Tenth and Final Blog Post

Your final blog post is a place for you to reflect on several aspects of the course. Read "What Sort of Revolution" from The Economist and watch "Epic," a short video about Google taking over the world, for inspiration. More than anything, this post is a place for you to consider the broader framework of the class--what constitutes new media, how it's changing writing, how the visual is a part of that. Because this is your wrap up post, it should be longer than the others and really engage with a few key ideas that interest you. You might write about some of the following questions or ideas related to them:

-How has your sense of your own writing changed as you've traveled more extensively in the new media world? How does image/ visual argument fit into this perception?
-Consider the way new media blurs the line between text and image and writer and audience.
-What do you see for the future of new media? How will this affect your writing and writing in general?
-Consider your use of the blog in this class. How have your ideas about blogging changed during the semester? Why? Has blogging altered your sense of yourself as a writer? How?

Twitter: Making People Faster, Smarter, and More Efficient

Interesting article in the NY Times about Twitter and its uses. “Twitter reverses the notion of the group,” said Paul Saffo, the Silicon Valley futurist. “Instead of creating the group you want, you send it and the group self-assembles.” To read "Putting Twitter's World to Use" click here.

Interactivity and Advertising

Okay People, so here's the plan. Next week is interactive week. Tuesday we'll be discussing interactivity (specifically as it relates to advertising)--what it means, what it looks like, and how it works. We are doing this because new media is interactive. And that's what the course is about. And because we're having a video conference on Thursday with Barbarian Group COO Rick Webb.

Before you proceed any further, surf the Barbarian Group website so you have a sense of the space we're moving into. The portfolio page is especially entertaining.

Now then....

Read:

• "The Myth of Interactivity" by Len Manovich - located on Ctools>Resources>Interactive Advertising. Stick with it, read through to the last page. That's when the pay off comes in terms of ideas.
• The Barbarian Group on Interactive Advertising - read through the section called "Interactive Advertising Strategy 101" to get a sense of how the Barbarians define interactive and how they approach it with clients.
  
• The Future of Visual Storytelling is Interactive- read this account of a panel discussion on visual storytelling that featured the Barbarian Group's Rick Webb
• Skim the Barbarian Group's glossary on interactive advertising
  

Explore (and have fun) on these Interactive Barbarian Sites:
Subservient Chicken
Waking Up Hannah - Dove Soap Interactive Video
Samsung Interactive Films - anyfilms.net
Moodstream-Getty Images
Virgin Mobile Parental Enlightenment Kit

Another Interactive Video
The Secret Location - Interactive Ad/Video

Blog Post #9 is also due on Tuesday. It should address interactivity in some way. You might discuss how you define interactivity after doing the reading and exploring, as well as how the interactive advertising sites above appeal to buyers. In other words, how do they actually entice a person to buy or do something? And how does the interactive element of the site/piece play into that?

Becoming Screen Literate: video editing, mashups, and image creation

Thanks to Brett for sending along the link to this NY Times article about how screen culture has evolved. "Becoming Screen Literate" discusses the ease and prevalence of video editing tools, their link to textual literacy, and how this is playing out in popular culture.

Among other things, the article discusses mashups, (for those unfamiliar with mashups- check one out here and read about them on Wikipedia) explaining that, "the habits of the mashup are borrowed from textual literacy. You cut and paste words on a page. You quote verbatim from an expert. You paraphrase a lovely expression. You add a layer of detail found elsewhere. You borrow the structure from one work to use as your own. You move frames around as if they were phrases."

Editing video and sound from various sources to create a new whole with its own separate meaning strikes me as not unlike an enhanced podcast that borrows music and images from various sources and uses them to make meaning in conjunction with an original audio text. Better yet, if you're not fully satisfied with the images you find on the Web, you can alter and mash them up using photoshop to better suit your podcast.

According to the Times article, this image mashing "is how authors work. We dip into a finite set of established words, called a dictionary, and reassemble these found words into articles, novels and poems that no one has ever seen before. The joy is recombining them. Indeed it is a rare author who is forced to invent new words. Even the greatest writers do their magic primarily by rearranging formerly used, commonly shared ones. What we do now with words, we’ll soon do with images."

For Tuesday: Considering Images in an Enhanced Podcast

You've got some viewing to do. As you watch and listen to the following NY Times audio slideshows (also known as enhanced podcasts), pay attention to what pictures appear when, for how long, and how they interact with the text and sound.

For your viewing pleasure:
The Urban Taxidermist
The Baby Deliverer
A Sense of History

Ira Glass on Storytelling parts 1, 2, 3 and 4

Image Collections:

NY Public Library

Library of Congress

Bring images to class to insert into your podcast. (Consider using the image collections whose links are in the resources folder on Ctools.) Lauren Atkins will be on hand to answer tech questions.

More on the death of print journalism and Twitter as mindcasting

NYU Journalism Professor and New Media Analyst Jay Rosen gathers and summarizes all the big articles published this month on the future of journalism in "Rosen's Flying Seminar In the Future of News."

And there's another new media term for us to throw around--mindcasting. Apparently, Twitter has uses beyond digital narcissism. Good to hear. According to Rosen, Twitter "is a new way to conduct a real-time, multi-way dialogue with thousands of his colleagues and fellow netizens." Read the rest of the LA Times article/blog post here.

Musical Classrooms - class on Thursday 3/26

On Thursday, we'll meet in classroom 3010 in the School of Education. For a map of where that building is located, click here: http://www.umich.edu/~sites/info/seb/

Please allow plenty of time to find the room so we can start promptly at 2:40. We'll be talking about the use of sound and music in podcasts, and then you'll have time to work on your own project, apply what you learned Tuesday, and have your questions answered by me and my highly skilled technical assistants Rob and Ian.

Bring headphones.

The Digital Divide: Stark Contrast

In the course of 24 hours, these two stories were sent to me. They poignantly represent the digital divide.

The Liberian Analog Blogger has the ideas and desire to bring new media to his community but lacks adequate resources to do so. Thanks to BJ for the link. (image from AfriGadget)




These Colorado kindergartners have new media resources to help them learn to read at the tender age of five.













(image from The Citizen Telegram)

New Media Picks of the Week: More From the World of Sound

Blog Post #8 due on Thursday and bring music and sound files to work with in Garageband.

Podcasts to listen to and write on for Thursday:

Scared

The Kiss and the Dying- click the third image on the right in the top row

Lost in Translation (see ITunes U on Ctools)

For class, consider how the use of sound and music creates image, set mood, underscore story, and help organize the narrative. Pay attention to when the sound and music comes in and at what level, as well as when there is only voice playing on the audio track. And do the sound and music serve other purposes in the podcasts?


Other Optional Listening:

Theory of Everything: Cell Phones. This piece falls easily into the category of the project on which you're working. Interesting discussion of people's behavior when using cell phones.

Third Coast International Audio Festival. Podcasts from Chicago Public Radio's audio festival that are chosen from a broad field of submissions.

More Jonathan Goldstein. If his segment of the This American Life episode "Plan B" about the telemarketer captured your imagination, check out his myspace page: Wiretap. It's comedy. The Fed and Barney segment is especially hilarious. Goldstein uses phone conversations and sounds associated with phones to create audio narratives. The concept is simple yet effective, and the humor is dark. And we get to eavesdrop on the dialogue.

B-Side Radio Tamara Keith creates podcasts about her neighbors and other aspects of daily life.

Didn't Ask to Be Born

This episode of This American Life, especially act one, is worth a listen. Some great images, characters, reflection, and progression through time. A wrenching story without being melodramatic. Click here to listen.

Making a Podcast: Cringing at Your Own Voice

I am getting used to hearing my own voice. Strange, I know. I hear myself every day. But not through headphones. I don't scrutinize my pitch and inflection. I just use my voice to communicate. Once it's been recorded and is playing back to me via Quicktime, I can analyze just how nasal and oddly casual this voice, my voice, sounds. I have to face it. I don't sound remotely like Terry Gross. Is this what I sound like to everyone? Horrors.

Hopefully we only sound foreign and awful to ourselves. My theory is that the awfulness, the cringe factor of hearing your own voice, isn't about the actual quality of your voice. It's about the self-consciousness--that when we replay a voicemail or a sound file of ourselves it creates a disjuncture between past and present, consciousness and body. A version of ourselves from the past is talking to our current self in the present. We are hearing from ourselves outside of our own head. This is not normal.

I'll get over the disgust at the sound of my own voice. I have to for the podcast. I'm already growing mildly fond of the casualitis that marks my voice as I re-listen to my audio files. As I edit, I'll hear my voice for hours at a time. I'll slice it and dice it to achieve my desired effect. Maybe by the end of the process, I'll even adore the sound of my own voice. I'll be a voice narcissist. Maybe Terry Gross will begin to dream of sounding just like me. Maybe Ira Glass will be saying, "Hey, can we get that Delia DeCourcy on the show? Doesn't matter what the segment is. We just have to have that voice."

Lobsters and Journalistic Blogs

In her talk The Blogosphere: the Future of Journalism?, Fara Warner discussed the inevitability of blogging as the future of journalism. Web 2.0 is here to stay, and journalists and newspapers must find a way to make it work to their and their readers' advantage. But the business of journalism is crumbling. New business models are needed. Warner pointed to spot.us as an example of community funded journalism in which the people pay for the stories they want investigated and reported on. But what about the more pressing stories that can't wait for funding? What about the daily news? While I agree with Warner that the future of journalism is inevitably in the blogosphere, and there are some great benefits to that (see sites like scoop44 and palestra), what I wonder about most is the effect of decentralized reporting on the reader.

The same evening I heard Warner's talk, I read a New Yorker article on David Foster Wallace, the visionary American writer who ended his life in September. The tornado of Wallace's mind is apparent in his fiction and was no doubt hard to live with as his suicide confirmed. It seems Wallace experienced the world as a constant onslaught of sensory information and ideas. And this is how I feel about the Internet--specifically the news media on the Web. While Wallace was able to make meaning and even great fiction from the onslaught, I don't possess his genius. The mass of information on the Web and its ready availability is unlike anything society has experienced before. There are so many sources all reaching for our attention, sources that may or may not be accurate. Warner asked if her multi-media reporting was journalism and answered her own question with--the audience gets to decide. Which leads me to the question of media literacy. Will journalistic blogging produce smarter, more critical readers who possess or develop the skills to determine what is and isn't journalism? Perhaps. Maybe the question is moot. The people who read critically are the ones who would've anyway without the advent of journalistic blogging. And the readers who don't question the truthiness of what they read on the Internet don't question the validity of the reporting on Fox News either.

Foster-Wallace's remarks at Kenyon College's 2005 graduation ceremony seem applicable here. He told the audience that true freedom “means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” I have to wonder if blogging as the new form of journalism will leave us totally hosed as a society or in a better place? How good is America at choosing what to pay attention to? On the whole, we seem to pay attention to messages that are broadcast the most loudly and frequently. How truly free are we, according to Foster Wallace's definition, when we experience the narcotic effect of the blogosphere? And how do I avoid the drug-like state I experience after reading several blogs and news-media sites? After bouts of news surfing, I know I look like someone who has had a labotomy. I get sucked in and absorbed by the words on the screen. I click from a CNN story on a Brazilian supermodel who lost her limbs to a report on the Huffington Post about Obama's speech on health care to a local report on police violence. How critical am I of online journalism when I'm surfing headlines and first paragraphs?

I appreciate the immediacy of online news and the ready availability of almost anything on the Web. At the end of my daily Internet media tear, I thought of Foster-Wallace's essay "Consider the Lobster," which had come up during class discussion about Eammon Grennan's poem "Incident." I could Goggle the essay and read it from start to finish--the kind of prolonged, focused reading I prefer that doesn't involve hyperlinks or flashing advertisements. Perhaps my issue with journalism in the blogosphere isn't the amount of information out there, but the way in which I read it. And I can't entirely blame bloggers for my peripatetic reading habits.

Blogging Update

As discussed in class, there will be no formal blog prompts for the remainder of the semester, only posting deadlines and general topics to discuss. Posts should concern the ideas we're dealing with in class. We have done away with work groups, meaning you can reply to anyone's blog, but must make 2 comments within 48 hours of the post. Of course, feel free to respond to more than two of your peers' blogs.

For Tuesday, listen to "Plan B" on I Tunes U and analyze the structure (of the individual segments and the entire episode), language, sound, pacing, music, and implied argument of the show.

Langston Hughes Multimedia Jazz Event

I direct you to Darius' blog where he highlights an interesting multi-media jazz event: The Langston Hughes Project. (You'll recall Hughes was the author of the text for Sweet Flypaper of Life.) Tomorrow. 6pm. Michigan Union Ballroom. Check it out. For more detailed info about the project, click here, and watch a video by the project's music director.

The Digital Divide down south

"Five Days on the Digital Dirt Road" is a video exploration of the digital divide in rural North Carolina, featured on InternetforEveryone's site. The link between Internet access and economic growth/vitality is evident from these interviews, and yet some of these folks couldn't even afford to pay for high speed Internet if it was available.

Not only is it striking to me that people living near my former home of Durham can't get high speed Internet access (or any access at all), but that my own parents were in the same situation just a year ago. The only provider in their rural Virginia county supplied dial up service that was inconsistent at best. About a year ago, a massive cell tower was built in their mountain valley (an eyesore but at last I could get a cell signal when I visited) and my mother bought herself an air card, which uses a cell phone signal to provide access. Prior to that development, I had to drive the ten miles to town to do any work that required a high speed connection--not a big deal when you're on vacation. But it's not a viable scenario long term.

So if such a lack of Internet access exists in wealthy America, how significant is this lack in countries like China and Brazil, nations that have bustling urban metropolises and vast rural regions? And what does this lack of access look like for people in poor urban areas, where high-speed Internet might be available but not an economic possibility. Who will pay to bridge the digital divide? Is it a government's responsibility?

UM Lecture on Blogging - Extra Credit

On Wednesday, March 11 at 6pm, Howard R. Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism Fara Warner will deliver a lecture, "The Blogosphere: The Future of Journalism?" Location--the Hussey Room in the Michigan League. If you attend the lecture and write a substantive blog post about it, you will receive extra credit.

New Media Picks of the Week - The Kindle 2

I've been away from the new media maelstrom for a week and in that time, the Kindle 2 was introduced. This NY Times article about it lists all the wonderful features of the Kindle 2 and even made me interested in purchasing one--though I'm such a lover of the traditional book that such a purchase would feel like blasphemy. When I first heard about the Kindle, I immediately wondered about the death of the book, which according to many has been dying a slow death for years. But in actuality, the Kindle has the potential to help the book, albeit in e-form. But so what? Well, according to writer Roy Blount, Jr. in his NY Times op-ed piece "The Kindle Swindle," the Kindle is gypping writers out of their well-deserved audio rights. The Kindle can read books to its owner. With a CD audio book, the writer gets paid for that iteration of his/her work. Not so with the Kindle 2. This is problematic, but I'm choosing to see the growing popularity of the Kindle in a positive light. After all, as the NY Times article points out "in Technoland, nothing ever replaces anything. E-book readers won’t replace books. The iPhone won’t replace e-book readers. Everything just splinters. They will all thrive, serving their respective audiences." I'm inclined to agree with this assertion.

And as Dave Slusher points out in his blog Evil Genius Chronicles, Kindle reading is for books we don't want hard copies of. "I will not cease to buy paper copies of books, I’ll just refine the choices to the ones I know I want to keep continuing to own for a long time." The Kindle makes readers more deliberate in their choice of whether to read an electronic text or a hard copy text. Nothing wrong with that. The question then becomes for me, should I ever invest in a Kindle: what books would I read electronically? I can highlight and underline with a Kindle. So would I do my academic reading electronically but still curl up on the couch with a hard copy novel? Or am I so married to the pen and my love of scrawling marginalia that I would stick to hard copies for in-depth reading and leave my pleasure reading to the Kindle? Guess I'll have to experiment to figure out which form of reading is best accomplished with this adaptation of the book.

New Media Picks of the Week

"The Conversion" is a viral video produced by and starring our own Rob Magnesen. Let's help his video live up to its viral title. Give it a viewing--it's quite funny.

"Do We Need a New Internet" is a NY Times article about the future and (in)security of the Internet that I know some of you will find interesting. To be rather apocalyptic, we're much closer to the brink of a technological breakdown than I realized. Thanks to Andrew for the link.

"How to Make Sentences Clear and Concise" No, it's not especially new media, but this website does have some direct and simple suggestions for how to make your writing better, an important subject given your current project.

images by Guy Hoffman from The New York Times

Other people are typographically obsessed too

It's nice to know I'm not the only one who notices and ponders font choices.

Read about New Yorkers griping about subway fonts here.

See beautiful and amazing typefaces by Bodie and Fou here.

New Media Picks of the Week

This week we're focused on design issues including layout, color and typeface. How can text act as an image and influence the visual effect of any document? How does the arrangement of images on the page determine where the reader's eye lands? How does color influence a reader's experience of your content? Check out the links below as you consider these questions.

Typeface: the way the message is dressed

At The Visual Dictionary, you can explore words as pictures in the world.

This clip from the documentary Helvetica looks at the effect typeface has on us as readers and consumers.

In another clip from Helvetica. Designer Wim Crouwel takes about the purpose of typeface.

What font are you? Take this highly accurate quiz posted on the PBS website about the documentary Helvetica.


Color: more meaning than you think

Blog Solid (of interest to you hardcore bloggers) uses earth tones to connote their solidity. The tan on brown contrast is easy to read.

Sometimes less color is more visually effective. The black and white approach with hints of color that Diesel Jeans uses makes for a clean, eye- catching homepage.

This landscape company selected colors that pop and are slick, while also selecting hues that people associate with earth and water.


Layout: directing the gaze

Large type in the middle of the page can be an effective attention getter. It's quite clear who will be presenting at dConstruct, a conference on designing the social web.

Simplicity means focus as this director/cinematographer's website shows on his personal website.

This web designer uses a one page/ two column navigational approach. Not ideal for those of us who don't like to scroll, but easy for the eye to understand.

images from: Visualdictionary.net
http://plaza.ufl.edu/mmcadams/colorpages/images/color_wheel_full.gif
http://donhowardproductions.com/eye.JPG

Websites - the modern equivalent of the record?

As I consider the place of the web design project within the frame of this course, I can't help wondering whether writing and designing web pages is truly a new media act? If the word "new" is contextual and audience dependent when used in conjunction with the word "media," then web design isn't especially new. The members of the class have grown up with the Internet. Reading a web page is as normal to you as reading a book and is probably something you do with more frequency and ease than hard cover text reading. With that in mind, I revisited the various definitions of new media that we discussed in week two and began thinking more about the role of interactivity and multimedia in web pages. Are these the elements that make a website a new media text? According to my first Powerpoint presentation:


"Current new media texts draw attention to their materiality by mixing media (sound, image, video) and/or making the reader/viewer consider the materiality of the form as they read/experience. This seems directly linked to interactivity--the reader/viewer makes choices to navigate through the text and thus plays a role in constructing content."

So does the reader's role in determining his/her reading experience through self-navigation make a website a new media text? Please weigh in on these questions and let us know what will firmly place your website in the new media category.

New Media Picks of the Week - Poor Website Navigation

Today I discovered that there's a term for poor site navigation. According to Wikipedia:

Mystery meat navigation (also abbreviated MMN) is a term coined and popularized by author, web designer, and usability analyst Vincent Flanders to describe user interfaces (especially in websites) in which it is inordinately difficult for users to discern the destinations of navigational hyperlinks—or, in severe cases, even to determine where the hyperlinks are. The typical form of MMN is represented by menus composed of unrevealing icons that are replaced with explicative text only when the mouse cursor hovers over them.

This post is dedicated to providing examples of MMN. Here's what not to do on your website.

The Connext Project wants us to "see the music," but it's difficult to discern where we'll see it and what music we'll see because of the site design. The grid of links on the homepage also makes us think there's alot more content on the site than there actually is.

I'm assuming Leo Burnett is an advertising agency, though it's not entirely clear from their site, which uses Flash! Flash can be very visually exciting for the user/view, but on this site, the use of Flash interferes with clear and effective site navigation. And ironically, the tab at the bottom of the page that reads "Feeling Lost" provides a menu when you hover the mouse over it, though that menu disappears if you try to click on any of the items listed.

Texelate is the web site of a web designer, which I found surprising. The issue on this site is the number of menus. There's one at the top of the homepage, another on the right margin for the site's Blog and additional links in the center of the page. Admittedly, I prefer a left hand nav bar, probably because I'm left-handed. Regardless, the format and design of the homepage also made it difficult for me to decide where to start and what to read and to even clearly determine what serves this guy offered.

Blog Post #5: Best and Worst of the Web

This post will be due in a week (Tues., 2/10). For post #5, you will select two websites. One will be an example of stellar content, web architecture, and design and the other will be a poor example of the same three areas. Your post should analyze how content, architecture, and design are working (or are decidedly dysfunctional) in each site. You may choose to compare the sites you've chosen or write about them quite separately. Up to you. Specific details will be important to back up your analysis and to entice your blog readers to actually go check out these sites. I'm hoping to be thrilled by your best picks and disgusted by your worsts.

Image from: http://xpress101.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/my-hand.jpg

New Media Personal Ad

Beginning next week, you'll design and author a website. Any website worth a reader's time has an implicit argument: buy this brand of clothing, hire me/our company to work for you, join this organization, read more novels by said author, Keith Richards is the best guitarist alive, the disappearance of the horned toad in North Dakota is a travesty, etc. While these arguments have varying degrees of importance, they are, nonetheless, arguments. Your goal here is to find someone in the new media class with whom you can develop an interesting argument that you both care about.

To find a web design project partner, post a comment in response to this post in which you include:

• Your name
• (3-5) website topics of interest to you> these might be areas of interest, world/scientific/philosophical or artist problems, or even more practical concerns (creating a site for the bike co-op you just started).
• Skills you'll bring to the table (technical, visual, writing etc.)

We'll begin having project conferences next week.

Blog Post #4 - Experimenting with Visual Arguments

For this post, you're going to apply some of the ideas we've discussed with regard to text and image. Your goal is to create a visual argument that is accompanied by a limited amount of text (think Sweet Flypaper of Life--significantly more images than text). Hopefully, this exercise will get you to think and compose visually in a way that you haven't before.

1.) Decide on a political, economic, personal, cultural, or educational concern that you'd like to make a statement about. The more specific your concern, the more focused your argument will be. For example, guns are bad is a broad concern. Congress should pass legislation to require a thirty day waiting period in all states is more specific. But your statement certainly doesn't have to be that weighty.

2.) Collect and post a series of images on your blog that address your concern and make a clear statement about it.

3.) Consider the following as you assemble your visual argument:

• How many images to use, what order to put them in, how large/small each one should be.
• How each image relates to the one before and after it and to the argument as a whole.
  
• Where to put text--on top of an image (a la Perez Hilton), below/above each image, only with select images, only at the beginning?
• How the text you select expands, narrows, contradicts, or confuses the content of the picture.
• The color and font of the text used in your argument.
  

4.) Write a paragraph following your visual argument that explains the choices you made and difficulties you ran into. Consider referring to ideas from Berger and Rose as you do this.

Image from http://www.martinelkort.com/photographs/abstracts/Number4.jpg

New Media Picks of the Week

The Eye by Salvador Dali

This week my selections will, of course, focus on blogs. Most of my picks are highly visual in nature--meaning with a focus on images rather than text, since we're moving into a week centered on all things visual. What is your experience of these blogs whose content is almost entirely visual? What meaning do you make from them? Feel free to comment.

Ego Pimp includes large photographs with intense color, many of which tell a story.

Bottom of the Eye also has photos that take up the entire screen. This blog and the previous one get me wondering about the difference between a photo blog and an online photo gallery. Temporality seems an important consideration--posting nearly every day (blog) versus putting up examples of your best work (gallery).

Photo of the Day has a more photojournalistic bent. All the images are selected by editors of Photo District News, a publication for photography professionals. The layout of the images with captions beneath feels very newspapery.

365 portraits - The clean, simple visual delivery of the images on this blog let the pictures speak for themselves. We get only the subject's name and a picture title.

Blood Orphans Blog - Is it a real blog? Are they a real band? Read for yourself and decide. We could ask the same thing about any blog out there--right? Such is the anonymity of the Internet. Read far enough back in the posts and you might see an image of someone you recognize.

The Purpose of Your Blog

In class on Thursday, someone said something to the effect that "in real life" no one would read their new media blog (NMB). This statement implies that the blogs you're creating for class have less validity than a "real" blog--one that is generated out of your passion and interest in a topic (the latest developments in molecular physics, the video game Doom, Michelle Obama's wardrobe choices etc.). I think it's less a question of validity and more about purpose. While the content of your NWB is somewhat shaped by what I ask you to do for each post, the overall purpose of these blogs does not differ dramatically from "real" blogs: to create an online conversation about a topic with a community of interested individuals.

But the other underlying purpose of your NMB does make it a sort of strange endeavor, I admit. It is a display of learning that will be assessed. And this fact alters the act of writing--whether you're writing an essay, short story, or journal entry. It affects voice, choice of content, and your sense of your audience. But with regard to audience, at least you have the benefit of a built in readership, something a blog about the joys of kayaking might not have, at least immediately.

The question I'm left with is: would it be more effective for your learning process about blogs to have complete freedom over your blog posts rather having the blog serve as a kind of reading journal? Your comments are welcome.

I understand the weirdness of blogging as it's connected to this class. I do. This blog has a very specific purpose and readership. I'm sharing information and ideas with 19 students to extend the conversation that goes on in class. So, yes, my purpose and readership is a bit more narrow than Bug Girl's, but given the general reaction to her blog, I'm guessing you're all okay with that.

Blog Post #3 Categories of Blogs/ Evaluation

We're going to travel a little deeper into the blogosphere. If you'd like to get really lost, click here and go to Technorati (you will want to be familiar with what this site is about). But if you'd like to know what to do for Tuesday, read on. You're going to view and evaluate one blog from each of the following categories:

Politics/ News

Entertainment/Arts

Lifestyle- fashion, cooking, etc.

Science/Technology

To view your specific blog options, go to ctools>
Resources>the blogosphere and your place in it> Blog evaluation.

The point of this blog evaluation is for you to think more deeply about blogging conventions with regard to specific types of blogs and compare types within the blog genre. In your evaluation, you'll look at four blogs. Write on one blog from each category listed above that I have linked to in the Blog Evaluaton folder or use only 3 of my picks and bring in a 4th blog of your choice. Also feel free to make reference in your post to other blogs that fall into these categories. Questions to address in your evaluation are below:

• What seem to be the conventions of the blogs in each category? Are there any you can identify? For example, does the art blog present itself in a particular way? Use more images? Have a particular layout? Use text differently than a news blog?
• What do you notice about the similarities and differences in these blogs especially as they relate to the balance of image and text, use of color and font, layout/navigation, authorship/credibility?

• How does the argumentation differ from one blog category to the next? How are images used differently in those arguments?
  
• How do the comments on the blog contribute to the complexity of the blog's argument? Or detract from it?

Blog Post #2 - Evaluating Academic Blogs

For Thursday you'll write a post in which you evaluate three academic blogs. I've posted links to several blogs that I consider academic in the Resources/The Blogosphere and Your Place In it/Academic Blogs folder. Please be familiar with all the blogs, but you need only evaluate three of them in your post. Questions to consider in your blog post:

• How does each blog visually convey a sense of its purpose and tone?
• Does/how does the blogger establish credibility in his/her posts?
• What do you notice about the depth and complexity with which the blog explores ideas?
• How does the blog encourage visual thinking, if at all? Examine the use of images, hyperlinks, and video in this blog. How are these elements used? Is their use effective? Do they overwhelm, inform or highlight the text?
• Who is the intended readership? How can you tell?
• What do you notice about the comments made on this blog?
• How would you characterize the blogger's voice? What makes it interesting, boring, unique, or informed? Do the visual elements contribute to the voice? How?
• Feel free to compare the blogs, especially in terms of their "academicness."
  

Inauguration Week New Media

New Media Relevant Picks of the Week

In honor of the presidential inauguration, I want to highlight Barack Obama's use of new media. He periodically gives twitter updates--well, let's be real--his handlers give the updates. But they seem to be useful in giving us the impression that he's a man of the people who wants to remain connected to us. Obama has promised the American people a weekly presidential address on Youtube. Is this use of media significantly different from the presidential radio addresses of the past? Will more people hear/view Obama than past presidents? Feel free to comment on Obama's move away from traditional media.

You might also check out this BBC News blog post on how new media is being used by media outlets for the first time at an inauguration. The Center for Civic Media's blog, an MIT collaboration, also has an extensive list of participative new media inaugural opportunities. Sounds like reporters and citizens alike will be blogging, twittering, posting, photographing, and videoing their way through the event. It's a ground-breaking day on more than one front.

Why Would a Pro Write for HuffPo- I post this link in reference to our Huffington Post discussion last class. This professional writer explains why she writes for HuffPo for free. It's not just altruistic journalism....

A Vision of Students Today- This is another video by Kansas State University Professor Michael Wesch who created "The Machine is Us/ing Us. This video looks at students, their lifestyles, and technology today. I'm curious to hear comments on whether or not the video gets at issues relevant to the undergraduate experience at UM.

Digital Ethnography- Prof. Michael Wesch's blog and website which examine the use of technology in society from an anthropological angle.

Blog Post #1 - The Nature of Blog

The word "blog" is quite new to our language and serves as both a noun and a verb. Already it has other forms--blogginess, blogosphere. I attribute the word's vast use and evolution to the quick proliferation of blogs. As you will/have read, a new blog is created every minute. Astounding.


After reading Sullivan, watching "Your Brain on Blog," and reading "It's the links, stupid," you'll write your first blog post. You may feel like you're flying a little blind and this makes sense. For most of you, this is a new form of writing, a new genre. While you may have read blogs, you have not written one. It's a bit like me asking you to try your hand at writing a sonnet when you've only recently been introduced to that poetic form. So view this first post as an experiment. You're going to be thinking about what tone you want to strike, what your blogging persona is, how much depth you want to go into, how you'll convey your ideas -- text, image, hypertext, video etc. Blogging is inherently experimental because, as Sullivan points out, it's like writing out loud. The form is an incomplete one that I would equte to early stage drafting. Hopefully, your blog and your presentation of yourself as an academic thinker on it will evolve the more you blog. And now, time to be brave and jump off the blogging precipice.

Before writing your first blog, be sure to thoroughly read the blog post guidelines on Ctools in the Resources/The Blogosphere and Your Place in it folder.

Below are some questions to get you started on post #1. You may choose to use one or several of these questions to shape your first entry, but also feel free to take your own approach to discussing how you're thinking about academic blogging (as opposed to journalistic or personal blogging) and responding to Sullivan and the Economist article. You've got great latitude in this form. Don't hesistate to use it.

What assumptions about blogging did you bring to this course?

How are you currently thinking about your blog for this class in terms of purpose?

What concerns do you have about blogging?

How are you thinking about your academic blogging persona?

What idea or ideas from Sullivan were most illuminating? How and why? Anything you'd like to take issue with or expand on?

How is a blog a visual text? If we call it that, what does that term do to the way we as bloggers conceive of our text? (Think about the Sheehan reading--"Being Visual, Visual Beings.")

What questions do you have about the form, specifically as it pertains to academic blogging?

Image from: http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/

Get Your Google Reader Rolling

After reading your introductory emails, I've determined we have a pretty new media hungry group in this class. So as the semester chugs along, I'll post relevant online articles and blogs that might be of interest but aren't required reading. Some blogs you might want to subscribe to via RSS feed/ Google Reader, as you did with my blog. To do that, visit a given blog, click on the little orange RSS feed box (located on the Internet provider address bar or somewhere on the blog's homepage) and you're off to the races. Updates will magically appear on your Google Reader page. And if you're not sure how to use Google Reader, there are several youtube video tutorials. New media on a new media application.

image from http://www.nmenv.state.nm.us/

New Media Relevant Picks of the Week

Virginia Heffernan's new media blog for the NY Times: The Medium is of interest. This week's entry concerns interactivity and Jimmy Fallon. I had no idea Fallon was so new media (note my adjectival use of the term).

The Barbarian Group: This is the website of the new media marketing group with whom we'll be video conferencing later in the semester. Their site is quite meta in that it uses a few forms of new media within the site--a blog, a play on Wikipedia, etc. Check out their portfolio where a plethora of new media examples live.

For the journalists in the class (and anyone else interested in how news on the Internet became "participative", you'll want to read "Out of Print: The Death and Life of the American Newspaper" from The New Yorker.

Whopper Sacrifice: I have to admit that the Barbarians turned me on to this site. It's an interesting example of a company using two forms of new media marketing--online interactive advertising and social networking (Facebook). Genius and hip.