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November 28, 2006

Why Read Blogs?

These are my notes for a talk I gave Tuesday evening, November 28th, 2006, as the invited speaker in this year's Friends of the Special Collection Lecture Series at the University of Vermont. If you weren't able to attend the talk, feel free to browse through this (rather schematic) outline. If you were at the talk, you may wish to refer here for easy access to the many, many blogs and blogging concepts I discussed.

By the Numbers

The Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that by the end of 2004:

Technorati reports that by end of October 2006:

That's a lot of blogs!

The Parts of a Blog

blogparts.jpg

1 – The blog’s title
2 – Calendar of posts
3 – Archive of past posts
4 – Search this blog
5 – Categories of posts
6 – Recent posts
7 – Blogroll (a list of other, recommended blogs)
8 – Syndication icon
9 – Post title
10 – Post text
11 – “Permalink” (a permanent link) to that post
12 – Comments on that post
13 – E-mail this post to a friend

So Why Read Blogs?

Computers are good at generating automatically updated information, and blogs are wonderful ways to distribute that information. This blog post shows a program that automatically scanned the polling data in the 2006 elections and created graphs based on those results. The chart was updated every time a new set of polling numbers was released!

Blogs foster a sense of community. This is a blog post discussing a commenter on the blog who posted from his hospital room his final comment before passing away. He is memorialized on the blog by the blogger and by the community of other commenters who remember his contributions to the blog.

There is a nearly infinite number of special topic blogs, each of which can create a sense of community for readers interested in those topics. There are blogs about interracial adoption, knitting, math, gay people who play video games, community college administration... you name it!

Blogs allow readers to find their voice and to speak back to power. Many blogs allow and encourage readers to post comments on the various posts that the blogger publishes. These comments can then be read by the blogger and by everyone else who visits the blog. Commenters often respond to each other's comments, creating vibrant, self-sustaining conversations. Daily Kos also features "diaries," which allow readers to create their own mini-blogs housed on the main blog site. These diaries can be read by anyone who visits the site, and diary entries are often "promoted" to the main blog page. Since Daily Kos receives almost 400,000 visits each day, that's a lot of exposure possible for the site's readers/diarists!

Blogs allow people to publish their writings without paper, printing presses, or the price associated with them. Electronic Iraq, for instance collects the blog posts from people in Iraq and translates them into English so that people around the world can read their thoughts and observations. A post from "Mustafa" in the Ghazaliya district of Baghdad, for instance, says "We have been under mortar fire for two days. It is 10:50 p.m. now and we can hear heavy gunfire and an attack against mosques in the area. May God save us all from the injustice of aggressors." In situations where traditional print is impossible, electronic transmission and distribution can allow these stories to be read.

Blogging links instead of merely citing or referencing. A New York Times article from November 8th, "Blogs Take Lead in Reporting Polling Problems, With Supporting Evidence on YouTube," by Tom Zeller Jr. and Michael McElroy quotes a post on RedState, a blog about conservative politics that mentions a "massive meltdown in Pennsylvania" and "widespread reports of an electoral nightmare shaping up in Pennsylvania with certain types of electronic voting machines." The Times cites to RedState, but a blog (such as this one) would provide the direct link to the RedState post, thus allowing readers to read more if they so desire. (The Times article is now locked away behind the Times Select pay-per-view wall, and thus I have not linked to it. That bothers me.) This feature of linking avoids the problem that all academics have come up against: citations to materials we can't get our hands on. Linking provides not only access to material, but instant access to even the most obscure works. Finally, the blogging practice of citation accommodates multiple types of reading: readers who want only main ideas can read the posts on a blog, while readers interested in gaining a deeper knowledge of the issues being discussed can click through to the sources linked in the post, tracing the online discussion as far back as they want.

Blogs represent the features of a hybrid form of newspapers and cable television news channels. Newspapers spread multiple articles across the printed page, allowing readers to skim across many articles at the same time. Readers thus have choices about which articles they read, and in what order. Blogs, by presenting multiple posts on the main page, also allow readers to skim down the page to pick and choose what posts to read and in what order. At the same time, print newspapers are generated at one time during the day, and must condense the previous day's events into each issue. Cable news, on the other hand, offers viewers 24/7 multimedia reportage and infotainment. In this, cable news is much like blogs. Blogs (especially political and news/current event blogs) are updated constantly with new posts. While the local newspaper you read this morning will not be able to tell you much about a bank robbery that occurred that afternoon, the news networks and the blogs can and will. This is why the New York Times reported that:

Blogs of all political stripes spent most of yesterday detailing reports of voting machine malfunctions and ballot shortages, effectively becoming an online national clearinghouse of the polling problems that still face the election system.

And in a new twist this year, many bloggers buttressed their accounts of electoral shenanigans with links to videos posted on the video Web site YouTube. [. . .]

That the blog now has a firm place in the choreography of national events -- and in elections perhaps more so than in any other cultural exercise -- is a boon to the democratic process, said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance at Oxford University and a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

''In a lot of ways they're helping to set the agenda for the mainstream media in fast-moving events like this,'' Mr. Zittrain said. ''They just need to be able to produce enough that's credible quickly to give a lead.''

Alluding to some of the voter intimidation reports that unfolded on Election Day, he added, ''There's also a real difference between hearing about a call that tells someone they're not allowed to vote and actually hearing the call as if you are receiving it.''

Some bloggers placed what were said to be digital recordings of such calls online for the world to hear.

(Zeller Jr., Tom and Michael McElroy. "Blogs Take Lead in Reporting Polling Problems, With Supporting Evidence on YouTube." New York Times 8 November 2006. 11.)

Blogs also allow bloggers to express their individual "voices" as writers. While network news is famous for presenting "news personalities" whose images and speaking accents are carefully moderated to appeal to the maximum number of viewers by diminishing quirky features that may alienate viewers, blogs flourish through the cultivation of writerly voice and persona in writing. Blogs such as Pops' Bucket, Center of Gravitas, and GayGamer present their readers with unique perspectives told in idiosyncratic ways. The readers of these blogs get a sense that there is a real live human being at the other end of the blog-link, instead of an over-processed mass-produced talking head.

Finally, blogging has also been adopted by the academy, with a host of benefits to academicians and their blog readers. On his blog Unit Structures, Fred Stutzman eloquently explains the benefits of academic blogging: "Blogs help researchers find one another," "Blogs can be a place to share research," "Blogs make academics better writers," "Blogs leverage the community's wisdom," "Blogs are great places to share accomplishments," and "Thinking aloud is valuable." For the reader of an academic blog, the ability to engage in high-level discussions of various topics and the insight academic blogging can give into the thought process of academics can be fascinating.

A Very Brief “Blogroll” (a list of other, recommended blogs)

Academic Blogs:

Political Blogs:
From the Left:

From the Right:

Humorous Blogs

Technology & Culture Blogs

Blogs about Life, the Universe, and Family

How Do I Find Blogs to Read?

The good news is that the easiest way to find a blog you like reading is through other blogs you like reading. The bad news is that this means that you have to find blogs you like reading before they can lead you to others. The list above is intended to be a starting place. Poke through these blogs, and if you like what you see, look through their blogrolls (also referred to as "links" lists, sometimes). See who those bloggers link to. Use the referral system of the blogroll to branch out to new blogs.

If none of these blogs is to your liking, try searching Google for "_______ blog" (where you delete the quotation marks and replace the underline with a topic that interests you). You might be surprised how many blogs there are out there on your favorite hobbies and interests!

Posted by reparent at November 28, 2006 4:06 PM

Comments

Thanks for the link! And for posting this; it's excellent.

Posted by: mj at November 28, 2006 7:14 PM

Richard, that was great tonight. I mentioned that I've established a blog that I've not really used much, yet: http://iclicker.blog.uvm.edu/

I hope to change that next semester, as we'll be using iClickers with the 400-500 students taking PSYC 001. It's been fun and interesting to use the little contraptions with PSYC 130 (ask my students about doing the clicker wave).

Looking forward to delving into your blog some more.

Best, LPR

Posted by: RudigerVT [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 28, 2006 10:22 PM

A category you omitted from your sample blogroll (above) includes blogs of scientists that often cover topics closely related to their professional interests. A few examples—with more in their blogrolls—are Not Even Wrong, Cosmic Variance, and Cosma Shalizi's Three-Toed Sloth. A longstanding "proto-weblog" is John Baez's This Week's Finds. The first post on TWF was in 1993.

A related topic is the increasing push towards open-access publishing of research. The Cornell (formerly LANL) preprint archive, arXiv.org, provided an early stimulus in this direction. More recently several members of the scientific research community have become activists pushing for independent publishing of research on the internet. See discussions by John Baez and in connection with this post by Peter Woit. This movement is backed by SPARC, a project of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL).

Posted by: Chris W. at November 29, 2006 9:07 PM

Sorry I missed your talk. Would have been there, but couldn't bring my 9-month-old, as he tends to make a lot of noise. I linked to your outline from my blog (and have recently added you to the blogroll).

I just had a little back and forth in the comments thread on one of my posts about how we still need simple, concrete answers to questions like "what is a blog?" It's easy to lose sight of the fact that they're still relatively new to lots of folks.

Thanks for posting the outline.

Posted by: cresmer at December 1, 2006 9:39 AM

I very much enjoyed your talk the other night.
One area that I was hoping you'd have more time to go into was the idea of reliability and sources in a world of opinion.

The idea of "peer reviewed" blogs was an interesting one to me.

Also, how would you propose to begin educating our young people (and not so young people) to evaluate all sources of information that they choose to utilize?

It seems that so much of the information that is available to us comes in the form of opinion (not just blogs, but talk radio, and even ABC TV Mock-u-mentaries) . The need for critical evaluation of sources seems more urgent than ever.

Thanks again for an informative evening.

Posted by: Alex Ball at December 1, 2006 4:36 PM

On the question of blog reliability, I confess I'm an avid reader of political blogs, which are probably high atop many people's list of suspect sources when it comes to crossing the line from fact to fiction, from reporting to opining.

For me, part of the beauty of political blogs is I can obtain a variety of perspectives from around the globe in a short time. The confluence of this multitude of thoughts, half-baked ideas, suggestions, and comments creates a melting pot of human consciousness that can raise fascinating new issues and resolve challenging new problems more efficiently than a supercomputer. I also find it invaluable to view the actions of the United States from the perspective of others.

Getting back to the question of reliability, each political blogger has an identifiable agenda, foibles, focus, expertise, and limited access to discrete types of raw data. All of these factors are internally consistent/predictable over time.

In the language of statistics, reliability means consistency. It does not imply validity. I find blogs to be quite reliable. This is due, at least in part, to the fact that I'm an informed consumer of blogs and of news media in general.

In the Information Age, it seems to me an important lesson for students, and for the rest of us, is to learn to critically evaluate all information sources: from peer-reviewed research papers, to corporate-owned media productions, to independent-minded blog posts. I don't find the New York Times to be more reliable than Eschaton, and I believe each has something valuable to contribute to intelligent contemporary discourse.

Posted by: coeurlion at December 2, 2006 6:44 PM

Hey, thanks for the shout-out. It's good to know that I have a ways to go before I will be an over-processed mass-produced talking head. I consider it a challenge to master that level of blandness.

Posted by: GayProf at December 7, 2006 3:56 PM