How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Blog

With the class wrapped up and the dust settled, I thought I’d take some time and look back on how my approach to writing in this blog evolved over the course of the semester – and how I might continue to evolve from here.

When it was first announced that we’d be participating in a group blog, I got very excited. I had toyed with the idea of starting a blog for some time – mainly as a one-stop resource for letting my friends and family know what I was up to, so I wouldn’t have to write a bunch of different, personalized e-mails every time something fun happened. (Lazy, huh?) But I never actually started it up – mostly out of the fear that I would end up with nothing exciting to say.

I wasn’t sure how a “group blog” worked, either – the closest analogue that I could think of was a message board, where multiple people talked back and forth on different threads about a variety of topics. Blogs don’t contain “threads” per se, but you can comment on each other’s posts – so I figured it would be a similar atmosphere. With that in mind, I decided to try to “break the ice” with my new community – starting off with a silly post about blogging in class, and then posting a little write-up about my experiences on Halloween.

The reactions I got were … mixed. The very first reply was someone offering the opinion that this wasn’t what the blog was supposed to be for. And although dissenting opinions weighed in, this wasn’t exactly the conversation I was trying to start. I got confused – apparently a group blog isn’t like a message board after all! – so I decided to fade into the shadows for a little while and see how others approached blogging there.

The blog theme seemed to me to quickly turn to “here’s a link to something web-related, plus my thoughts” – and although I found a few articles and wrote a few drafts, I didn’t feel like I had created anything worth posting. I’ve always been somewhat of a luddite, internet-wise – I don’t know how to torrent, I’m not sure what an RSS feed is, and I can’t socially-bookmark to save my life – and now I was self-conscious to boot. These guys are blogging way over my head! I commented on a few articles, but couldn’t find a comfort level blogging about web-related news articles.

Eventually, as I thought about it more and more, I realized that a compromise solution existed. I could blog about my day, I could tell anecdotes and try to engage my audience – other bloggers – on a conversational level … as long as I made the posts web-related!

After a harrowing family illness, I blogged about my apathetic feelings toward e-cards, and got a number of favorable responses. After trying vainly to find a certain clip on YouTube, I blogged bemoaning the loss of a wild, untamed clip-sharing community, and got a pretty good conversation going there as well.

Hey, this is kinda fun after all! I was happy with the balance I was striking, but it still seemed to me that everyone else was linking to other stuff more than I was. I felt left out – so I tried a series of posts where I listed various ways of accomplishing a goal on the internet. I brainstormed ways people could find other people’s contact info online, and about ways I could have checked the weather without turning on my TV, radio, or looking out the window.

I was happy to be linking to things like all the cool kids, but those posts didn’t generate much feedback at all, and I started to dislike them as a little too forced. Sure, I was telling anecdotes and sharing experiences with the group, but they were getting a little too David-Letterman-Top-Tenny. Here’s the premise, here’s a list of links. Not very organic. I decided that I liked my previous approach better – it fit me more comfortably, and came out of my head onto the keyboard much more smoothly.

So now, the class is over and I’ve tried on a few different blogging styles for size. I’m glad that I tried them all – glad I stretched myself in the format, checked out the boundaries of what I was comfortable with and what the group/audience expected and enjoyed. I think I had a few awkward moments, to be sure, but – as I kept reminding myself – the purpose of this group blog was to learn about blogging!

And, despite any nervousness or awkwardness I went through, I certainly did learn – what blogging was all about, how it differed from writing for print, how audience feedback and group interaction could shape future entries practically in real time.

Honestly, I still don’t know if I’m ready to launch my own blog. I’m still worried that I’ll have nothing to say, and that my friends and family will roll their eyes at my non-adventures ("dear blog: today I had soup!"). But I definitely feel more comfortable with the format. I now know what I feel makes good blog posts – and more importantly, I got some experience with making what I feel to be bad blog posts.

I’ll keep my eye on this blog from time to time, to see if any of my fellow classmates continue to post up adventures, or links, or thoughts about the web. And if I ever do launch my own blog, full of ramblings about my day and snarky, self-deprecating one-liners – well, I’ll be sure to post the link right here.

Thanks for helping me feel my way into the wild world of blogging, folks. I had a great time with you all this semester and I wish you all the best of luck in your future classes and endeavors.

-Jeph

Correction http://stalkingjorge.googlepages.com

Oops - sorry, there is no www in the address

http://stalkingjorge.googlepages.com

For my final project for this class I created a website.

Stalking Jorge and Other Adventures
Essays by Deborah Chaisson.

Its been so long since I have done anything in html I can barely remember how to make text bold. To create the site I used googlepages and it was amazingly fast and easy.

To find google pages I just googled "google website creator" or something to that effect. I found the page, registered for an account, and since I am apparently the one last person on the planet that did not have a gmail account it created one for me, so be careful what you use for a login name because that becomes your gmail address.

Google hosts your website for you so no figuring out how to get a domain name or where to park the site, its all right there.

The page creator was ridiculously easy to use once you have all your text written and have decided how to lay the site out. It probably took me less than an hour to get the content up. You simply copy and paste the text in and then insert photos and links by clicking buttons named "insert link" or "insert image." Once I got it up I had to fine tune things, the text and line spacing got a little weird in places. To fix it I would simply cut the text that had the wrong format and paste it into a paragraph that had the right formatting and the text would pick up the right formatting and then I could just hit enter to move it down into its own paragraph and retain the formatting.

I had several online friends test drive it in different browsers and operating systems and after a little tweaking it looked good on any browser on any platform.

One especially cool feature that googlepages added without me even asking for it, is if you click on any picture on the site it opens the picture in its own window, full size. This was something I had wanted to do because my site is pretty photo heavy and I really wanted to showcase them, so google did it for me without me even having to figure out how to do it myself.

A+++++++ Would create website with this software again.

My website is

http://stalkingjorge.googlepages.com

I would love to see sites and blogs other people have created for the class.

A New Year's Ritual: Endings & Beginnings

It's the end of class and the semester, but a new one will come soon. In the spirit of the new year, I thought I'd comment on a story on a story I saw on New Year's. (yeah, it's a little late--and I can't find the actual article anymore!)

It was about how people would bring in all their old junk that they wanted to get rid of—bills, bad grades, letters from exes—and burn them in Times Square. For people who didn't have anything physical with them, they were provided paper to write down the things they wanted to get rid of in the new year.

I find that neat, how we humans need these rituals to start anew. Our class is on the web, and we've talked about how the web is better at some things and traditional print is better at others—I think here is a great example of something you can't do electronically. I supposed you could erase your hard drive, but there's something about the physical act of crumpling or ripping or burning or smashing that is substantial. The physical act lends weight to the symbolic, making it all the more real.

I'm not advocating violence though! I just thought it was neat that in this century, we still have rituals like that, in the one of the busiest areas of the largest cities in the U.S. It's also interesting that it was a mass ritual—just as we are social animals and like to build relationships and communities, we also like to tear down things together. That's another thing that is sometimes harder to do online.

I remember a friend used to say that he preferred that we meet in person, then second came phone, then last, the internet. I didn't understand then, back in undergrad. I thought online was the best because I could multi-task. I understand now, that there's no replacing the real-time face-to-face contact. We'll always develop better technology and have convergence, but the physical, real sense of self and of the other will never be replaced.

--Hana

Weather or Not

After my last blog entry this morning, about my office shutting down due to inclement weather and not letting me know, I got to thinking: maybe it's partly my fault. I mean, surem they could have tried harder to contact me -- but if I had known the storm was coming, I might have thought to check with someone about the office's status before shoveling out the car.

Most people learn about upcoming weather by watching the evening news or reading the paper, but I don't have cable and don't get the paper -- so, since I just listed a bunch of computer-related ways that my boss could have reached me, what are some computer-related ways that I could have learned about the storm?

Well, right off the bat there's WeatherBug -- a downloadable program that sits on your desktop and shows your current staus, predictions for the next few days, and alerts you with warnings about upcoming extreme weather. I've encountered WeatherBug on my mother's computer and some co-workers' machines -- but each time, all it's seemed to do was get in the way. I've found that my co-workers' computers started up significantly slower ("Loading WeatherBug, please wait ... zzzz..."), and the weather-alerts feature pops up a small box in the corner that just will not go away unless you've you've opened the program and read the alert.

I've always found WeatherBug annoying. But, given that last feature, if I had it, I definitely would have known about the storm...

What else? There's Weather.com, which is run by the Weather Channel. They've got a "local weather" feature right on the front page, where you type in your zip code and get the current status and a 36-hour forecast. Handy, but I've never seen such an ad-heavy page. I literally have to work to figure out what content is weather-related and which content is an ad -- and that's a very bad thing. (Plus, right now one of the ads is that stupid "dancing man/woman/alien" gif from LowerMyBills.com, which just makes my teeth grind for some reason.)

Weather.com seems to have downloadable desktop feature much like WeatherBug. I wonder if it would slow down my co-workers' computers' startup time any less than WeatherBug? Hmm.

There's also Yahoo Weather, which runs weather updates (powered by weather.com) and weather-related news stories. This storm certainly qualified -- look, here's an AP news article about it.

I'm sure every major online news site has a similar weather subsection -- msn.com, USA Today.com, cnn.com. If I'd been paying attention, or used these sites for my news more regularly, I probably would have noticed a mention of the storm.

Also, I could have been signed up to receive weather alerts by e-mail. This site offers them, as does weather.com. (Oddly, boston.com weather doesn't seem to have this option, although I could have sworn they used to offer something similar.)

So, with all these high-tech options available to me -- I really should have had an inkling that we were supposed to be walloped with a foot of snow. So I guess part of the fault for not checking if my office would be closed does rest with me.

I think I'm going to look into weather.com's downloadable desktop app. If it turns out to be less obtrusive than WeatherBug, they may have just gotten themselves one more customer...

Rumor Blogs & First Amendment

Chatting with my brother recently, he mentioned something that I thought was relevant to our class, if a little late:

User-friendly Apple shows a blogger its ruthless core

What happens when your blog is so successful (and is all about leaking secrets) that a company wants to shut you down?

That's what happened to AppleInsider, a blog devoted to supplying consumers with rumors and gossip about the latest Apple product news. It was so accurate that even employees like my brother (well, a former employee) would follow it.

Well, Apple sued the blog because the accurate information had to come from sources disclosing trade secrets, but AppleInsider argued that it was its First Amendment rights to not disclose its sources. Apple won at first, but lost on the appeal, because

"The higher court ruled that there could be no distinction between 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' news when it came to the first amendment, and that bloggers were functionally identical to journalists within the context of California law."

Still, Apple kept going after the blog, saying that it violated the Uniform Trade Secrets Act by asking for "insider tips", so the court finally arranged a compromise: None of the sources had to reveal themselves and the blog didn't have to pay Apple, but the blog had to shut down.

This brings up why blogs are valuable as another form of journalism today: "As AppleInsider's Kasper Jade commented: 'Letting corporate America dictate what bloggers and journalists can say or publish threatens to set a very ominous precedent.' ....The blogosphere is full of such people [as the blogger for AppleInsider], who sometimes publish stuff that is of public interest but which no mainstream outlet will touch."

We need different individual voices who write for themselves, not for a corporation, to counter the official voices.

When it comes to a blog whose sole purpose to provide rumors, though, I'm not sure that counts as journalism...what do you think? As my journalism professor has discussed, the purpose of journalism is to present a fair, balanced picture to the public and help them make sense of the information. A rumors blog, by its nature, is not about presenting a balanced picture, although I suppose it could by analyzing how true a rumor could be. I think a blog that debunks rumors might be more likely to be true journalism.

An interesting point is the contrast between blogs and Apple—blogs by their nature cater to users, and Apple is supposedly user-friendly but actually very harsh on its most fervent followers if they happen to leak information. I'm not surprised that Apple isn't as "nice" as it seems, because like Microsoft and other big corporations, they need to protect their bottom line.

So...to all those out there who want to start a rumors blog, be careful who you choose to talk about!

--Hana

Snow Day!

Hey, lookit me blogging twice in a row!

I just got home from my office. I drove 25 miles in white-knuckle, blizzard conditions, only to arrive and find that nobody was there.

Apparently, my boss decided last night to close the office today, because of the inclement weather. However, the way he chose to let me know this ... was by e-mailing my inter-office e-mail account.

Now, of course, I have no idea how to check that account from home. I gather it's possible, and involves logging into our company server and some other voodoo, but it's fairly cryptic to me.

When I got to work and found it abandoned, I called my boss. He told me that his standard procedure was to use his home computer to log into the office server, and pull up our contact database, which is where my contact info is stored. However, since our office had lost power last night, the server was off and he couldn't log in. So the only way he knew to reach me was through my office e-mail address.

But you know what? That's BS. This is the year 2008. His home computer had power, he had internet access, and there are a million other ways -- 'net-related or not -- that he could have located my contact info. Let's count off a few, shall we?

I'm in the phone book. That means he could have looked me up on whitepages.com.

It also means, even if he didn't have internet access, that he could have used 411 to get my number.

He could have googled my name -- one of the top few hits would probably have some mention of, or link to, my e-mail address.

(EDIT: Okay, maybe that one's not fair. I just googled myself -- a search for my name revealed a link to a website that I contribute to, and where I have an e-mail account that forwards to my regular one -- but that fact isn't easily discoverable from the main page. And a search for my name plus "e-mail" turned up my public Facebook profile, which could be used to send me a message -- but I understand that my boss might not think "Facebook" would be the ideal way to go in reaching me.)

Okay, google aside, there are other ways to find my home e-mail address. I've e-mailed my boss from that account before. He could have searched through his old messages to find it. (Sort by name and there I am!)

Also, my company gave me a cellphone for office use. I generally bring it with me to various courthouses and registry offices when I'm running errands and filing paperwork, so I can call the office if there are any problems -- and I tend to leave it off when I'm off-duty -- but my boss could have tried anyway! I just checked the phone, and I have no missed calls and no voicemail messages -- he didn't even bother to call.

"Well, if your cellphone number was in the unreachable contact database..." No. We all have office cellphones, and the phone numbers are arranged in a sequence (i.e. I have one number, an attorney has the next number up, my boss has the next one after that, etc etc). If my boss knows his own cellphone number, he could easily have doped out mine.

Heck, he could/should have it programmed into his cell.

Heck, while I'm at it, why don't they have my home number programmed into their cells? They call me at home often enough.


So -- yeah. Off the top of my head, I just rattled off about six legitimate ways that my boss could have tried to find a way to contact me. And I'm a little steamed that he didn't try ANY of them -- instead opting for the lazy way out, and using the inter-office system to tell me not to come to the office.

Can anyone else think of any ways I missed? How else can you use the internet, the phone company, or plain old common sense to find someone's contact information?

I guess I'm happy to have a snow day -- I'm swamped with finals, and can certainly use the extra time. But I really wish I hadn't had to slog through six inches of snow and drive fifty miles in terrible conditions just to discover it.

Bah.

Yuku for Cocoa Puffs

My favorite message board, where I spend an inordinate and possibly illegal amount of my workday, has just switched over from EZboard to yuku.

For those who don't know what those words mean, they're both simply formats of message boards. EZboard is in the process of converting all its communities to yuku format, and my little corner of the interweb finally succumbed this week.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. As I've mentioned in previous posts, I'm kind of internet-dumb and ludditey. I like my webpages simple, to the point and easy to understand -- excessive visual content confuses me, and excessive features frighten me. I don't want to have to *learn* how to use a given page -- I want to be able to just sit down and use it. And change ... oh sweet Jesus how I fear change.

So I've been poking around my new yuku-environment with some trepidation. Some things remain the same, which is good, but there's a whole host of new features, add-ons and alterations that just keep tripping me up. A friend of mine who runs an ezboard was told by an acquaintance that his newly-yukuized page looked "like it just got hijacked by a pack of wild Japanese teenage girls", and that's not totally inaccurate. The new board has much more visual information -- banner signatures, quick-reply boxes, colored kudos buttons, pop-up menus under people's usernames, and "silhouette avatars" for everyone that hasn't picked one. And tag lists. So many tag lists.

Remember what I said above about visual information?

I guess some of the stuff is potentially useful, but I find a lot of it unneccessary and cluttery. Do I really care how many "kudos" some user has gotten? No I do not. It's not even slightly relevant.

And I don't really see the need to have an expanded profile that resembles Facebook, right down to friend requests and movable feature boxes that include mapping your location via Google Maps.

And then there's the transition, in the Reply and New Post fields, from excodes to WYSIWYG text and html coding. (I guess it was fortunate timing that I just took this class, then!)

Oh well. Apparently yuku's been in beta testing for years, and their website happily supplies an ezboard/yuku comparison page to help n00bs figure out where all their old features went. And I'm not the biggest fan of tags (another web development that I still don't completely understand or trust), but I gather they're the way of the future -- so I suppose their inclusion here is for the best. And hey, cool, we're no longer limited to 20 pages of threads before they vanish into the ether. So it's not all bad.

But it says something that the "how do I adjust my yuku settings" thread on my favorite board is nine pages long in only three days.

I don't know. I'm figuring out how to use yuku, yes. I'm re-establishing my footing and re-learning how to do all the little things I used to do on the old board (inserting images, using smilies, quoting text,etc). But I'm not liking it. I'm not saying "wow, this yuku is fantastic and much better/easier/more fun than ezboard!" I'm tolerating the experience, and getting through the teask of posting -- in the same way that I'd tolerate and feel my way through using a foreign operating system on a friend's machine.

They may call themselves "message boards 2.0", but I'm just not seeing how the yuku format is an improvement. At the moment, it feels to me kind of like a small step backwards.

I guess I'll give it a few weeks.

Facebook as Community & Participatory Media (and its Psychodynamics)

I came across this article a while ago, and after the lecture on community & participatory media, I thought this was a great article about Facebook (as a way to test psychological theories and gather sociological data).

“We’re on the cusp of a new way of doing social science,” said Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard sociology professor who is also part of the research. “Our predecessors could only dream of the kind of data we now have.”

Facebook’s network of 58 million active users and its status as the sixth-most-trafficked Web site in the United States have made it an irresistible subject for many types of academic research.

Obviously, Facebook succeeded in being a useful community because it wasn't out to make profit in the beginning (and CEO Mark Zuckerman claims he still isn't, despite Microsoft winning the bid to place ads on it). Following what we studied in class, Facebook is a community that is useful because its purpose is simple and clear (social networking, info sharing in one place), isn't a marketing ploy, has easy barriers to entry (well, it is now; it started off as open to only Harvard undergrads, then to all college students, then to high schoolers, and now to everyone), and doesn't fragment discussions on message boards and walls.

It's also a natural place for Connectors and Mavens, and around May 2007, started to cater to the Salespeople as well, by allowing companies to place classified ads on its site.

Facebook also encouraged a talent pool, by allowing third-party developers to create their own applications for Facebook (I remember this being introduced in May 2007 also--adding much more to my time-suckage).

But, back to the article itself.

Because it's such a successful community site, (the clean user interface probably helps too--MySpace just looks amateurish, imho) no wonder social scientists are now flocking to study Facebook.

I think one of the more interesting points in the article is how it builds on real-world relationships, yet is still different enough from them:

An important finding, Ms. Ellison said, was that students who reported low satisfaction with life and low self-esteem, and who used Facebook intensively, accumulated a form of social capital linked to what sociologists call “weak ties.” A weak tie is a fellow classmate or someone you meet at a party, not a friend or family member. Weak ties are significant, scholars say, because they are likely to provide people with new perspectives and opportunities that they might not get from close friends and family. “With close friends and family we’ve already shared information,” Ms. Ellison said.

Ms. Ellison and her colleagues suggest the information gleaned from Facebook may be more accurate than personal information offered elsewhere online, such as chat room profiles, because Facebook is largely based in real-world relationships that originate in confined communities like campuses.

Mr. Sundar of Penn State agreed. “You cannot keep it fake for that long,” he said. “It’s not a Match.com. You don’t make an impression and then hook somebody.”

Of course, Facebook is only as interesting as you make it, or as interesting as your friends make it. I was pretty addicted to it up until this semester (when I got swamped with my 4 classes & work). I know people who don't really use it much (usually guys). For me, the attraction is definitely about community, especially when I moved across the country to study here. There is a truth to what Prof. Ellison said about "weak ties". It really does work better when you know those people in "confined communities like campuses" or maybe even offices, because it gives you a chance to turn those "weak ties" into strong ones.

--Hana

I Miss YouTube

Well, okay, I know YouTube's still alive and kicking -- but I miss the old YouTube. The classic YouTube where you could find enormous chunks of your favorite movies and TV shows, offered up en masse and commercial-free.

I know that's not a very PC opinion to have -- "I miss piracy" -- but I have to express it nonetheless. I used to use YouTube to catch up on shows I missed the night before, to check out shows I'd heard good things about, and even to socialize at work -- boning up on key scenes of shows I didn't watch, that everyone at work was yakking about.

I know, it's still piracy, and there are people out there who get very touchy about that sort of thing -- but think on this: watching YouTube clips has actually turned me on to shows and movies that I never would have watched otherwise! If not for YouTube, for example, I never would have gotten into "Rescue Me" -- and now all three DVD seasons ($40 a pop) sit happily on my shelves.

Now -- thanks to a shockingly clean sweep of the entire system in recent months, and extremely diligent policing of the clips that have been uploaded since then -- I've been reduced to watching home videos of total strangers and lousy "remix" music videos made by bored teenagers.

Not that the talking cats, angry German kid and "leave Britney alone" manwoman aren't entertaining -- but I have to say that I miss my Family Guy, Sopranos and The Shield clips...

(I note, however, that YouTube is still chock-full of commercials. Strangely, the commercial manufacturers don't seem to have a problem with people viewing their ads for free...) ;-)

Ah well. All good things must come to an end, I suppose, and I'll just have to find some other way to stay abreast of what's going on on TV. (I suppose I could try actually watching TV...)

Am I advocating piracy by expressing this opinion? Or am I just showing that I'm a hypocrite? I don't know. I'm against piracy as a concept -- but, all the same, I have to admit that I'm going to miss the manly sport of hunkering down at my desk and watching a grainy South Park clip at the lowest possible volume while keeping an ear out for my boss.

It was a good run while it lasted. Good night, funny site...

Commercial Convergence

Bart Feder was right to a degree – who does want to watch ads? Most of the time, most of us seek to avoid them and technology has kept pace with that desire - thank you, Tivo, and on-demand cable services. But is it really ads we’re trying to avoid or just the annoyance of interruption during that second plot point in the movie? Maybe it’s bad ads we want to avoid. Commercial advertisements have been known to create quite a buzz – think Superbowl spots and in particular, the Apple “1984” commercial. Clever, well produced advertisements can be just as compelling as other, longer film and video productions.

Firebrand apparently believes there is a market in commercials – not as filler but as the main course. Firebrand offers hip, slick ads and Public Service Announcements on it’s TV ‘show’ as well as its website. The emphasis is on world-wide so you won’t find Ernie Bock schilling cars but you can check out Japanese ads for Budweiser and Czech PSA’s advising slower speeds while driving. “Brand” is another selling point (sorry) for the site as well as category for watching ads. C-jays introduce commercials and the television component of the site is set up to encourage visiting the site. In fact, the TV screen actually mimics the site webpages, minus interactivity, of course - this year, anyway.

Short agency/director credits are superimposed over the end of each clip so we know who to praise or blame for the work.

What’s most interesting about the site/show is the very explicit effort being made to converge these media. Content is the same regardless of the technology used to view it. They even enable posting ads and PSA’s to blogs, though I didn’t see anything about compensation and you might have to register for that option.

Ads as entertainment. What will they think of next? Compulsory media literacy classes?

Help with Small Scale Streaming Video

Bart Feder’s presentation and our discussion last night had my mind racing about the challenges I have with video on my website at work. I have worked at a small center at Harvard the past few months as their publications/communications/web person. I inherited a website with tons of streaming video and have not been quite sure what to do with it. Very, very few people were viewing the videos, mostly likely because they were buried a dozen clicks deep on our website, among other problems. I actually took that part of the site down because I figured out none of the videos had been properly encoded in the past, and most users probably weren’t able to play them.

The professors at the center are eager to record all of the events we host and post the footage to the website. But if I keep relying on the established method of recording the video will have all of the bad qualities we discussed last night: static shots of hour-long plus panel discussions with bad audio and heads and raised hands blocking the camera at various times.

I have enough money in my budget to hire a student reporter or two this semester, and the plan was to have them write stories to fill our online newsletter. Last night, I started to think I should have them record interviews with the speakers we bring in and post short, more intimate videos instead of what was done before. My question, though, is who edits the videos? We don’t have the staff resources to do it. Do reporters edit their own videos in the new single reporter/cameraman world? And do any of you have recommendations for easy-to-use, inexpensive or free video editing software? I could give access to a Mac with iMovie. Will that do?

Your advice will be much appreciated. Streaming video is completely new to me.

Bacon love

I just had to share this:
http://msnalist.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E26821E70C2025D9!393.entry

Take that, Oatmeal!

Near Future Stories about the Web

Can we really predict how much the Web will change five years from now? New Yorker Staff Writer Ken Auletta asked a few notable icons of Internet culture wrestled this question at The New Yorker Conference/2012: Stories From The Near Future in May of 2007.

• Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post claims that the rise of citizen Journalists will make the profession more accountable, spelling an end to the use of anonymous sources. When the future is divided between the mainstream media and citizen journalists, transparency will become commonplace. Citizen journalists aren't as willing to sell their independence to gain access to a story. This will make fact-checking even more important. Is Huffington tacitly approving Robin Miller's prescription for saving the newspaper trade? You may recall his USC Annenberg article that we read earlier. According to Hufington, the hybrid future is already here.



• Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, imagines that many of the world's social problems may be improved through the advance of online social communities. Like Huffington, he agrees that truth has no hiding place on the Web. He even muses that we may see the Web allowing us a restoration of constitutional democracy



• Barry Diller, creator of Fox Broadcasting Company, tells us that we will all be much more comfortable doing business online. The Web's bandwidth will increase and e-commerce applications will improve, improving the usability of online transaction services.

In general, the interviewer canvasses his panel's views thouroughly. I found this episode the New Yorker Conference Podcast a bit difficult to sit through, however. The interviewees spend a lot of time cross-checking eachother's analysis of what may or may not happen five years from now.

New Yorker writer Larissa MacFarquhar uses a much simpler interviewing style than Auletta, one that is friendly to small-screen Podcast devices. Conducting the Solutions: 2012 episode for the same conference, MacFarquhar allows her panelists to express their views from start-to-finish. She asks a few leading questions during the interview and leaves out the panel discussions at the end. Her interviewing style is still deeply informative, but the narrative is simpler. This is well-suited to an audience that may be watching this podcast in transit, on a small video I-Pod screen.

We are beginning to see Apple TV drives available in stores. This may be a more appropriate venue for Auletta's more complex approach to interviewing. Perhaps Apple TV will take off, perhaps not. Until then, as the T sways and screeches along the curved tracks, I'll gravitate to the simpler interviews with more linear narratives.

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Since we're talking video

The link below is to a blog from the San Francisco Chronicle about a new video site started by a Harvard student. Thought it was interesting and relevant given this evening's discussion topic. Enjoy. - Molly

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogburst/display/tech_biztech?bbPostId=BCOY80rfAAAaB4PToPbQUxV1Cz3VOkiVa5tOpCzAq9e4lweJox&bbParentWidgetId=B93BjWpIdi4oz263LDlH74PW

The Holidays are Officially Over

I am so sad today. We are finally taking our Christmas tree down this afternoon. We've kept it up an extra week because my 4-year old can't bear to part with it. Truth is I understand how he feels. I love Christmas not for the gifts (although that's nice), but because it's the one time of year that I get to see my entire family and hear from all my friends. I love receiving Christmas cards and finding out how my friends from college are doing. Sometimes it's the only time we really get to communicate with each other outside email during the year. I truly enjoy Christmas Eve with my family and all of the traditions we've had since I was a little girl.

It's really hard to let go of the one last symbol of the holiday that sits in our living room "the tree". I will miss watching my son run out of his bedroom each morning to flip the switch to turn the tree on. He is still excited each morning to see the lights click on and he says how beautiful the tree is. It's hard to give up something that has brought so much happiness to our house and our family.

As I packed up each ornament today I took a trip down memory lane looking at ornaments that I made as a child to the ornaments that my great-grandparents gave my grandmother when she was a child. Each ornament has a special meaning and memory and I'm a little sad that I won't see them again for another year. I look forward to telling my son where each piece came from and how old it is and I hope that he treasures those memories as much as I have.

I'm not very sentimental about most things, but now that I have a child I appreciate the holidays in a whole new way. This year I'm a little sad to see it all end. - Molly

What would Ann Landers say?

About two months ago, a relative of mine suddenly got very sick. He somehow contracted brain menengitis, and between getting him to the hospital, seeing him through surgery, and caring for his kids, the resultant drama consumed my family for a few days.

In the aftermath, I wanted to thank a few family members for their help, and I wanted to send my relative and his family some get-well wishes. When I mentioned this to my mother, she said something to me that I found strange:

"Why don't you send them an e-card?"

Now, to me, an e-card is sort of a disposable thing. A quick, cutesy, animated greeting that you send to teenagers on their birthday or that you get from your aging grandmother who's still trying to master the internet and constantly sends everyone e-mail forwards full of old jokes and pictures of kittens. An e-card doesn't seem to be an appropriate thing to send during a serious or meaningful event.

But every other member of the family I ran this by also agreed. "Oh, yeah, just shoot them an e-card".

And then I started to wonder: am I old-fashioned?

It took me the longest time to switch from film to digital photos. I still struggle with accepting a cellphone into my daily life. I am, in many ways, definitely tech-leery and old-fashioned. But really -- e-cards aren't cheesy anymore? Did I miss another sea-change of the digital world altering what people consider appropriate, or am I the only sane person left in a world of folks who turn to the internet first for the solution to everything?

The way I see it -- it takes time and effort to send a real, paper card. You go to the store, you pick out just the right one, you write in it, you mail it. You spend a little money and the recipient has an actual paper item they can cherish forever. E-cards, on the other hand, can be done with a few clicks on your laptop while you sit in your living room eating cheez-its, they don't cost you a penny, and they vanish after a month or so.

If you went through a big life event -- a graduation, a marriage, a child, a death in the family -- would you be happy if a relative sent you an e-card? Or would you feel a little slighted, like your loved ones couldn't be bothered to put down the cheez-its and leave the house?

I don't know. What do you folks think? Are e-cards now an acceptable method of sending congratulations/celebrations/condolensces? Or should they be reserved for lighthearted, casual greetings and unimportant, silly occasions? I've heard my family's opinion -- now I'm curious to hear the thoughts of my peers.

-Jeph

(Since it seems no post here is complete without a link, here's the site I generally use for e-cards: Blue Mountain .)

(Oh, and as a P.S.: my relative is more or less fine now. He's got a shunt in his brain to deal with residual excess fluid buildup, but he's home from the hospital and his kids are delighted to have him back. So no need to send him any e-cards...) :p

Everything is Miscellaneous

The history of organizing information provides the fodder for the first few chapters of David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous. The Dewey Decimal system, the Periodic Table and even the development of alphabetization are outlined and explored. It’s the chapter Social Knowing where he makes his most compelling case for the value of knowledge as not just the privilege of the elite or educated but a social act. He sings the praises of the social power of sites like zillow.com, blogs and, in particular, Wikipedia. Authority, and the "truth" it frequently uses to defend or engage its own interests, better watch its back, according to Weinberger.

“In a miscellaneous world, an Oz-like authority that speaks in a single voice with unshakeable confidence is a blowhard. Authority now comes from enabling us inescapably fallible creatures to explore the differences among us, together”, he writes.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the pre-eminent literary authority The New Yorker, takes a slightly different tone in the article “Know It All” by Stacy Schiff. A study done by the journal Nature comparing the errors in science articles in Wikipedia to those in the august Encyclopedia Britannica found, according to Weinberger, that “they are roughly equivalent” lending credibility to the new kid on the block. For Schiff, “ according to the survey, Wikipedia had four errors for every three of Britannica’s, a result that, oddly, was hailed as a triumph for the upstart.”

Reading the Social Knowing chapter alongside Schiff’s piece is edifying in that they compliment each other and underscore the often relative or interpretive nature of the “truth”. For Weinberger, the beauty of social knowing is that it “changes who does the knowing and how, more than it changes the what of knowledge”. Changes, corrections, multiple perspectives can be, and are, updated repeatedly, constantly on an interactive site like Wikipedia. Ironically, an editor’s note to the Schiff article was added at an undetermined date and could only, obviously, be added to its website and not the print publication.

Both author’s acknowledge that errors happen. Weinberger, in the Emersonian tradition of not fearing a little dirt, considers them to be a part of the work.

Online evolution of newspapers

Yet another article on how newspapers are adapting their models for online readers. There’s a quote that really struck me in light of our class material, though:

“I always used to say when I was web editor ‘we’ve got to tell stories in ways the paper cannot tell them.’ So a New York Times reporter, for instance, now is called upon to think about the story in terms of web elements, interactive graphics, video-storytelling, additional photography, perhaps putting more documents up and supporting the story”.

Doesn’t that sound like it’s straight out of the syllabus?

Blog Wars!

Ooooh! Looks like our friend Jane Roper over at babble.com is dueling online with Steve Almond over their kids, their blogs, and their pencils...Could get worse before it gets better....