Parody Blogging and the Call of the Real

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.

Roberts-Miller, Trish. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Writing>Community Building>Blogging

Personal Publication and Public Attention

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.

Mortensen, Torill Elvira. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Publishing>Online>Blogging

Planet Blog: Bringing Development Communities Together

Explains how RSS feeds from weblogs can be aggregated to enhance communication among groups of software developers, and how XML/RDF can be used to describe multiple communities.

Dumbill, Edd. IBM (2004). Articles>Collaboration>Community Building>Blogging

Politics Goes Blogging

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.

Fernando, Angelo. Communication World Bulletin (2004). Articles>Communication>Blogging>Politics

Promiscuous Fictions

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?

Curtain, Tyler. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Publishing a Project Weblog

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.

Udell, Jon. InfoWorld (2003). Articles>Project Management>Community Building>Blogging

Questions About Blogs Nobody Seems To Answer

Here are some deep questions about blogs that seem to be overlooked. For example, can you post too frequently? What is coming next in popularity, wikis or glogs? Why do many business people express no interest in blogging? Can you answer any of these 16 probing questions about blogs and blogging?

Streight, Steven. Blogger.com (2005). Articles>Cyberculture>Usability>Blogging

Reinventing the Media Interview

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.

Rubel, Steve. Communication World Bulletin (2006). Articles>Interviews>Blogging

Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs

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.

Brooks, Kevin, Cindy Nichols and Sybil Priebe. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Education>Writing>Blogging

Should Businesses Embrace the Blogging Phenomenon?

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?

Blackshaw, Pete. Communication World Bulletin (2005). Articles>Web Design>Business Communication>Blogging

Should You Really Say That in a Corporate Blog?

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.

Fernando, Angelo. Communication World Bulletin (2006). Articles>Management>Legal>Blogging

Slashdot and the Public Sphere  

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.

Baoill, Andrew Ó. First Monday (2000). Articles>Technology>Community Building>Blogging

The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution

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.

Boese, Christine. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Top Seven Tips to Writing an Effective Blog

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.

Weil, Debbie. Communication World Bulletin (2005). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Unbundling the Blog

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.

Taylor, Helen. Communication World Bulletin (2006). Articles>Business Communication>Public Relations>Blogging

Understanding Weblogs: A Communicative Perspective  

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.

Wijnia, Elmine. wijnia.com (2003). Articles>Communication>Online>Blogging

Usability of U.S. Presidential Candidate Blogs: Why it Matters

When it comes to the usability of the presidential candidates' blogs, they all need some work from a usability standpoint. Applying good usability practices would make better use of campaign funds, attract young voters, and give candidates a better idea of what is important to the electorate.

Russo, Thomas. Usability Interface (2005). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Blogging

Visual Blogs

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.

Badger, Meredith. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Web Design>Visual Rhetoric>Blogging

Visual Factors in Constructing Authenticity in Weblogs

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.

Thompson, Gary. Saginaw Valley State University (2003). Articles>Web Design>Visual Rhetoric>Blogging

Weblog Journalism: Between Infiltration and Integration

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.

Gallo, Jason. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Writing>Journalism>Blogging

Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes

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.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Blogging

Weblogs and Power Laws

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.

Kottke, Jason. kottke.org (2003). Articles>Web Design>History>Blogging

Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

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.

Shirky, Clay. Shirky.com (2002). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Weblogs and the Public Sphere

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.

Baoill, Andrew Ó. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Writing>Community Building>Blogging

Weblogs as a Bridging Genre    

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.

Herring, Susan C., Scheidt, Lois Ann, Wright, Elijah, and Bonus, Sabrina. Information, Technology and People (2005). Articles>Publishing>Online>Blogging