Category: Blogging

Today is the eighth birthday of J’s Notes. Yep, for eight straight years (on and off), J’s Notes has been a source of the nonsense I care about at the given moment. Maybe the anniversary will get me off my butt to update this thing more often. Maybe.

Tomorrow is the first WordCampRVA and it’s gonna be great.  What is WordCamp?

WordCamp is a conference type of event that focuses squarely on everything WordPress. Everyone from casual end users all the way up to core developers show up to these events. These events are usually highlighted by speeches or keynotes by various people.

A look at the schedule can give you a good look at what types of topics are going to be covered and it really is a bit of something for everyone.  Of note, not a whole lot of WordPress specific stuff.  I don’t know if that’s usual for WordCamps, but I like that: WordPress is what brings us together but does not define us.

I will be heading up a Journalism Blogging Panel that will discuss the use of WordPress and blogging by citizen journalists to cover news and happenings from neighborhoods to nationally.  The panel will include:

John Murden – godfather of community blogging (see Church Hill People’s News)

Ross Catrow

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– one of the hydra heads behind RVANews and RVABlogs

Jim Hoeft – EiC/Publisher/Head guy of perhaps the best political blog in Virginia, Bearing Drift

I’ll try and have a wrap-up not only of the panel but the day’s events after the weekend.  If you’re heading out, see you there.  If you’re intersted, there are a handful of ticket still available as of 10am so get them while the getting is good

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And kudos and thanks to Matt Walters for making this happen.  He put a lot of work into this and I’m sure he’ll be glad when it goes off awesomely.

Technorati has released its State Of The Blogosphere 2008 report.  Interesting to see is the map of US bloggers:

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TechCrunch also talks about Technorati’s numbers, in the report and not:

Technorati has indexed a total of 133 million blogs since 2002. In terms of how many are active, 7.5 million blogs have added a new post during the last four months, and 1.5 million have been updated during the last week.

J’s Notes: One in 1.5 Million!

A BIGresearch Simultaneous Media Survey says bloggers are typically younger white dudes who make less money but are smarter than those who don’t blog.

F.T. Rea at SLANTBlog makes a good point about the use of the word “ethical” in the blogosphere these days:

[T]he way the terms “ethical blogger” and “blogging ethics” are being used by bloggers to attack other bloggers they simply don’t like is not only getting quite tiresome, it is stretching the meaning out of the words.

Moreover, from what I’ve seen, the bloggers who are using this buzzword approach in their posts the most are the very ones who must know that any serious discussion of obnoxious behavior in the blogosphere — mostly meaning deliberate dishonesty and incivility — will shine a bad light on them.

Without speculating on who Terry’s talking about (though it’s probably the same people I’m thinking about), I must say I agree with him. The term “ethical blogging” is something people like to toss around but provide absolutely no meat to.

The more and more this goes on, the more people hop on the “ethics” bandwagon merely to use it as a weapon against people who have wronged them, the more I really start to feel that perhaps a code would be worthwhile, some written guidelines that show that people are willing to take themselves and their blogging seriously. Something that broadly defines what ethics in blogging truly is. Something that just says “I pledge to be good and others will be good to me”.

But there’s more to ethical blogging than trying to create a code and folks signing onto said code and interpreting it as they’d like.

I think readers know ethical blogging when they see it. I know when a blog hits me the wrong way, I know when one hits me the right way. There is a tone, there is a content, there is something about a site that speaks volumes without my really being able to put my finger on what exactly it is. You can pick up on these things and I think most readers do.

So if you’re going to talk ethics, be serious about it, because you’re not going to like what comes of the conversation if you aren’t.

Technorati’s reading some interesting numbers on blogging and Business Week dissects them:

The numbers here show around 15.5 million active blogs, or blogs that have been updated in the past 90 days. Hurst pointed out, and I agree, that this is a more key number. That’s why I asked Sifry for this data. It’s a very different number from the overall 70 million total blogs that Technorati ever reports tracking.

As well, the percentage of blogs that are active compared to the total number of blogs tracked by Technorati is declining, according to the data that Sifry sent.

It also seems that the percentage of English blogs that are regularly updated has dropped as well. Does this mean that blogging has reached its peak? Has the bubble burst?

Blogs broke the 15 million barrier around September/October of 2006. What else happened in the fall of 2006?

The Congressional elections.

Potential millions of blogs were created to cover the 2006 campaigns and when November came and went, so did the blogs. Yet they’re still out there, inactive and charted by Technorati.

The following chart shows the raw number of blog posts over time:

Again, 2006 as a whole seems to be the peak of blogging activity over the last couple of years. Post November 2006 there’s a dip, a new peak around the New Year, and then it drops again.

I think it’s way too soon to say the blogging bubble has burst. Yes sites like MySpace and Facebook are impacting how people interact with one another on the web, but events like elections impact how people use the web as well. 2008 will probably see blogs being updated in record numbers once again.

Larry Sanger, co founder of Wikipedia and creator of Citizendem, on the “Daily Me” and Philosopher Kings:

But we are now confronting a new politics of knowledge, with the rise of the Internet and particularly of the collaborative Web—the Blogosphere, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, and in short every website and type of aggregation that invites all comers to offer their knowledge and their opinions, and to rate content, products, places, and people. It is particularly the aggregation of public opinion that instituted this new politics of knowledge. In the 90s, lots of people posted essays on their personal home pages, put up fan websites, and otherwise “broadcasted themselves.” But what might have been merely vain and silly a decade ago is now, thanks to aggregation of various sorts, a contribution to an online mass movement. The collected content and ratings resulting from our individual efforts give us a sort of collective authority that we did not have ten years ago.

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As it turns out, our many Web 2.0 revolutionaries have been so thoroughly seized with the successes of strong collaboration that they are resistant to recognizing some hard truths. As wonderful as it might be that the hegemony of professionals over knowledge is lessening, there is a downside: our grasp of and respect for reliable information suffers. With the rejection of professionalism has come a widespread rejection of expertise—of the proper role in society of people who make it their life’s work to know stuff. This, I maintain, is not a positive development; but it is also not a necessary one. We can imagine a Web 2.0 with experts. We can imagine an Internet that is still egalitarian, but which is more open and welcoming to specialists. The new politics of knowledge that I advocate would place experts at the head of the table, but—unlike the old order—gives the general public a place at the table as well.

An interesting read. Mainly applicable to encyclopedia or reference sites, such as Wikipedia and Citizendem and a bit too much reliance on people’s willingness to listen to the “experts”. Anyone willing to sign onto such ideas tends to already follow them. Not that creating a system like this is flawed, it would allow a viable and reliable source to exist for those who do not pay attention and currently find things like Wikipedia or blogs to be the best source for information (no matter how flawed they may be).

The Guardian on the dangers of political blogging:

Political blogging has come of age. At least, that was the idea behind the BBC’s Newsnight screening of a report by a high-profile blogger who writes under the pseudonym Guido Fawkes. His film argued that blogs provided more acute and independent political analysis than traditional journalism, owing to the absence of an editor, proprietor or regulator. Theatrically insisting on being filmed in darkness to maintain his supposed anonymity, “Fawkes” debated his thesis with Michael White of this newspaper.

It was a catastrophic performance, mainly because the blogger required continual correction on points of fact. He thereby illustrated blogging’s central characteristic danger. It is a democratic medium, allowing anyone to participate in political debate without an intermediary, at little or no cost. But it is a direct and not deliberative form of democracy. You need no competence to join in.

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Blogs are providers not of news but of comment. This would be a good thing if blogs extended the range of available opinion in the public sphere. But they do not; paradoxically, they narrow it. This happens because blogs typically do not add to the available stock of commentary: they are purely parasitic on the stories and opinions that traditional media provide. If, say, Polly Toynbee or Nick Cohen did not exist, a significant part of the blogosphere (a grimly pretentious neologism) would have no purpose and nothing to react to.

The great innovation of web-based commentary is that readers may select minutely the material they are exposed to. The corollary is that they may filter out views they find uncongenial. This is a problem for a healthy democracy, which depends on a forum for competing views.

The Guardian article is incorrect when the author says that blogs narrow available public opinion. Quite the opposite, they broaden the availability of opinion. But it is our individual decisions as to what we expose ourselves to that limits the impact of those thoughts.

Welcome to the Daily Me. Cass Sunstein covers this thuroughly in his book Republic.com (previews available through Google Book Search) and evaluates the impact of echo effects in a blog post here:

Over 60 citizens were brought together to explore three of the most controversial issues of the day: affirmative action, an international treaty to control global warming, and civil unions for same-sex couples. People in Boulder deliberated with others from Boulder, and people from Colorado Springs deliberated with people from Colorado Springs. Thus people were generally sorted into groups of like-minded people. Citizens expressed their views in three ways: anonymously, before deliberation began; in small groups, which deliberated and tried to reach consensus; and anonymously, after deliberation concluded.

Our key question was this: What would be the effect of deliberation on people’s views? There were three major findings.

(1) Liberals in Boulder became distinctly more liberal on all three issues. Conservatives in Colorado Springs become distinctly more conservative on all three issues. The result of deliberation was to produce extremism — even though deliberation consisted merely of a brief (15 minute) exchange of facts and opinions!

(2) The division between liberals and conservatives became much more pronounced. Before deliberation, the median view, among Boulder groups, was not always so far apart from the median view among Colorado Springs groups. After deliberation, the division increased — by a lot.

(3) Deliberation much decreased diversity among liberals; it also much decreased diversity among conservatives. After deliberation, members of nearly all groups showed, in their post-deliberation statements, far more uniformity than they did before deliberation.

The ability of individuals to limit what they read and hear and expose themselves to limits the diversity of their opinions, as well as their ability to back up their statements with facts.

This also comes back to the idea of an enforceable Blogging Code of Conduct and whether or not community is a viable alternative to a written code. Any community can develop its own unwritten code. When talking about the code’s audience I mentioned how my friends and I have a level of civility that exists merely through our relationships, no matter what our opinions may be. One also exists among my brothers and myself, it does not need to be written or spoken, but there is an understanding as to what is acceptable among us and how we react as a group to outside forces. Both of these codes exist in groups that force me to confront and engage opinions that I may not agree with. But they also make me engage those in a civil manner.

Bring this out to blogging. There may be an unwritten code of ethics shared among the members of Raising Kaine, but that code is going to be entirely different than one that may form among the members of RVABlogs. Because the content of both is different and one is insular while the other makes people have to engage and confront opinions and topics they may not otherwise choose to deal with. And while RK may have a strong community, it is the RVABlogs community that goes farther in helping develop its members and creating a sense of doing more than just nodding in agreement and preaching to the choir.

So can a Blogging Code of Conduct exist in a form that is widely incorporated and evenly enforced? No. Too many people are openly insular in their blogging. They have the blogs they read, the blogs they comment on, their group of friends who they blog with, and that is their core. That core already has its own code, why would they want to agree to a larger standard that is enforced by or merely involved blogs they want nothing to do with?

In order for a Code to work you have to break people of the Daily Me mold (among any other number of habits) and it’s just not going to happen. The best one can hope for is to be a decent person on their own site and from there find a sense of community that shares your values. Essentially you’re creating a Daily Me but you have to be willing to allow that Me to be open to ideas and conversations and debates. You don’t have to be willing to change what you feel, you just have to be respectful of what others present you. And it is within that community of like-open-minded individuals that one will find their code.

Waldo Jaquith chimes in with some thoughts and people comment. Virginia’s starting to discuss this. Good.

TNL dissects the code here and makes some really good posts.