Re: [-empyre-] subversive?

[Brandon Barr <barr@mail.rochester.edu>]

At 10:47 AM +0200 6/6/02, Jill Walker wrote:
> I find those automatic content management systems which are based on 
> users rating items or essays (slashdot, amazon), and on things like 
> the epinions.com "web of trust" where you say "i trust so and so's 
> reviews, so show them higher up on my screen, and show people she 
> trusts' reviews higher too" - um, I love it, and at the same time I 
> worry about the perception of objectivity that lies in the 
> automation of it all. If we had one big system with algorithms to 
> determine how peer-reviews and ratings push an article up in the 
> system, and others down, well, it might increase the gap between 
> rich and poor - ok, I'm shifting metaphors there aren't I. For 
> instance, after Blogdex (http://blogdex.media.mit.edu) started 
> indexing links from blogs and showing a list of today's 
> most-linked-to-sites the difference between the number of links the 
> most-linked-to-sites got and the sites that weren't that linked to 
> increased. People see that oh, that site got 30 links, so they look 
> at it, and link to it too, so now it has 31 links. I'm worried that 
> could happen with academic research too.

this is a great point.

blogdex also seems to support the journalism that blogging supposedly 
subverts.  most of its top 25 are now "traditional" media outlets, 
presumably because many blogs are linking to them to comment on them. 
then again, by making sometimes quotidian stories "famous," blogs 
still scoop broadcast media.  a month or so ago, an unfortunate 
picture of a lady golfer kissing a dildo-shaped trophy topped 
blogdex.   two weeks later, that pic appeared on saturday night 
live's "weekend update."

it's a dirty joke, but i got it before most by skimming blogdex.

I tend to avoid thinking of the strength of blogs as being "scooping" 
traditional media though.  for me, it is tha availability and 
flexibility of voices, as you suggest, Jill, both here and on your 
blog (yes, some of us follow both discussions!).  And it is the focus 
on process, instead of product:

At 9:19 PM +1000 6/6/02, Adrian Miles wrote:
> as brandon says they're more or less an online journal. for me they 
> are historically associated with graphic designers (and the blog A 
> list is largely a design community - is that right jill?) who keep 
> those nifty note books full of snippets - sketches, ideas, quotidian 
> dodads. that's how you use a blog. it's whre you 
> keep/put/do/sketch/note your web quotidian dodads. and by that i 
> don't mean you translate to the web your notepad but you use your 
> blog to annotate and write with and around your day to day use of 
> the network. a site you wnat to hang onto, then rather than bookmark 
> it you blog it, if only to mention it in passing as somewhere to 
> return to.

At 9:27 PM +1000 6/6/02, Adrian Miles wrote:
> absolutely :-) and this is how my honours students treat their 
> blogs. because it is public writing you have to be more articulate 
> than what you'd write on a post it note (for instance). this means 
> you have to make what you're thinking about reasonably clear and in 
> doing that you have to actually deal with what you're thinking 
> about. instead of just making an abstract aside that is 
> unintelligible in 3 weeks.

This dichotomy is essential.  blogs are public writing that present 
private thinking.

all writing does that.  but blogs do it,usually, in a less filtered 
but more mediated, self-aware way, no?  hence all the blogging about 
blogging, about the web, about the process of writing...

--
Brandon Barr
University of Rochester
http://brandonbarr.com