1. Seminar 9
The Blogosphere
Introduction to the Digital Liberal Arts
MDST 3703 / 7703
Fall 2010

2. Business
• Mid-terms graded and available
• Synthetic responses
– To repeat: Due on Thursday, comments to
colleagues on Friday
• Excellent responses this week . . .

3. Midterms
ESSAY A: Hypertext
Affordance : Intertextuality, open narrative, writerly text, freedom, mind modelling,
incompleteness
Implementations: varies with affordance; some implemented more than others
Unanticipated: social media, worlds; for HT theorists, it's all about text
ESSAY B: Fast Horses
Horse = Library
Fast horse = cars designed like horse-drawn carriages = use of library metaphor to
structure content
Examples: VOST to THL
Example of breaking away: use of cross-cutting categories to link content
ESSAY C: Contextual Mass
Quality vs. Quantity, Needs of a community, Selection and Organization, Diversity of
media . . . Not critical mass (or textual mass)
Mechanisms: organizational devices, e.g. categories, comparison tools, etc. -- anything
that connects items
VOTS does not have it, THL and Blake went both ways, Rossetti and WOD best examples

4. Review
• Last week we looked at Unsworth, Wesch, and
Shirky
– Two methods of classification available to digital
scholars
– Both are useful
• The we learned to use Delicious
– Tag based
– Illustrates Shirky’s ideas

5. Overview
• This week we turn to the Blogosphere
– One of the reasons that bookmarking software
emerged in the first place
• We want to know:
– What is the history of blogging?
– What is the nature of blogging?
– Is it useful for academic work?
– If so, how?

7. Was blogging new?

8. “Blogging was embraced in the late ’90s by the
masses but was preceded by isolated projects
spearheaded by visionary individuals. … The blog
interface is, perhaps, an invention but the act of
blogging itself is a combination of several trends in
early internet behavior. A blog is a discussion board
(USENET), a trading post (mod.ber), a newspaper
(Cleveland freenet), a journal (Open Diary), an
encyclopedia (travel-library.com) . . .”
Another open narrative …

9. History
• Word coined by John Barger 1997
– Web + Log = “blog”
• Began as hand made online diaries, “personal
home pages,” and lists of things
– Drudge Report
• Eventually blogging software emerged with fixed
certain features
– Radio UserLand, Blogger, Moveable Type, WordPress
– River of news, archives, blogrolls, RSS …
• Evolved into a platform for personal publishing
– And the “feed”

10. http://www.ikissyou.org/

12. 1997
News
aggregation

13. Distinctive Features
• Blurring of Public and Private, Formal and Informal
discourse
– Personal Broadcasting / Publishing
– Individual as “brand”
• The List as organizational framework
– No imposed document framework, just an unending
feed (hence RSS-able)
– A personal database of thoughts …
• Linking becomes overtly about personal
relationships
• Space over Time ….

14. Academic writing,
journalism
Letters, Diaries
Informal Formal
PrivatePublic
Non-fiction Genres

15. Blogs Academic writing
Journalism
Letters
Diaries
Prayers?
Informal Formal
PrivatePublic
Non-fiction Genres

16. What are the lexia of the blog?
How are they connected?

17. Internal and External Structure
• Internal
– Posts
– “River of news”
– Date, categories, tags
– Permalinks
• External
– Trackbacks  See Amanda French’s post
– Pingbacks  Updates sent to
– Technorati
– FOAF

18. Spatial Reach (Geography)
TimeDepth(History)
Western Tradition
The Web
The Space-time of Content

19. Can blogging replace the
academic essay?

20. PRESTIGE?

21. Academic blogs
• Amanda French (amandafrench.net)
• From the Hands of Quacks
(jaivirdi.wordpress.com)
• Grand Text Auto (grandtextauto.org)
• Savage Minds (savageminds.org)
• Leiter Reports
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2010/10/
most-significant-philosophers-of-science-of-the-
20th-century-the-results.html

22. Another search zone on the Web
• Delicious, Diigo  Bookmarks
• Digg, Reddit  Bookmarks with comments
• Technorati, Google Blogs, blogs.com 
BLOGS
• Google News and Scholar Other

23. • Set up Google Reader -- DONE
• Search for blogs on Google Blogs, Technorati,
and Blogs.com
– Look for Academic blogs relating to your areas
• Add useful blogs to Google Reader
– Use tags
– then see how they are they are tagged in Delicious
Exercise