HW 17b: Influential Blogs

After reading the interviews with Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Ana Marie Cox in Blog!: How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture by David Kline and Dan Burstein I went and visited their blogs DailyKos (dailykos.com) and Wonkette (www.wonkette.com). As much information that DailyKos has, Wonkette has gossip. I think Wonkette would have more of an influence on how I vote in coming elections. I find Wonkette more interesting than DailyKos because she blogs with a voice, not just news stories or statistics. She blogs about things that are interesting and it is more of a relaxed feel to her writing. Recently there was a post about how Mitt Romney pretty much ignored a guy in a wheelchair who has muscular dystrophy when he asked “Would you arrest me and my doctors if I got medical marijuana prescribed to me?” Romney pretty much said that he doesn’t think medical marijuana should be legalized and went on shaking hands of other people. Completely ignoring what the guy had asked. This definitely influenced my vote; it kind of shows how ignorant he is about things. He spoke at my school last year and he shifted his answers to controversial questions like gay rights and abortion and he really didn’t answer the questions asked. Ana Marie Cox writes with a real voice. I enjoyed looking at Wonkette and I think I will continue to look at it in the future.

Lindsay

HW 16: Five Pillars of Convorsational Software

I read an interview with Robert Scoble called “Blogs: Humanizing the Face of Corporate America” in Blog!: How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture by David Kline and Dan Burstein. In this interview he talked about the 5 Pillars of Conversational Software. These are what Scoble thinks are the 5 things that made blogging hot. The first one is the ease of publishing. Anyone can go on the web, take 2 minutes to set up an account with whatever blog site they want to, and start writing about anything that comes to mind. The second one is discoverability. This is relating to how blog authors put tags on their posts to tell people what they are about, people can search for a subject, and certain tagged blogs will come up of that subject. Cross-site conversation is also one of the pillars. This is talking about how sites can link to each other if they blog about the same topics. Permalinking is the fourth pillar. Using permalinking you can put a URL to a certain blog post instead of your homepage and people don’t have to search through all your posts to find a specific one. The last pillar is syndication. Syndication helps you see a large number of sites on your own terms. I was a little confused on this pillar and I wasn’t sure what exactly it meant.

Lindsay

HW 14: Blogging... Copyrighting??

As a result of reading the Joi Ito Interview “Japanese Blogger Champions Internet Democracy” in Blog!: How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture by David Kline and Dan Burstein my view of blogging has changed a bit. For example, our last blog post had to be about whether blogs were better for business or communication, I chose business. However, I now see that communication is just as important. As an illustration, Ito says “You can do what you want but you’re in my living room, so be respectful because I have to take care of this place.” (Kline and Burstein 144) After all a blog really is your own space to choose what is said and what to throw out. In addition I liked how Ito talked about copyrighting things that people put on the blogs. Specifically when he said that you would be able to give some of the copyrights away if you wanted. Although it is true copyrighting is something that is still up in the air about blogs and is tough subject to pin on things like blogs. In conclusion I enjoyed Ito’s interview and agree with a lot of what he said and I am thinking of going to look at his blog!

Lindsay

HW 13: Business and the Blogosphere

After reading the chapter called “Blogs Will Change Your Business” by Stephen Baker and Heather Green in Blog!: How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture by David Kline and Dan Burstein I realized how important business blogs really are. There are so many business blogs emerging now and people are starting to look at them. Even so, sometimes the blogging world can hurt a business.

“There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, and others constitutional law. And yes many are plain silly. “Mommy tells me it may rain today. Oh Yucky Dee Doo,” says one April Posting. Let’s assume that 99.9% are equally off point. So what? That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.”

Businesses can make a blog to put the business out there more or even have a discussion board to make their customers happier with products or purchases. In one case GM’s Vice-Chairman Bob Lutz created a blog and car buffs started making suggestions and complaints to him on the blog. These people were car buffs because of the car business. This shows that blogs can attract certain people to joining them or maybe even being a customer at a certain place. On the other hand a Google programmer named Mark Jen had some issues:

“Google is regarded as a secretive company. So in January, when a young programmer named Mark Jen started blogging about his first days in the Googleplex, folks in the ‘sphere instantly linked to him. Jen certainly wasn’t dealing out inside dirt. But he griped that Google’s health plan was less generous than his former employer’s—Microsoft—and he argued, indignantly, that Google’s free food was an enticement for employees to work past dinner.”

Obviously he was fired because he was pretty much bashing his company. That sort of stuff should not be on a business blog… not good for business. At first glance teenagers might say that these blogs are boring and don’t really matter to them. But on closer inspection they do. How can you say that businesses don't matter? They produce the products you the consumer buy! And teenagers buy a lot of things! So, business blogs are good things and should stay.

Lindsay

HW 11: A Wonderful Global Blogger

After reading the interview “Making Global Voices Heard: An Interview with Rebecca MacKinnon” in Blog!: How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture by David Kline and Dan Burstein I visited one of the blogs that MacKinnon talked about. I visited the blog called Kenyan Pundit (www.kenyanpundit.com) It looks like a blog… well it has a picture of 3 vans on the side of the road at the top. I don’t really know what it is actually. The author is Ory Okolloh. She writes informally but very strong. There are a few different topics on this blog. They range from talking about jobs in Africa to talking about business to sort of a mommy blog. It isn’t focused on her little girl (who is cute as a button I might say) but she asks for advice on feeding and gives updates on milestones in her child's life, which is neat.

She still does criticize news stories but I don’t think I see it as much in her recent posts. She still is linking to other Kenyan Bloggers, a lot actually there are 39 Kenyan blogs and then lots more African blogs. It still corresponds to the reading though because she is still doing what she used to. I think now I even like it more because she has some of her personal life in there and I think it is good to show some personal touches in your blog.

However, does the evidence I’ve cited prove conclusively that Kenyan Pundit has stayed completely how it was before? No, I’m just saying that in my opinion I see her blog as the same with a few extra posts that are neat as well.

Lindsay

HW 9: To Post or Not To Post? That Is the Question.

This interview I read called “A Weblog Saved My Life Last Night” with Ayelet Waldman in Blog!: How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and media by David Kline and Dan Burstein was really neat. I actually went to her blog (bad-mother.blogspot.com) and read a few of the posts. She really had a lot of trouble in her life. I’m of two minds about what information Ayelet was putting on the internet. On one hand I agree that it is good for people to get their ideas out and even receive support from people on the internet sometimes. On the other hand putting suicidal thoughts or personal information about your family and your sex life is not ok. Some people like me, do not want to hear that. I understand that it helped her in the end to get better, but when I read her blog post that she talked about in the book it was scary. I also agree that there should be a place for women to meet other women that have had or are struggling with the same problems. It is very comforting sometimes to have another person that has something in common with you to talk to. I think that it was a good choice for her to stop blogging because all the stories she told online are the ones she could have wrote a novel about and made lots of money with.

Lindsay

HW 7: Should Parents Read Kids Stuff??

I really enjoyed the chapter “My So-Called Blog” by Emily Nussbaum in Blog!: How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture by David Kline and Dan Burstein. That said, I am kind of on the fence about the question if whether parents should monitor everything that their middle-school children write online or not. I think that parents should talk to their children about what is safe to put out there on the web, but they shouldn’t read the things they write in blogs or social networking service sites. I see a lot of things on Facebook that I wouldn’t want my parents seeing that are on some kids sites. In this chapter Emily Nussbaum writes about teens and how they feel empowered by writing in their blogs. She also talks about how the adolescent experiences are made public by using the internet:

A result of all this self-chronicling is that the private experience of adolescence – a period traditionally marked by seizures of self-consciousness and professional confessions wrapped in layers and hidden in a sock drawer – has been made public. (Kline and Burstein 351)

In other words Nussbaum is saying that in the days before the boom of computers and the internet young people would write in their diaries and hide them from the world. Nowadays things like Livejournal and Blurty are some people’s diaries. I think that is an important quote because you can really saw that happen in the past years, the transition to the digital age!

Lindsay

HW 5b: Young People Changing the Future?

Ahh, Kline and Burstein again. The chapter “I Blog Therefore I Am” in Blog!: How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture it talks about how the so called “old forms” of television and newspaper media are fading. There wasn’t much in the reading I disagreed with but one thing that jumped out at me is on the first page, page 237, where Kline claims that “the nation’s print and television media are going the way of the dinosaur.” I question this statement because I personally watch the news a lot. I also see a lot of students around campus either sitting around reading a newspaper or carrying one in their hand (which makes me assume that they are going to or already have read it.) Kline also emphasizes that it is young people that are changing those statistics about reading the paper. I sort of agree with this because you don’t see many elderly people searching the web… (well at least I don’t.)

Lindsay

HW 3: Politics and Blogs: Are They Really Effective?

Many people assume that politicians rely on the television and newspapers only for their two sources of media exposure, but as we “bloggers” know, they are wrong. In the chapter called “Toward a More Participatory Democracy” from David Kline and Dan Burstein’s Blog!: How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture it talks about how blogs affect politics when bloggers post certain things that may hurt or help a politicians campaign.

When I began reading this chapter I didn’t quite understand how blogs could affect things as big as the Presidential Election of 2004. As I read on I realized that blogs can play a big part in elections, but only if used correctly. The book said that Kerry’s e-mails were mostly about wanting money. This was not an effective thing to do using e-mail, obviously, because he is not our president right now. This chapter has opened my eyes to the effectiveness of blogging and the internet. So in conclusion people should be very conscious about what they are putting on the internet or their blogs for everyone to see.

Lindsay