A Presentation to the Faculty
Houston Community College Faculty Conference. JW Marriott Hotel, Houston.
February 5, 2005.
Blogtastic! Making it easy to stay on top of your professional reading
Contents of this presentation
Intro
What We Will and Won't Cover
Definitions
History
How They're Different
A Gratuitous Note About the Mainstream Media
Why They're Great Tools
Syndication
A Note on RSS
Demonstrations
Handouts
References
A presentation by Shelly Drumm, with help from Trudy Cleveland, Judy Caramanica, and Denise Coles.
Even if you’re not very technologically inclined, in the past couple of years, you’ve probably heard mention of weblogs, or blogs. The New York Times Magazine did a feature article on blogs and the people behind them, known as bloggers. Bloggers were issued press passes at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. There’s a lot of confusion surrounding blogs, though. A recent Pew Internet and American Life report found that over a quarter of Internet users are reading blogs, but a whopping 62% still don’t even know what a blog is. Today, I’m going to de-mystify blogs a little and show you how you can use blogs to keep on top of current events – in your field and beyond.
What We Will Cover
The topic of blogging is about as wide and diverse as the millions of blogs that populate the Internet. Here, however, we’re going to keep a focus on just a few main points. We’ll talk about:
- Definitions – what is a blog, exactly, and why are they different from other web pages.
- History – we’ll explore where these things came from and why you’ve been hearing so much about them in the past year or two.
- Use and management – Here I’m going to show you how to find blogs that are relevant to your interests, focusing on academic interests, and also how you can use an RSS aggregator or feed reader to manage them neatly in one place.
And what we'll save for another time
Among the things that we won’t be covering today are how to set up a blog and ways to incorporate blogging into your courses. Faculty across the globe are finding that incorporating blogs into the classroom is encouraging learning in unusual and exciting ways because it creates a less formal venue in which students can write. Some are exploring assigning blogs instead of research papers, and all sorts of other projects. But, again, these are topics for another time. At the bottom of this page, you'll find handouts prepared by my colleagues Denise Coles, Trudy Cleveland, and Judy Caramanica on these topics, though.
Also, in the coming months, I will be making a presentation at the Central College CIC and possibly at the NW College CIC about how to use the Learning Web software we have, Plone, to generate your own blogs and during those workshops we might have time to look at how to use blogs as instructional tools. I’ll also be posting information to that end on my learning website.
Definitions
Defining a blog is relatively simple. In its most basic sense, it is a communication tool. A blog is a regularly updated web-based journal. A blog can be maintained by one person, or a team of people, small or large. Generally speaking, and on its best day, a blog is dedicated to a specific topic or area of interest.
These topics can be
- Personal Diaries: This is by far the most common and least useful type of blogs.
- Corporate: Lots of corporations are starting to use blogs to communicate with those interested in their products and services. For example, Google launched a blog not too long ago to keep folks up on their latest tips and tricks.
- Academic disciplines and professions: There are scholars and practitioners in almost every field blogging away daily. Librarians, in our constant quest for new information, are among the most avid bloggers, but you can also find historians, lawyers, writers, sociologists, etc populating the blogosphere.
- Current events / politics: Next to the personal diaries, I would guess that this is the second most common type of blog and the kind that are garnering the most attention lately
There are blogs on pretty much any topic you can imagine – and some you probably don’t want to imagine – both scholarly and otherwise.
History
In the beginning
The term “web log” was probably first coined in 1997. The first blogs that made their way into the world were evolved from Usenet groups. Instead of posting information to these bulletin boards, people started putting that information up on web pages. The earliest blogs were a way of sharing links with a community of readers that might be interested in the same things you were. A blogger would read an article, link to it from his or her blog and maybe make some comments on the content of that link. A lot of current blogs are still in the same vein, though more and more are sources for more original content. The earliest blogs were often techy in nature, because only technology enthusiasts knew how to build the things.
Then in 1999, things started to shift. The term “Blog” was coined, and that same year, Blogger.com was launched. Blogger is a site that allows luddites from all over the world to generate blogs in a matter of minutes. Many other companies followed suit, and in their wake, blogs began popping up everywhere and on every topic imaginable.
And then... the Blog-splosion
Then it all happened at once. When America took on the “War on Terror” in late 2001, a lot of people took to the Internet to try to understand the event, and there they found a relatively active group of bloggers who were posting some of the most current information available. A handful of bloggers, most notably Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, gained popularity during that time by blogging their support for the Bush administration's actions during those strange times.
Of course, over time, the war bloggers, as they came to be known, went on to blogging other things, and nobody really talks about “war bloggers” any more. Many of them are still around, though. Instapundit still is possibly the most widely read blog on the web. Many of them are still blogging current events and political happenings and you have bloggers on every side of every issue. Two of the most popular leftist blogs are Atrios' Eschaton and the Daily Kos.
And then... Growth
And over time, more and more people started gravitating toward blogs. Today, in fact, the Daily Kos and Atrios combined have more readers than the Philadelphia inquirer!
Some other developments to note:
Merriam Webster declared that “blog” was the word of the year for 2004 meaning it had the most look-ups at m-w.com. (but then, defenestration was #10…)
Rathergate and Trent Lott’s fall are both widely attributed to activity in the blogosphere
During the 2004 democratic primaries, the Howard Dean blog became a huge asset to his campaign, and now “Blog for America” is promoting Dean for the chair of the Democratic National Committee. Also, both the Bush and Kerry campaigns ran very active blogs during the run for the presidency.
and then More Growth
And according to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project:
- 8 million American adults say they have created blogs
- Blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users
- 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online
- 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs.
- Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.
(Pew internet and American life project)
Why They're Different
So by this time you’re probably wondering what the big deal is. Why are these making so much news lately? Well, there are a few things that make blogs different.
- They tend to be very current and have frequent posts which are usually listed in reverse chronological order
- Lots of free applications and sites such as LiveJournal, Blogger, etc make it very easy to make these things. Web publishing is no longer just for the computer savvy! Blogger accounts are as easy to set up as Hotmail accounts.
- Blogs are often syndicated. Basically what this means is that one website can publish bits of information directly from another site – which enables us to aggregate all of our news in one place. But more on that in a minute.
- Most blogs feature comment sections and some develop incredibly active communities in which readers can interact and exchange ideas with each other and with the blogger
- Less formal venue – many bloggers publish more traditional pieces in print sources, but offer a completely different online persona via their blogs.
Mainstream Media?
In
terms of mainstream media v. blogs, a lot of folks think that the
mainstream media is becoming so concerned with offending anyone that
they never take a stance on anything and don’t let journalists
express their own voices. Blogs, with their unedited posts by what
are usually rogue commentators who answer to nobody, are seen by many
as a solution to that. In fact, according to an article
in the Columbia Journalism Review, blogging has begun “to deliver
on some of the wild promises about the Internet that were heard in
the 1990s. Never before have so many passionate outsiders…stormed
the ramparts of professional journalism."
Image from BigBrainBoy.com
Great Professional Tools
So – what’s in it for you? How can blogs make you better at what you do? Well, there are a few reasons why blogs make particularly interesting and valuable tools for academics and professionals.
Immediate: When a blogger has an idea, s/he can post it immediately – no delay! These are not published once a quarter or even monthly. These are updated multiple times a week in most cases. The same immediacy benefit goes for readers’ comments, too. When you write to a blogger about a particular subject, she can get back to you within minutes!
- Current: Have you ever anxiously awaited the newest issue of your favorite professional journal to make the rounds through your department and land on your desk? And found by the time it did that the info inside is old news? Not so here! You are reading it as it happens – especially if you use an RSS aggregator.
- Insight: You will also have the pleasure of learning from leaders in field without attending conferences. You’re reading what they’re writing as they’re writing it. Rarely do know-nothing hacks bother to blog, and you can certainly avoid those that do with ease.
- Even More Insight: Reading what others write is one thing, and it’s good. But equally important can be what other people are reading. Via blogs we can easily keep up with what others in our fields are reading because many blogs feature what are known as blogrolls. These are the lists of blogs that a blogger often reads, and therefore includes on her own blog.
- Community: Blogs are also great for building community for one big reason: Comments. Most blogs include an option for any reader to comment on a post, asking questions, pointing in new directions, etc. This allows for an open exchange of ideas which can get very interesting when people from different fields and from all across the globe begin to chime in. A lot of blogs have incredibly active readerships offering great opportunities for bloggers and readers alike.
- Syndication: This is perhaps the greatest reason these are so handy for professional reading is syndication.
Syndication
Most blogs have what is called an RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication, no joke!) embedded into them. This is the same technology that powers the news feeds you might see when you log into a personalized portal page like My MSN or My Yahoo! and it allows for a bunch of different things to happen. Most importantly in this context, the feed enables a web-based tool called an RSS aggregator or feed reader to check for and display content that is new since the user’s last visit, centrally locating a user’s preferred blogs into one place. Most feeds will provide headlines or abstracts instead of full content if you choose, so you can quickly scan content for things that are interesting to you, without wading through a multitude of whole posts that are not of value to you.
More about RSS
A quick note, here about RSS and blogs. Blogs are by no means the
only web pages that utilize RSS technology. As I mentioned, Yahoo!
and MSN both use it. The New York Times uses it. CNN, the BBC, and
ESPN use it. Any site that wants to syndicate its content, that can
divide its content into regularly updated discreet bits of information
that it wants to pass on to other sites – e.g. new headlines,
stock prices, sports scores, etc. – can use it, and often do.
And this means you can take advantage of those feeds, too!
Here is a more
thorough explanation of RSS
And here you can learn how to set up feeds for your own website.
And for the demos...
The following links will take you to Flash demonstrations. If you do not have Flash, get the quick download from Macromedia.
The focus here is on how to use Bloglines to find, read, and manage the blogs you want to read. I have not included a tutorial on how to create an account, simply because it's easier to create a Bloglines account than a Hotmail account! Simply go to the Bloglines homepage, and click "Sign Up" and follow the directions there.
Aggregator and blog examples (.swf 764K)
Find discipline specific blogs (.swf 505K)
- Subscribing to blogs
- From a Bloglines search (.swf 517K)
- From a blog using the RSS or XML feeds directly (.swf 1.35M)
- Using Bloglines Easy Subscribe Bookmarklet (.swf 1.21M)
Handouts
Classroom benefits and uses of blogs
How to set up a blog at Blogger.com
References
- Matusow, Catherine.
- "The Blog Age: Matt Mullenweg helps usher in the real information revolution, one Web log at a time." The Houston Press, October 28, 2004. http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2004-10-28/news/feature2_1.html.
- Welch, Matt.
- "Blogworld: The New Amateur Journalist Weighs In." Columbia Journalism Review. 2003 Issue 5. http://www.cjr.org/issues/2003/5/blog-welch.asp
- Glenn, David.
- "Scholars Who Blog: The Soapbox of the Digital Age Draws a Crowd of Academics." The Chronicle of Higher Education. 6 June 2003. http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i39/39a01401.htm
- "War Blog."
- Wikipedia.org. 4 February 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Blog
- "Weblog."
- Wikipedia.org. 4 February 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog.