Blogging

AKMA is making his book of sermons, Flesh and Bones, available as a .pdf file. If you want to buy it, the money from the book sales will benefit St. Luke's Church. I've got my Christmas shopping (for my family) done!

I'm going to follow in the footsteps of Liz and Alex by posting my tentative AoIR itinerary. I won't get to the conference until Friday night, so my Saturday schedule is as follows:

8:30: "Pornography and Ideology"

10:00: "Identity: linking identity, community, and belonging"

11:30: Keynote

2:00: I might need this time to meditate before my presentation, but if I go to a session, it will most likely be "Expanding the Boundaries: Methodological Issues in Doing Internet Research."

4:00 I'm presenting--in the "Blogging: authors and consequences II" session.

Sunday:

8:30: "Digital Divide: haves and have-nots?"

10:00: "e-Democracy: localism"

Hey, Anne and Andrew, what are your schedules like? Are we going to have a bloggers' night out? (Ugh, that sounds nerdy.)

Update: Looks like Anne's going elsewhere.

Today I got an email from Thierry Robin, who told me about his upcoming trip to Iraq. He says (this is from his blog, not the email):

:: I'm a freelance journalist and reporter and a member of the ABIR association. I feel concerned by the fate of Iraqi women and men since 1991, year of the first war conducted against the government of Saddam Hussein. Twelve years of embargo have followed and finally a much debated occupation. In October 2003, I will go on a trip to Iraq within the framework of a humanitarian action organized by ABIR, in company of three female members.

This experience is essential from a human point of view. It's also crucial for the various feelings and realities that I will try to "print" and reveal through my articles and photos. My favorite subject is the condition of women and girls in Iraq. I'm going to listen to their words, silences, claims and hopes. I will try to seize their glances, to catch a moment in the life of these women, of these girls in the turmoil of this war which does'nt finish. I'm going to meet them as if I were visiting the members of my own humane family. That's the main thing. It does not matter what these women will dare or be able to tell me, what they will reveal about their life or inner feelings. Try to decipher the language of the human heart in such a situation will give all the depth to this work, like a unique testimony of our time.

Should be interesting.

His blog mostly consists of book reviews--very nice! In an applied methods class I took, we had an "analysis of research study" assignment, in which we took a book-length study and analyzed the entire research design, including how well the choice of methods fit with the theoretical framework and research question, etc. One of the options was Spinuzzi's dissertation, which I chose. It's an excellent genre analysis and has been published by MIT Press.

Sheesh, I can't believe I'm just now finding this interview of sorts. Glenn Reynolds answers frequently asked questions from journalists so that he can refer them to his FAQJ; how convenient! One very interesting question:

Will the blog bubble burst?

Sure. But it'll be like most Internet bubbles: the real bubble is in attention. Napster got a lot of attention a couple of years ago. That bubble has "burst," but there's actually more filetrading going on now than there was then. It's just not on the cover of newsmagazines. Similarly, someone will soon announce that blogs are "over," but weblogging will continue at a higher rate than it's going on now. It will just have become part of normal life. We don't hear much about the "electric light revolution" anymore, but that doesn't mean we've all returned to candles.

A year ago, I wrote a paper for my Technical Communication as Cultural Practice class titled "Anarchy in Academe? A Cultural Analysis of Electronic Scholarly Publishing." After much hemming and hawing, I have finally decided to publish the paper online. Note: It's a big pdf file. The assignment for the final paper was to use cultural studies methodology to study mundane text (any text outside of "the canon," which means basically anything goes). Cultural studies methodology, in this class, entailed using Foucault, de Certeau, and Lyotard as a theoretical framework and asking questions about the cultural context surrounding our mundane text, including: How did conditions come to be this way? What's at stake in this issue? Who benefits from the status quo?

The New York Times has a story today that harks back to depublishing. Daniel Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee has been keeping a blog on California's recall election, and now the newspaper is starting to edit it before it goes live:

Many of the initial censorship accusations stemmed from an article published by The Bee's ombudsman, Tony Marcano, that implied that the new policy was a response to objections to Mr. Weintraub's blog raised by the Latino Caucus, a powerful group of Hispanic state legislators. But Mr. Marcano and other Bee editors have since sought to correct the record, saying the policy was not the result of political pressure, but a response to complaints from Bee news staff members who wanted similar editing procedures of the blog and regular print stories.

Mr. Marcano said he supported the decision, and neither he nor Mr. Weintraub said they agreed with critics who see the new rules as a muzzle.

"I think this is more of a logistical issue than a editing issue,'' Mr. Weintraub said. "I've written nearly 500 columns for The Bee; all of them have been edited, and I can count on one hand the number that have been changed in any substantial way. I expect the same to apply to my blog entries." He said his blog had been edited since about Sept. 10. "It might be slightly more difficult to be immediate and spontaneous, but the editors are committed to being available whenever I am ready to post."

The article suggests we take a look at Cyberjournalist, a resource and portal to journalists' blogs. They have an interesting artifact, the Bloggers' Code of Ethics, which doesn't address the depublishing debate at all.

Cross-posted at Kairosnews.

Today has been awesome so far! This morning was busy, but as I was getting ready to leave my apartment I listened to my Beach Boys CD. I got a few of those "10 Best" series CDs the other day at Best Buy when I went there for a flash drive. I got Beach Boys, Culture Club, Bonnie Tyler, and Blondie/Pat Benatar. I had a nice lunch of pho with Jennifer and Amy, and I also got this lovely compliment. Yippee!