking, and turn the blips into conversations. 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/25558.html http://tc.eserver.org/25558.html While a few educators have already started using blogs in the classroom, more have focused on the potential of blogging in teaching and learning. 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/25554.html http://tc.eserver.org/25554.html Weblogs are often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles. http://tc.eserver.org/25556.html http://tc.eserver.org/25556.html It's been shown that the distribution of links on the web scales according to a power law, so it comes as no surprise that the distribution of links to weblogs does as well. 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/25551.html http://tc.eserver.org/25551.html Rebecca Blood, an early blogger, describes the rise of blogging. 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/25484.html http://tc.eserver.org/25484.html 'Blogging' is a Web-based form of communication that is rapidly becoming mainstream. In this paper, we report the results of an ethnographic study of blogging, focusing on blogs written by individuals or small groups, with limited audiences. We discuss motivations for blogging, the quality of social interactivity that characterized the blogs we studied, and relationships to the blogger¡¯s audience. We consider the way bloggers related to the known audience of their personal social networks as well as the wider 'blogosphere' of unknown readers. We then make design recommendations for blogging software based on these findings. 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/25481.html http://tc.eserver.org/25481.html Blogs are a simple, yet powerful tool and their popularity is rapidly growing. How are blogs affecting the community and technical communication? 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/25475.html http://tc.eserver.org/25475.html Web-logging software has received plenty of attention as a quick and easy way to post content to a web site. Web logs (blogs) tend to fall into two categories: personal web logs that function sort of like diaries, and informational blogs that target a readership with a shared interest. But web logging can also be used to support knowledge management (KM)¡ªthe effort within an organization to share knowledge and help the organization achieve its mission. This form of web logging, called knowledge logging, or k-logging, is emerging as an inexpensive alternative to large-scale KM solutions. http://tc.eserver.org/25476.html http://tc.eserver.org/25476.html The purpose of this personal mini-research project is to investigate learner attitudes towards a weblog that I recently set-up and have been running for my classroom-based university EFL learners here in Japan. What follows will be my attempt to relate my experience as a first-time researcher: from formulating the research questions to selecting research methods and describing their deployment. I will then report on the outcomes, give a short analysis, and discuss what the entire process meant to me. http://tc.eserver.org/25477.html http://tc.eserver.org/25477.html Few native English weblogs link to non-English weblogs in their blogroll and those English language weblogs that do link to non-English weblogs are usually written by non-native English speakers. The Internet may be transnational but many communities remain bound by barriers of language. http://tc.eserver.org/25478.html http://tc.eserver.org/25478.html Given that students have access to the Internet, weblogs can easily replace traditional classroom uses of the private print journal. While weblogs are normally public, free tools such as Blogger can be used for private, expressive writing. http://tc.eserver.org/25479.html http://tc.eserver.org/25479.html Running a project Weblog is a great way to collect, organize, and publish the documents and discussions that are the lifeblood of the project and to shape these raw materials into a coherent narrative. The serial nature of the Weblog helps you make it the project's newspaper of record. This kind of storytelling can become a powerful way to focus the attention of a group. The desire to listen to a compelling story and find out what happens next is a deep human instinct. http://tc.eserver.org/25480.html http://tc.eserver.org/25480.html This research investigates what form of communication is made possible through the weblog and what its uses are for the future. Taking Habermas' theory, it will be investigated whether blogs offer a platform for what he calls the 'ideal speech situation'. Conditions for the ideal speech situation are that everyone has equal access to the communication, that there are no power differences between the participants and that the participants act truthfully towards each other. http://tc.eserver.org/25490.html http://tc.eserver.org/25490.html Authenticity is something which must be constructed rather than simply accruing to verbal content, and visual and other design features are an inherent, but often overlooked, factor in this construction. 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/25456.html http://tc.eserver.org/25456.html Content Management is starting to wrestle with what Clayton Christensen calls The Innovator's Dilemma: the inability of successful companies to adapt to a new, disruptive technology. http://tc.eserver.org/25432.html http://tc.eserver.org/25432.html Web logs (also called 'weblogs' or 'blogs') are frequently updated website commentaries, short or long, organized chronically and sometimes include the blogger’s personal life. 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/25440.html http://tc.eserver.org/25440.html My new theory on blogging is that whenever I can't find a particular piece of information on Google I should just create it myself. What's the point of all this easy-to-use publishing technology if you don't publish stuff, right? 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.