But I make no guarantees about how long it’ll last. I’m sitting in Rick Beach's DigiComp Pedagogy seminar, after having lectured on teaching with blogs for the first part of the session. We’re all talking Twitter now, and so I set an account up and installed the feed on the sidebar in spite of my previous objections.
Tweet tweet tweet. (Hi, Candyce! Whose name I’m probably mispelling!)
Clearing out stored links:
Good Copy, Bad Copy, which got boingboinged awhile back. I’ll be using it the next time I teach IP.
Dylan Hears a Who. When a musician recorded "Green Eggs and Ham" in the voice of vintage Bob Dylan and posted it online, the Grinch estate promptly replied: One fish, two fish, cease and desist.
London Review of Books piece on Disney's artistic limitations and personal practices of originality. Disney was not just an attention-hog but always irritable about the limitations of his own fakery: ‘Disney was continually, if mildly, irked because he could not draw Mickey or Donald or Pluto . . . Even more embarrassingly, he could not accurately duplicate the familiar “Walt Disney” signature that appeared as a trademark on all his products. As Mister Husband pointed out to me when he sent it, not only did the man sign everyone else’s hard work, he was signing with a signature he had asked a studio employee to redesign.
Remember that interview on women and blogs that I did a year ago and then forgot about? I was doing some vanity googling, and found the article in the Hindu Business Online and Domains Magazine. The latter wins for most misogynist title. Since when does representing half of anything count as ‘hogging’? Only when women do it, apparently.
The new journal Writing Technologies looks promising.
The Encyclopedia of Life aims to provide a free, public electronic page for each species of organism on Earth. There's some things to be said here about why this project should or shouldn't be rolled into other major digital encyclopedic projects like Wikipedia. Personally, I think a unified project has the most value.
QB discusses Doing Time, Doing Vipassana
Aaand a note-to-self to retrieve "Law Booksellers and Printers As Agents of Unchange" (2007) Cambridge Law Journal, vol 66, issue 2, p 389. Also Katharina de la Durantaye, "Origins of the Protection of Literary Authorship in Ancient Rome". Columbia Public Law Research Paper No. 07-139. Boston University International Law Journal, Spring 2007.
Chuck Olsen has uploaded the full version of his Blogumentary to Google Video and YouTube. Go take a look.
Chuck, Dan Gillmor, Rex Sorgatz, and I did a panel together a couple of years ago for the UMN New Media Center, and Chuck was smart and articulate. So is his documentary. Clancy and I have used it in a couple of blog workshops we did for faculty from around the university, and it always generates good discussion when I teach with it. If you’re an Internets Researcher, it’s worth an hour of your time.
Oh, the blessing and curse that is the "keep new" feature in Bloglines. It means that I’ve cluttered up that place with all sorts of good stuff, some of it a year old now. It’s all links that I meant to do something with or save for some wonderful future purpose, but never deployed. The end of the year compels me to clean some of it out, so I’m moving it over here where it can go safely into the archives of oblivion for future reference. (Am I the only one who still likes storing links in the same place I keep everything else instead of keeping them in deli.cio.us?)
New Media
Andrew Lih on How Wikipedia Ranks
danah boyd on making net neutrality relevant and writing community into being on social network sites
The blogging special issue of Reconstruction
Media from Johndan’s old blog: the Eames’ Information Machine and the original iPod launch video
Via Infocult: timeline of the Wikipedia/Britannica controversy, a history of FaceBook, the Foucault-Chomsky debates on YouTube, and frightening instructional AT&T videos.
Information Aesthetics spotlights email thread visualizations, blogosphere linkology, and treemaps
Clay Shirky argues that news of Wikipedia’s death is greatly exaggerated
Anne Galloway’s working bib on The Internet of Things
Fodder for Teaching Presentation Skills
Guy Kawasaki on the art of panels
Dean Dad’s interesting threads on grading group presentations and ">handling difficult classmates
Academic Whatnot
50 ways to take notes
Book History
From Old Books: images from, um, old books
Jill points out material aspects of the original publication of “Death of the Author”
Professionalization
Via Prolurker: The Academic Departments: Home Base for Doctoral Students and the Center of the Graduate Mission of the Institution and Thinking Beyond the Dissertation
AKMA on productively structuring argument in academic writing
Sherry on study breaks (I’d send this to new grad students if I were putting together a comprehensive advice file.)
Pop Culture
scribblingwoman rounds up Brokeback spoofs
The 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time, with linked video for each. (High ratio of Warner Brothers, of course.)
Just Beautiful
Aunt B: Breathe In, Breathe Out.
Regarding Lauren’s decision to remove her blogroll, prompted by Burningbird’s post on the issue: I’ve blogged for years, and maintain a lengthy blogroll. It fluctuates constantly because I keep it updated, and it does reflect what I’m actually reading at any given time. And yes, I still find new blogs through other blogrolls. They’re still an important blog paratext that contributes to the sociality of this whole endeavor we’re engaged in. It’ll be a poorer place if we pull them down.
Bitch Ph.D. makes another good point in Roxanne’s comments:
So I don’t agree with burningbird, and I think that it’s problematic, frankly, that people like you and Lauren are thinking of ditching your blogrolls. Because you guys are FAR more likely to link to sites that AREN’tT the big boys, and by removing your blogrolls, you’tre removing links to those other sites, and just knocking ’em further down the technorati and TTLB rankings. Now, I agree that technorati and TTLB aren’t great ways of ranking blogs; but the fact is, they exist. And *those guys* aren't going to stop doing what they’re doing. And in fact, I think that the constant “where are the women” thing has actually raised a lot of peopl’s consciousnesses. And now is not the time to give up.
Via Ernie the Attorney: Are group blogs partnerships? Quite possibly so, according to Professor Bainbridge.
And, passed on by the Very Alert Mister Boyfriend: The Weblog Question, which examines ownership of content in weblogs.
Clancy points to Kaye Trammell’s blog bibliography. Lois Scheidt at Bloomington also maintains an extensive one.
AKMA is live-blogging Blogwalk Chicago, complete with a Flickr stream. Looks like I’m missing out on all kinds of good stuff, including sightings of the elusive window wiki.
elearnspace links to an extensive list of knowledge management bloggers and the 5 best KM discussions. I'd add a lot of these to my blogroll, except that I've finally gotten to the point that I consider it unwieldy. 200-ish* links might be nearing a bit much, and I haven’t added everyone from Networked Rhets yet.
*What with the sidebar and then more stuff stashed over on Bloglines.
The UMN Institute for New Media Studies and the Internet Studies Center are cosponsoring a showing of Chuck Olsen’s Blogumentary on February 3. Chuck’s project promises to be more personal than PBS’s Media Matters: Welcome to the Blogosphere:
We live in an age where everyone is a mediamaker. Blogs empower us to tell our story, spout and debate our politics, and share ourselves with the rest of the world - or at least the 5 people who read our blog. What compels us to blog? How does it affect us, each other, our work, the mediascape, the world? Do bloggers have anything in common? Does the blogosphere have a life of it’s own, like the emergent behavior of an ant colony excited by the discovery of food?
Ton's announced that the next BlogWalk will be in Chicago. After reading about all the European BlogWalks, I'm mightily intrigued.
Jill notes that the term "blog" has been chosen as the top word of 2004 by Merriam-Webster, based on searches to its site. And Barclay Barrios posted a response to the news on the CCCC-Blog list:
For the longest time, those of us working on blogs had to have a
sentence that went something like "Blogs, short for 'weblogs,' are ..."
Well, no more. Coming off the enormous cultural moment of bloggers at
the political conventions, "blog" is now the word of the year. I think we can just write about blogs now.
My advisor pointed out that the most recent issue of ACM is devoted to blogging.