Storehouse shuttered in summer 2016, just a couple years after they launched, but the app and website introduced or made beautiful a few features that remain interesting now.
» about 400 wordsA comment in the University of Lincoln’s Audio Production course blog demonstrates the value of public blogging in academia:
I am looking forward to beginning this course in September and have been finding these blogs very useful in providing a guide as to what sort of things to expect during my first year. Keep up the good work!
Thanks to Joss Winn for the tip.
Philip Greenspun suggests small organizations use a blog for their website (ironically, not blogged): The Small Business Web circa 1994 In 1994, a small organization that wanted a Web site would hire a “Web designer” skilled in the exotic art of “HTML programming” to produce a static Web site, i.e., a cluster of linked pages […] » about 300 words
Finding a 2007 blog post about a condom and a cheeseburger made a friend ask if student blogs should be moved off-domain. My flippant answer was “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” His retort was simple and quick: “Tell that to the catholic church.” It stung. He had me, I was sure. It’s hard […] » about 300 words
Well, not the entire university, I guess, but a number of online publications use it. The newspaper is featured above, their CIO has a blog, and they’ve started a pilot with WPMU to offer blogging to everybody in the University. » about 100 words
The news about BuddyPress has fully shifted my attention from single-blog WordPress installs to multi-user, multi-blog installs.
WordPress mu is my platform of choice, but I was quite fond of Lyceum when I first learned of it a while ago. The big perceived advantage of Lyceum is that it uses a unified table structure for all blogs, rather than creating a new set of tables for each blog as WPmu does. I’m not so sure that’s important now, and WPmu’s scheme now looks a lot easier to partition onto multiple database servers, should traffic ever scale there. Still Lyceum is an interesting project, and their name and logo are great.
In an interview on NPR, The Diana Chronicles author Tina Brown says “Diana had represented feeling, and the end of the stiff upper lip,” but the Princess comes off sounding a bit like a harbinger of the Cluetrain. Yes it’s all about the Royals, the glamor, and her dramatic death ten years ago, but take […] » about 400 words
A <a href="http://xkcd.com/c77.html">comic from XKCD</a>: <blockquote>“I feel like I'm wasting my life on the internet. Let's walk around the world.” “Sounds good.” [panels showing the world's great beauty, a truly grand adventure] “And yet all I can think of is 'this will make for a great Livejournal entry.'”</blockquote> » about 100 words
| <a href="http://dcfischer.blogs.plymouth.edu/">Our CIO</a> is asking whether or not <a href="http://www.plymouth.edu/">Plymouth</a> should get <a href="http://blogs.plymouth.edu/">involved with blogs</a>. Not to be overly academic, but I think we should define our terms. Despite all the talk, “blogs” are a content agnostic technology being used to support all manner of online activities. <a href="http://dcfischer.blogs.plymouth.edu/2006/09/20/should-psu-host-blogs/">What you're really asking is instead</a>: what kind of content do we want to put online, and who do we want to let do it? » about 700 words
I’ve been citing pieces of branding consultant james Torio‘s master’s thesis for some time now. But because the thesis is long, and I want to cite a few small pieces, and those pieces aren’t directly URL addressable, I’m quoting them here. Clickable URLs are added, but everything else should be exactly as Torio wrote it. […] » about 1000 words
Nicholas Lemann, in a story on blogging and citizen journalism in the August 7 issue of The New Yorker: [N]ew media in their fresh youth [produce] a distinctive, hot-tempered rhetorical style. …transformative in their capabilities…a mass medium with a short lead time — cheap…and easily accessible to people of all classes and political inclinations. And […] » about 400 words
As noted here, I’m going to WordCamp in SFO in early August.
Matt describes it as a BarCamp-style event (where “’BarCamp-style’ is a code phrase for ‘last minute’”) with “a full day of both user and developer discussion.” I’m just going for the free t-shirt, of course, but I can imagine a number of folks will get a good value out of the sessions and discussions that will likely run, especially all the developer stuff.
Also, if you’ve got some suggestions about what else I should be doing in San Fran, leave a comment or contact me with any suggestions.
My buddy Cliff emailed me excited about the following quote he found on the Yahoo Finance message boards: Sun vs Dell All you need to know about Dell & Sun was predicted 8 months ago by some blogger in his parent’s basement. The draft ads are cool: http://spiralbound.net/2005/09/15/sun-talks-some-smack/ How come the big brokerage house analysts […] » about 100 words
I meant to post about this weeks ago, but HigherEd BlogCon has now come and gone. It had sections on teaching, libraries, CRM, and web development. (Aside: why must we call it “admissions, alumni relations, and communications & marketing” instead of the easier to swallow “CRM”?) The “events” are over, but everything is online, and […] » about 200 words
I’m not sure what to think of Richard Sambrook appearing to struggle to find a place for traditional journalism in the age of the internet, but the story’s worth a read.
David Weinberger […] talked about the crisis in US journalism with failing trust in the big news organisations. He pointed out that Google now provided a news service with just an algorithm where there used to be a newsroom of dozens of people — and suggested algorithms were probably more reliable than journalists anyway! So if information is commodotised, and the public can tell their own stories, what’s the role for the journalist? I came up with three things — verification (testing rumour and clearing fog), explanation (context and background) and analysis (a Google search won’t provide judgement). And journalists still have the resources to go places and uncover things that might otherwise remain hidden. Citizens can do all of those things, but not consistently, and with even less accountability than the media.
A friend revealed his reticence to blogging recently by explaining that he didn’t want to create a trail of work and opinions that could limit his future career choices. Fair point, perhaps. We’ve all heard stories of bloggers who’ve lost jobs as a result of the content of their posts. And if you believe the […] » about 300 words
Way back near the end of 2005, Lot 49 reported that the Federal Election Commission had basically ruled that bloggers are journalists:
The Federal Election Commission today issued an advisory opinion that finds the Fired Up network of blogs qualifies for the “press exemption” to federal campaign finance laws. The press exemption, as defined by Congress, is meant to assure “the unfettered right of the newspapers, TV networks, and other media to cover and comment on political campaigns.” The full ruling is available at the FEC site. A noteworthy passage: “…an entity otherwise eligible for the press exception would not lose its eligibility merely because of a lack of objectivity…” (emphasis added)
So, yeah, it’s double-edged, I mean that last line is basically the Fox News Channel exemption, but it also gives those bloggers who consider themselves citizen journalists a leg to stand on.
And the folks in that camp should be happy to have the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s help. As Donna Wentworth says, Bloggers: You Have a Right to Remain Vocal.
Note: these are my presentation notes for a brown bag discussion with library faculty and university IT staff today. This may become a series…[[pageindex]] More: my presentation slides and the Daily Show video. Introduction Public awareness of blogs seems to begin during the years of campaigning leading up to the 2004 election, but many people […] » about 1400 words
Cliff invited me to WordPress.com earlier this week and I’ve just gotten a chance to get things up and running over there. I’m planning (though plans are never certain) to move my link blogging (think “blinks”) over there and (perhaps) re-publish them here in some aggregated form. We’ll see how that works out over time. […] » about 100 words
James Torio has been working on his masters in marketing and took a strong look at blogs for his thesis.
I looked at how Blogs have impacted business and communication, how some Blogs create revenue, how some companies are using Blogs, how Blogs greatly boost the spread of information, how Blogs add richness to the media landscape, how Blogs work in the Long Tail, how some companies are tracking the Blogosphere and what the future of Blogging may be.
Via Blogging Pro
Wendy Seltzer alerts us to the Delaware Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Cahill v. Doe, a case that tested our rights to anonymity online, as well as the standard for judging defamation.
As it turns out, the court decided against the plaintiff, a city councilman, and protected the identity of “Proud Citizen,” who the councilman accused of posting defamatory remarks in an online forum. Further, it also decided that the context of the remarks “a chatroom filled with invective and personal opinion” are “not a source of facts or data upon which a reasonable person would rely.”
In short, as Seltzer points out, the ruling hold readers responsible for seeing materials in the context they’re presented in:
The standard empowers a wide range of bloggers’ speech. Because readers can use context to help them differentiate opinions from statements of fact, bloggers are freer to publish their choice of opinionated gossip or citizen journalism. And thanks to courts like Cahill and Dendrite, they can do so using pseudonyms or their real names.
[[pageindex]] About “Blogging” typically connotes short-form writing that needs little internal structure, but that’s no reason to cramp your style. As people start to explore WordPress‘s Pages feature, it seems likely that we’ll need a way to structure content within posts or pages sooner or later. That’s why I’m working on bsuite_innerindex. It’s a WordPress […] » about 300 words
WordPress‘s Pages open the door to using WP as a content management system. Unfortunately, Pages can’t be edited via XML-RPC blogging apps like Ecto. This might be a good thing, but I’m foolhardy enough to try working around it. Here’s how: Find a text editor you like and open up the wp-includes/functions-post.php file. in the […] » about 300 words
I talk a lot about the Google Economy here, and how that and other ideas are driving changing modes of communication. Today I learned of arXiv. Henry Farrell describes it at CrookedTimber: [I]t’s effectively replaced journal publication as the primary means for physicists to communicate with each other. Journal publication is still important – but […] » about 400 words