4 out of 5 Doctors Agree

That my other blog helps fortify your bones.

Not really, but with 74% of all statistics being made up on the spot you’ve no way of double checking my claim. I’ll have to come back to this blog later, but until then I’ll be updating that one more regularly since it’s linked to my Flickr account already and I’ll be posting pictures at least semi-regularly. Mostly frisbee pictures, but I’ll hopefully start finding more time to take pictures of other interesting things. If I’m ever feeling intellectual or anything I’ll be sure to head here, though so keep that RSS rolling.

Below is a picture I took at the park across the street from my house about five or six years ago when we got three inches of snow in a few hours.  I think that has to be one of my favorite memories of living in Irving.  I don’t know if I’d enjoy 20 inches of snow every year as much, but I certainly wouldn’t mind getting nice amounts of build up on a yearly basis.

 

Everything Nice?

ChicaDeaLeah argues that “Posting with Passion: Blogs and the Politics of Gender” by Melissa Gregg in  Uses of Blogs diminishes her to a statistical girly-girl blogger, but I think that it does the opposite.  I think what Gregg is arguing is that there is more of a balance and a method to the madness of female bloggers than they are given credit for, and even though there are certain stigmas that come with being a female blogger, there is more being done every day to do away with these stereotypes by bloggers from all different walks of life.  Just because you may like bunny rabbits, arguably one of the cutest animals found in nature, doesn’t mean you can’t be concerned with health or finance, or politics, you know, those “masculine” subjects.  It may seem the opposite, however, because there seems to be such segregation of genders online with certain websites being seen as a “no girls allowed” boy’s club, and others being a safe haven for women online.  I think a solution to this would be blurring the lines between the two kinds of blogs seen as male and female and instead ordering things by their category, not their author (thank you Mr. Foucault).  Who says that the guy sitting next to you on the bus doesn’t like bunny rabbits more than Leah?  I think this is what Gregg is really trying to get to, and I know Leah knows that there are important women bloggers and give the female author of the article a second read and a second chance.

 

Assignment: Assignment Zero

Wired and NewsAssignment.net’s  Assignment Zero(AZ) project set out to crowdsource  the definitive report on how crowdsourcing is turning  the way  businesses  are operating online on end, and I believe that it did just that.  Just as Rheingold sets out to find how smart mobs are(or might someday, anyway) revolutionizing our world, AZ came out a big proponent of the potential of the masses to collaborate efficiently enough to have a tremendous impact soon and for the rest of our lives, but came to find out that the mass mentality is, in fact, chock full of great ideas and potential for brilliance, but digging the brilliance up and turning it into something as tangible as nearly 100 pieces of high quality group-created journalism is a much harder task than tossing a group of children a ball in the middle of the field and watching them establish a structured game of soccer.

Like the children, the group involved started out kicking the ball around, excited with their new toy and seemingly having more kicks in them than could go around for the single ball, or articles as the case is in AZ.  As time progresses, however, the children grow weary of kicking a ball around without any foreseeable  end result.  So, too, did the amount of and intensity for collaborating begin to diminish as the children realize they want to play and keep score and be able to leave with a story of something they accomplished but that doesn’t seem to be on the agenda.  Eventually the AZ team found they needed to make changes from a completely open-ended structure full of anonymity to an operation that had teams and players reaching for goals and knowing a bit about who they are working with and where they are coming from with their side of the story.  Once the social networking aspects of AZ came about, individuals working on the same thing became a group and they started playing ball.

I think that just as some of the children in the pickup game of soccer may find they enjoy it and pursue the game further, so will some of the pro-am tandems and groups continue to create content and grow the area of crowdsourcing into something that may at some point be used by the majority of people connected to the web, and with the success that some projects, such as A Million Penguins show, crowdsourcing and the hive mind may one day become the most popular sport in the world.

I may be a cynic, but I hold out hope.

 

Football – free (from the preseason) at last!

Last night the Cowboys survived a shootout with the Giants and that inspired me to go back through the pictures I took when my little brother and I went to the opening preseason game against the Colts. I remembered hearing something about a bug being thrown on Tony Romo while he was being interviewed and found Awful Announcing’s take on Pam Oliver’s handling of this situation:

I came to realize that in my picture-taking I snapped a shot of Pam Oliver interviewing Tony Romo just as Romo was trying to get the bug off his uniform. Talk about coincidence… I mean…I totally meant to do that.
The part of the pictures I like best here is Roy Williams and Terrance Newman turned around laughing at Romo and his bug problem at the top of the frame.

 

J. David Bolter 2000… and 1

In 2001 David Bolter furthered his argument for hypermedia into the book Writing Space. In his blog, David Mueller comments on Bolter’s views of hypertext and remediation, saying that Space belongs in the upper echelon of writing in the growing world of computers along with the works of Hayles and Johnson, which from the titles of their work(Writing Machines and Interface Culture respectively) sounds important.

Bolter foregrounds much of the discussion of the force of hypertext on writing activity (activity leaning into academic projects and literary pieces) with the idea of remediation: the existence of the old in the new.

Mueller goes on to say that as hypertext continues to grow, it will challenge all perceptions of the written word. Libraries have to incorporate much more than printed works and the need and demand for printed materials diminishes to a point that the author questions weather there will be a need for printed media whatsoever at all in the future.

As we have all come to realize, there is “the future” and there is THE FUTURE. Though it may be hard to accept for most, our future may never become the latter which brings flying cars in the early 21st century like the Jetsons have, and I think the same goes for wholly computerized works of writing. There will always be people that want to be able to hold in their hands that which gives them information. This is why newspapers will still be around for quite sometime. There seems to be some sort of validity and integrity to something in print, so much so that our own UTD faculty will most often reject citing the internet as a primary source of information, God forbid Wikipedia. At the same time however, our library, just like most other libraries, has an increasing pool of online resources and e-books and articles from trusted media that have since their inception converted to electronic format.

I think that just as remediation calls for a sort of backwards compatibility where aspects of the old media are found in new media, so, too, will the aging media do its best to emulate what the new media can do that it cannot. This is evident with books and magazines that ship with cds and dvds full of content that you can only access by getting the printed material that comes with it. The acceptance of new media has led to things such as sing-along books or even books as simple as the ones this generation had as children that would every so often substitute a word with a picture and the reader presses the button bearing that picture on the soundboard along the right side of the book and it would make the appropriate sound to go along with the picture.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to go find out what the cow says…

 

Blogs I Read

Digital Photography School is a blog that provides tips and techniques for digital photographers as well as news that its readers find important.  The blog gives each entry a designated amount of space for the preview view and each entry has a “Read the rest of this entry” link at the bottom of it.  This is useful because photography tips usually are not the type of things that take up a few sentences, they require examples and the author includes them and at the end of each entry links to related and similar posts are included, which I think is a nice touch.  This blog also has a nice navigation at the top of the page to find posts relating to whatever kind of help you might be seeking as a photographer.  The writing works in that it does everything you can ask for instructional writing to do, which is convey its point without coming across as condescending to its readers.  I found this blog as a result of this assignment, but have now subscribed to it and plan to make as much use of it as I can because I think it will come into use for my photography portfolio class this semester.

Hashmarks by Matt Mosley of Dallas area sports-writing lore (well, maybe not lore, but he is a familiar voice on local sports talk radio and a former DMN writer) is a football blog on ESPN.com, as a result his blog is just another piece of content wedged into the standard ESPN.com visual structure.  I have been reading Mosley’s blog on a fairly regular basis since he started it back in May and it is interesting to see how he’s adapted his writing to the fast, short and sweet style of blogs.  His writing is fairly casual as is the writing of most opinion-based sports writers and most bloggers in general.  Pictures are sporadically used, most likely on the assumption that his readers have already had their share of visual on the topic he might be covering elsewhere on the ESPN website.  He tends to pepper his posts with links as needed and does it neither to excess or too sporadically.  He tends to update just about every time something of matter happens in the NFL, which at this time of year is quite often.  This blog is an easy read and, for me, a fun read because I have a great interest in the NFL and I will likely read it for as long as it stays online.

 

Blog It All

Over the last six years or so I have had many run-ins with blogging. Starting in high school many of the people I knew started posting web journals on sites such as LiveJournal, Xanga, and even the now defunct Ujournal. From there a few friends of mine built their own sites, none of which still stand today. I myself jumped into the fray by building a couple of journal-centric sites, of which only one has been kept alive by a free host that doesn’t seem to monitor site activity, that mostly served as a platform to showcase some of my writing and photography in a very informal manner.

Since those days blogs have grown at a blistering pace changing what they are along the way. Most blogs today try to be informative, or at the very least entertaining. Blogs today allow writers, both professional and amateur, to give people instant updates of what is on their mind. This instant gratification form of writing is the most essential shift blogging has brought to writing over the last decade. Even big media outlets have realized the magnitude of this change and sites such as ESPN.com and CNN.com (towards the middle of the page) have either hired a slew of new writers or have assigned their existing writers to the blogsphere.

It is inevitable, however, that no matter what platform people choose to write in, what they say will not be something for everyone to agree upon, nor will the authors mean for it to be. Opinions will resonate in writing for as long as mankind chooses to write. Blogging merely amplifies this concept by giving everyone a voice, including those who would not have otherwise been able to express themselves to such a large audience.

From this point forward who knows where blogging will go. It may continue to separate into smaller and smaller pieces that eventually become something new and different altogether, or it could become a group that is increasingly closer knit and unified as blogging for the sake of blogging. 2010s here we come.