In tweneyblog, Dylan Tweney runs with Peterme's distinction between media and forms:
Just to clarify the terms: A practice is something you do, probably requiring some training, a standard of professionalism, and code of ethics (journalism, medicine, or construction). A medium is a vehicle through which information is transmitted and displayed (broadcast television, HTTP/HTML, newspapers). And a form is a stylistic genre, a way of organizing and presenting information or stories (haiku, sonnets, novels, magazine stories, weblogs).
So far, there's not really a "practice" of blogging in any coherent sense, though I suppose one could emerge eventually. Peterme is right on that blogging is primarily a form.
But there is a sense in which the weblog is also a medium, and that's syndication. ... When people start using aggregators ... with integrated aggregator/weblog tools, such as Radio, they can post their own responses much more quickly. That creates a kind of "virtuous circle" of conversation, as Udell has noted.
Tweney thinks that we'll see syndication behaving more like a medium as we move further along the adoption curve.
categories: metablog radioactive
4:18:21 PM 
say what []
Quasistoic posted a long review of the panel from his perspective in the audience. He leaps to some subjective conclusions but he is up-front about that and strives for balance. He also reminds me that is old-hat for the people who WERE THERE when the word blog was coined or whatever is still virgin territory for a lot of unleashed minds:
Last night I attended that discussion panel on Weblogging, and I must say I was impressed. I was given a new angle from which to view welogging: as a possible journalistic tool. It isn't that I never thought of it before; I just never considered turning my weblog into something which I might someday consider journalism.
and
Dan Gillmor ... was speaking about the class on weblogging he teaches [in Hong Kong], and about how he "[reminds] them that they don't need publishers...they don't need permission."
Note to quasi, when Gillmore spoke about the "beast that demands feeding all the time" I think he was speaking not of weblogs but of the traditional daily or weekly periodical or corporate broadcast-media forms of journalism, which have deadlines and feel they can spare no resources on blogging.
Quasistoic captured some quotations that eluded me, again from Gillmor:
"I do link to people whose politics I feel are "off-the-wall" [not because they are off-the-wall, but] because they have really good weblogs. That's my criteria."and
"For some people the weblog is the greatest resume in history."
Quasi also liked J.D.'s contributions:
"The more a weblog reads like a newspaper article, the less interesting it is." He spent a lot of his conversation time advocating the use of weblogs by professional journalists as both an unregulated media outlet and a resource for investigative journalism. He also referred to weblogs as a sort of "quasijournalism" (good prefix choice), and he defined a journalist as "Anyone who is an eyewitness of events or an interpreter of events and who reports it as honestly and accurately as possible." I guess that makes me a journalist today.
Quasistoic found Rebecca's presentation to be off-putting. He took her to be saying that amateur bloggers shouldn't bother. This is so far opposed to the things she has written and said in her book, her essays, and on her weblog that I suppose it is all being inferred from her style of expressing herself in person. That's just my subjective take on someone else's subjective take on an event we all eyewitnessed. He's balanced, though, after accusing Blood of a lot of unflattering things, he allows:
I concede a couple things to Rebecca, though:
- She has been around a long time, so she knows her way around. It always is impressive to have been there since the beginning, wherever there is.
- I agree that "echo chambers" exist, and that they are sad to see. Many bloggers will only link to those people who have similar world views, which is why I'm always impressed by someone who "links out" to opposing viewpoints.
He notes that Meg was relatively reticent. I just realized today that the three "journalists" were men and the two "webloggers" were women, although of course all five are webloggers. Sorry, non sequitur. He relates also how Meg mentioned that her readers buy her gifts from her wishlist and Rebecca asked humorously how to get in on that.
From the audience at the time, I asked Meg the perennial question "Does it scale?" which is about as close as the conversation veered all night to subject of business model (outside the media business).
categories: metablog
10:46:10 AM say what []
My second-grade French is letting me down, but my note about some unknown RSS referrers hosted at UserLand got this response from Michel Dumais.
Heyyyy!!! It's a real pleasure to read you each day. A lot of good comments and suggestions. BTW, open to suggestions from your readers? How about a match between Movable Type and PMachine Pro?So permalien , huh? Does lien = link?
10:45:15 PM Permalien
And, sure, I am open to suggestions. Comparisons add value, for sure, but they take time. I do want to make sure I keep contributing and not simply collecting the work of other people, but the whole distributed no-boss collaborative thing is working for me right now, so I'll fit that in when I can. I have heard of pMachine a lot. I should ask Michel if he uses it.
I feel a little funny posting kudos to myself, though when it's posted on a blog it seems like fair game. (I assume email is not for publication unless the sender tells me otherwise.) Sincere praise and honest feedback is one form of compensation all writers like to receive from their readers.
categories: metablog
10:25:36 AM say what []
Scot Hacker posts at the birdhouse that he's "just finished titling and encoding Weblogs — Challenging Mass Media and Society in QuickTime format for our Darwin Streaming Server. Posted both Sorenson3 and MPEG-4 versions (but no modem-friendly version, sorry)."
9:44:08 AM say what []
She sings when she's nervous. She's really good and unaffected. Sang a little bit of "Groovin' on a Sunday Afternoon" to illustrate a point: She always heard one line as "You and me and Leslie... grooving etc." and talked about how that evoked an image of three people groooving or whatever. Years later in her car she realized the line is actually "You and me endlessly," which she said is a much inferior line, as it evokes almost no image at all.
She pointed out how an editor would prefer the endlessly line as it makes more "sense" and "because you haven't introduced this Leslie character properly." She also made a good point about the naysaying editorial voice that chokes off the flow too close to the spigot. She said, "You know when you're writing and a voice in your head says, 'This is stupid, I'm an idiot. Why am I doing this? I should quit, etc.'? If you were writing in a bar and some guy came in and said, 'Why are you doing that? That's stupid. You're an idiot.' etc., you'd immediately know that person was an ass, so why when the voice is in your head do you suddenly tread it like an authority?"
She reminded us that we are all storytellers and writers by birthright. She says the human race spent as much time developing storytelling as music and dance, as long as it took to develop opposable thumbs, she said. It's only "the man" (one of her favorite expressions) who tells us to leave creativity to the professionals. She compared being creative to child's play and how it's one of the ways that we solve problems and understand things.
She talked about the power of memory. To write her latest book, 100 Demons she says she made a big stack of nouns on 3 x 5 cards and would just grab a card and promise herself she'd write a comic panel page about whatever each word evoked. She wrote it all with a brush because she says her computer makes it too easy to delete things.
She used the example of cars. Think about a specific car from your life. Now imagine where it is. Where are you? In the car? Outside it? Can you describe the car? Who else is around? What time of day is it? What time of year? What's happening? Stories come to mind easily when brought up attached to details. She gave "couch" as another example.
She said her writing students, even when they are turned on to the power of memory and our innate storytelling ability, they still ask what they should write about or what they should do next. She said that this is in one sense a good question but in another sense it's a really bad question that really doesn't help you do anything. (I think it comes from fear.)
Her analogy was: suppose I gave the power to be invisible, and fly, and travel through time. Would you say, "I really can't think of anything to do with these powers"?
She said her brother used to wish he had a time machine that said Future, Past, and Meanwhile....
She pointed out that writing really is time travel. At the very least, I hope someone in the future reads something I wrote and understands what it was like for me to be alive in this time.
She said a lot more that was really inspiring. I wish I could study with her as a teacher because I think she'd be hugely encouraging, but she lives in Evanston, Ill. You can buy signed artwork from her for just $25, though.
Current Music: Faith/East Wind::Minutemen::Post-Mersh, Vol. 1: The Punch Line / What Makes a Man Start Fires? [bodega]
categories: x-pollen
9:23:42 AM say what []
a place to write, nothing fancy has two long thoughful entries about the panel dates Wednesday and Thursday of this week. I couldn't find permalinks, by the way, which are something the author discusses, on the issue of whether they are essential to the definition of a blog.
Rebecca said on the panel that they are not, and that may be so, but if the essential unit of a weblog is the post and not the page and if the linking between and among weblogs and other web resources is an essential act in the form, then I'd rate permalinks as fairly important elements in order to enable linking at the proper level of granularity.
As a longtime handcoder, Blood seems a bit wary of innovations that have become standard through the popularity of software tools. She mentioned on the panel that she doesn't have an RSS feed because making one by hand would be too much hassle.
Back to nothing fancy, here are a few quotations to give the flavor of each post (in chronological and not antichronological order). From Wednesday:
One of the panelists asked who would be blogging about this. Maybe ten people raised their hands. My assumption is that if you were there and you blog then you're going to blog about the panel. So that means sixty-five other people don't blog. And so here comes my often and firmly repeated contention: if you haven't blogged, over time, repeatedly, and interacted with other bloggers, then you don't know what a weblog is.
So it was interesting to me that the panel began with no definition of or introduction to weblogs. And you could tell later by the questions who knew, intimately, as a user, what a weblog is and who had no experience and so, basically, didn't really know what they are and how they work. In fact, a woman two seats away from me prefaced her question with, "I've never used a weblog, and I'm not really sure I've really seen one..." and then went on to try and talk or ask about how and if and why weblogs and their practioners could be a form of journalism.
...and from Thursday:
Sparked by the weblogs and journalism panel discussion the other night at the UCB School of Journalism: can a weblog have a limited life span? If it does, is it still a weblog?I agree with this last point. Openended and serialized does not imply infinite or immortal. I think blogs like most other things in nature are born, have a lifespan, and then die. Knowing how and when to stop blogging or to end a weblog is itself a skill.
...
I would argue that there is a place for weblogs with an intentionally limited life-span.
categories: metablog
9:14:14 AM say what []
