Chicago Bloggers--come out wherever you are

If you can herd cats, you can organize bloggers, right?

Actually, this is a first attempt to gather Chicago area bloggers to meet and talk about our interests as bloggers. There are at least 125 folks waiting for someone to organize a weblogger group in Chicago, so I reserved a room at Columbia, and here is a call for any interested parties to show up and see where we go from there.

On either coast and even in the hinterlands, blogger organizations exist and provide social and professional kinds of help to bloggers. Chicago is writer's town, but so far, has had no "blogger central." I am looking for other people to help me organize a loosely coupled collective and web portal to connect Chicago Bloggers to other media, to training and workshops, and to other people.

If you are a blogger, please consider coming out for this meeting. If you are not a blogger yourself, can you print/post this poster and get it out where bloggers might see it?

There is no fee to attend the meetings, but as I am going to provide some refreshments, I will accept $2.00 donations from those who care to help out.

MSM types, students, literati, digerati, podcasters, novices, vloggers -- anyone who is interested in blogging and is located around Chicago is invited.

Here are the details and a link to RSVP if you decide to check it out:

Chicago Bloggers Group
Open to any interested bloggers (or potential bloggers)
Initial meeting
12/21/05
7-8 p.m
33 E. Congress 2nd floor Room 219
(Journalism Dept. Columbia College Chicago)

Details and RSVP at:
http://blog.meetup.com/351/boards/view/viewthread?thread=1584572chicagoblogs

Flow Volume 3, Issue 5

Whoa blogoteers, came across this site while reasearching something else, but I was pleased to see our own Sharon has a story in there. Go Sharon. Flow Volume 3, Issue 5

Scholar who blogged denied tenure at U of C. Was it the blog?

Daniel Drezner, an academic at U of C with a traditional record of publication and scholarship was denied tenure recently. This is an interesting discussion of the role, risks and rewards of blogging in academe, specifically in the tenure track.

It's not conclusive, as some tenure track bloggers got tenure while others were denied, but it raises questions about whether to blog, anonymous blogging, and the attitude of many universities toward the idea that faculty might be public intellectuals rather than one-track working drones.

I am going to pass it along to those on whose tenure committees I sit. However, none of tenurees is writing a blog that I know of.

I can see a day when traditional higher education institutions will experience declining enrollments analogous to the declining circulation in the newspaper business if there is a failure by these institutions to open up a bit and to adjust to the learning modalities of the ""pomo" generation.

ABC News: What Is Blogging?

ABC comes a bit late to the blogging "party" but at least they see it as a tool....ABC News: What Is Blogging?

Blogging Ethics

One of my email lists, the Association of Internet Researchers, just featured this post, with its useful links:

Regarding blog ethics, from the bloggers' perspective, there is a piece on CyberJournalist called "A Blogger's Code of Ethics":
http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/000215.php

Blog ethics was also a hot topic of debate on www.dailykos.com, a left-leaning political blog, early this year, and probably on other blogs as well.

>From a scholarly perspective, Andy Koh et al. recently posted a summary report of a survey they conducted on weblog ethics at: 
http://weblogethics.blogspot.com/2005/07/ethics-in-blogging-2005.html

And Fernanda Viegas has a recent article in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication on bloggers' expectations of privacy:
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/viegas.html

Posted by Susan.

Blogs and the art world.

INSIDE JoongAng Daily

editorsweblog.org: US: Newspapers connecting with young readers via blogs

This story is about newspapers and the use of blogs to attract new readers but the cool thing is that one of bloggers for the Daily Herald's Beep is Lisa Balde, one of my former students. She always was cool and ahead of the pack.editorsweblog.org: US: Newspapers connecting with young readers via blogs

Chicago Tribune | CBS blog will keep eye on its coverage

Chicago Tribune | CBS blog will keep eye on its coverage

Research on blogs and bloggers

Six Apart who created Movable Type and Gawker Media, two of the best-known names in blogs and blog aggregation commissioned a study of bloggers. The research is based on analysis of over 2 million Internet users and their browsing patterns. They sampled blogs widely to get a sample of big and small blogs to come up with a picture of blog users in 2005.

The cut to the chase points of the study include:

• 50 million U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005. That is roughly 30% of all U.S. Internet users and 1 in 6 of the total U.S. population


• Five hosting services for blogs each had more than 5 million unique visitors in that period, and four individual blogs had more than 1 million visitors each


• Of 400 of the biggest blogs observed, segmented by seven (nonexclusive) categories, political blogs were the most popular, followed by "hipster" lifestyle blogs, tech blogs and blogs authored by women


• Compared to the average Internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger and connect to the Web on high-speed connections


• Blog readers also visit nearly twice as many web pages as the Internet average, and they are much more likely to shop online

Coming on the heels of our presentation at the Retreat

A new study shows how important blogs have become in journalism, and thus how crucial they are in education in communication studies, including journalism. editorsweblog.org: US: 51% of journalists use blogs

Our live session on blogging went very well at the Faculty Retreat. The tech stuff all worked except we forgot to bring external speakers, but that part was kind of "fluff" anyway. I think our point that blogging is a process of communication that is here to stay, but is adapting to a variety of uses and disciplines came across clearly.

The blogoteers are planning their next engagement so look for news of that.

Foto(03).jpg

Foto(03).jpg
Originally uploaded by biverson.

The expectant crowd gathers...

Foto(02).jpg

Foto(02).jpg
Originally uploaded by biverson.

This is blogoteer Sharon

Geneva1.jpg

Foto(01).jpg
Originally uploaded by biverson.

Checking out our presentation room.

Links for BR segment of the presentation

I've posted the visuals to accompany my part of the presentation at: http://work.colum.edu/~briley/blogoteers.html

documentary:BLOG

This site about blogs has some interesting links. Dell now combs blogs for complaints and comments that are from individuals and forwards them to their service dept.

Blogroll

Many blogs feature a blogroll (a list of other blogs to read). We haven't got one of those, but I think it would be useful for us to tell you a bit about blogs we read. Here's a list of some I read regularly:

Kairosnews. This is the first blog I started reading regularly. It's what Barbara calls a professional knowledge blog or perhaps a filter blog for the Computers and Writing community. In this vein, see also The Valve and PrintCulture.

Academic-Gamers. While I contribute to this community blog occasionally, it serves as a place to discuss video games from a scholarly perspective. In this vein, see also WaterCoolerGames, GrandTextAuto, and Game Girl Advance.

My favorite blogs to read are scholarly endeavors that often cross the borders between public and private, regularly mixing the personal and theoretical. See Yellowdog, Working Blue, Thanks for not being a Zombie, Colin vs. Blog, CultureCat, and my own blog, The Digital Sextant.

Finally, there are plenty of blogs that are just fun. I like The Comics Curmudgeon quite a bit.

Barbara I

Barbara I
Originally uploaded by biverson.

Notice I could not leave cyberspace comfortably.

Brendan Riley

Brendan Riley
Originally uploaded by biverson.

We took notes on paper.

Russell Porter

Russell Porter
Originally uploaded by biverson.

We even met IRL (in real life.)

fish_drawing

fish_drawing
Originally uploaded by Digital Sextant.

Brendan blogged about this and we needed a image in our blog to liven up the look.

Blogs and photos

One of the best blogging tools is flickr.com which is a photo archiving, tagging and display site. You can upload or download photos from flickr. You can license your work with a range of licenses. By "tagging" work with a descriptive title, you can easily locate photos by topic. For example, at the bloggercon "BlogNashville" held in May 2005, everyone used "blognashville" to tag photos.

Brendan uses flickr to locate images when he needs them. Barbara has used flickr to find a photo to go with a news article. There are now flickr games, too, On the site, they say "Flickr evolved from a game, and is an excellent environment for creative playing. Let's play together!"

Flickr games can be adapted for any classes with a visual emphasis, from photography, poetry, film, advertising, etc.

UsageWatch.org: How many people publish, read or contribute to blogs? 2.0

Three of the blogoteers had a useful meeting in preparation for our presentation and talk at the retreat. I found this story which puts USA blogs at 8 million, but notes that ther are 11 million bloggers in South Korea. UsageWatch.org: How many people publish, read or contribute to blogs? 2.0

Blogswarm forms to oust Korean Soccer Coach

Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition) : Daily News in English About Korea: "Countless angry comments could be found at the bottom of news sites like Naver.com that brought the bitter news of Korea's defeat. The flood of nasty comments was so great that it was hard to access the homepages of either Bonfrere (www.bonfrere.co.kr) or KFA chairman Chung Mong-joon (www.mjchung.com).

Some members of the Red Devils, the fan club that has been a strong source of support for the squad since 2002, even went as far as to call for head-shaving ceremonies as a way of urging Bonfrere to go. Online groups such as at blog site Cyworld formed an online coalition calling for the resignation of the Dutch coach."

A 'Blogswarm' Stings Old Media Into Action | MediaChannel.org

A 'Blogswarm' Stings Old Media Into Action | MediaChannel.org

Time to check: Are you using the right blogging tool?

Here is something we will certainly mention and tell folks about. This article has the "jargon" definitions and the comparison chart of features and options is very helpful.
Time to check: Are you using the right blogging tool?

Beyond blogs?

This is really cool. These journalists set up a Wiki and used it to do a collaborative story on video journalists. I think you could use a blog in a similar fashion as a collective notepad, and then spin off a written summary document. Anyway, its cool.
video_journalists

A professor discusses academic blogging and his career.

Steven D. Krause%u2019s Official Blog %uFFFD Blog Archive %uFFFD What academic blogging means to me (and what it is likely to mean in the coming year or so%u2026)

Choosing a Blogging Package for Students

This looks like it might be useful to teachers. What do you all think?Choosing a Blogging Package for Students

Stigmergic systems - summary of theory

Stigmergy. I like it already. Kidding aside, its about collaboration. Stigmergic systems - summary of theory

Fafner awaits the blog maven.

Fafner awaits the blog maven.
Originally uploaded by biverson.

Casa Iverson. Summer office and blog central.

technology and the social � Blog Archive � Blogger Motivations: Power Pull and Positive Feedback

I haven't read the paper yet, but I will before we return from summer fun. The student who wrote it won a prize from the Internet Research group. technology and the social :Blog Archive: Blogger Motivations: Power Pull and Positive Feedback

The journalism department is moving, so I feel like I have no place to hang on campus. I am making the most of it, however, and here you can see my "Summer Office."

technology and the social:Blog Archive :What is a wiki good for? an explanation for teachers

Hi blogoteers. Here is an interesting blog entry about what wikis are good for. This blogger recently won an award for her research on blogs and college students. I will probably link to that too. technology and the social %uFFFD Blog Archive %uFFFD What is a wiki good for? an explanation for teachers

Collaborative Scholarship via blogs

The "Computers and Writing" community, a sub-set of Rhetoric/Composition scholarship, has a phalanx of active bloggers who are just finishing a "carnival" of blogging about a particular article. See some of the posts here, here, and here.

This seems to be a distinctly different activity than the one we're engaged in here--collaborative single-site authorship. Each author assumes others are reading some of the carnival but presumably no-one reads it all. Hmmm.

Ohmynews International Citizen Forum--Seoul, June 2005

What I did over the first part of my vacation and why I haven't been diligent about posting and adding to this group blog.

I will be in South Korea for a few days at a forum on "citizen journalism" so I will have lots to report back. If I can, I will post some photos via flickr.com. See you when I return.

american dialogues: student blogs

Sharon, and everyone,
Here is the way one teacher sets up to incorporate student blogs for a class. american dialogues: student blogs

But, look closely, and you will see that many of students did not blog, or if they blogged for awhile, they stopped.

Maybe a question for us academics is, how long do you have to blog in order to get a benefit from the activity?

Why Blogs Are Beating Out Ezines

Why Blogs Are Beating Out Ezines And Matter So Much to Your Platform: "We're no longer happy with passive activities. Maybe as a culture we've grown completely sick of sitting around doing nothing ... all those hours of reality TV? We've now begun to expect to participate in our entertainment, even when it comes to reading websites. So blogs -- which allow comments from readers -- are the perfect medium. "

Research

As I begin to think about our talk for the faculty retreat in August, I hope to do a little reading about blogs and blogging from a variety of fronts. Here's something I've been meaning to look at for a while: it's a peer-reviewed "book" on blogging:
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/

Does anyone have other suggestions for places to look?

Here is some rough work on a typology of blogs

Post from my other blog where I try and categorize blogs. It might be one thing to think about.

Welcome blogoteers.

We have added Brendan Riley from the English Department to our group. He has a slick looking blog called The Daily Sextant and he seems to fit with our group. Here is some biographical information about him:

I am a member of the English Department faculty at Columbia College Chicago. Columbia College provides a liberal arts-based education for students interested in careers in the performing and media arts. I teach Composition and New Media classes at Columbia, and look forward to participating in the Cultural Studies program.

I earned my PhD in English from the University of Florida in 2004, where I studied Film and Media Studies as well as Rhetoric and Composition. My research interests include: Rhetoric and Composition theory, particularly work in the sub-field of Computers & Writing; New Media studies; Grammatology (the study of the history of writing); and Film and Media Studies. My work has appeared in Kairos and Computers and Composition Online, among others. I also have some experience in programming web applications. For example, my web-based gradebook program is in use by several instructors in the English Department at the University of Florida.

Brendan our other blogoteers are Sharon Ross from the Television Department and Russell Porter, documentary filmaker and Columbia College Chicago teacher.