The conversation started by Steven Hodson about how bloggers can most usefully fulfill their roles and obligations to their audiences has grown to proportions rivaling some of our other popular posts. I learned of Steven’s initial post through Corvida at SheGeeks, who had added her own thoughts to his original theory. I responded with a critique, which prompted Corvida to rebut and clarify. Along the way, readers of all three blogs have chimed in through comments as well as on FriendFeed and Twitter.
Steven, Corvida, and I have since reached common ground in the fact that bloggers are indeed similar to news anchors in that they highlight issues for their readers. We’ve also essentially agreed that bloggers can be more aptly described as “layers” to raw information rather than filters for it. Finally, we’ve also found consensus in the fact that the term “blogger” is to broad a category to attribute specific characterisitics to it.
This last point has really had me thinking about blogs and digital media in general. What’s the big deal?
Continue reading ‘Round-Up: What’s So Special About Blogging?’
Happy Monday. I decided to start the week (sharing with coworkers, naturally) with Whole Wheat Apple Muffins, following this recipe from Smitten Kitchen. Del.icio.us. (nerd joke!). Enjoy a few links as you consider how good an apple muffin would taste right now (answer: unbelievably good).
- Could Google benefit from asking users to input their race before searching? The NY Times reports on Rushmore Drive, a new search engine that delivers search results catered to specific racial groups. The company behind Rushmore Drive started with an African-American focus, but plans on expanding to other races; from the article:
[The site] offers search results that, at first glance, border on stereotypes. A search query for “Thanksgiving recipes,” for instance, yields sites featuring recipes for sweet potato pie and collard greens. But according to Johnny Taylor, the chief executive of Rushmore Drive, the results are based on years of search data from IAC’s Ask division.
Rushmore Drive analyzed search results for 3,000 of the most popular search terms in areas with large black populations and found that when people in those areas searched for recipes, they were much more likely to click on pages with soul food. Those searching for hair products, dance, cars, fraternities and sororities also ended up on vastly different Web sites than people who lived in areas with smaller black populations.
- Here’s a quick Fast Company featurette on the new D.C. Nationals ballpark. It’s the first professional ballpark to receive LEED certification. Can’t wait to catch a game (or 3) there in May
- This is old news, but in case you missed it (or didn’t understand the details), here’s a Washington Post article describing the new partnership between Google and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The U.N. will use Google Earth to draw attention to the plight of refugees around the globe and to illustrate their forced emigration.
- [slaps head for not thinking of this]: Here’s a simple idea for storing your ever-growing list of frequent flier/hotel reward program/valued shopper numbers…file them away in your cell phone under a specific heading. Brilliant…the Internet is a beautiful thing.
Happy Monday.
A recent NY Times article is (predictably) getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere. The article uses the deaths of two bloggers (and a heart attack suffered by a third) to wonder aloud whether blogging as a profession carries inherent stress that causes folks to blog themselves to death:
A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.
John Batelle wonders what the fuss is about: after all, in any profession there will be those who unfortunately work themselves to the brink of personal collapse. Just because blogging is a relatively new profession doesn’t mean that we should be any more shocked than we are are by, say, a lawyer who works him or herself to death. But in a comment on Batelle’s post, reader JG offers a great and thoughtful response (I encourage you to read the whole thing; emphasis mine):
Even people who work themselves to death in their offices, late into the night, eating bad take-out, had [sic] to leave their offices at some point. In order to go home, they have to walk outside, catch some fresh air, walk up or down a couple of stairs to get to the subway. That travel period gives them a modicum of real contact with real people. A nod. Maybe sometimes even a smile. An eye-flick of recognition from the newspaper vendor on the corner. Those small things are sustaining, life-affirming, human. And those things, no matter how small, do help reduce stress.
The internet changes that. Again, this is what we have to admit to ourselves that we believe. The internet makes things different. Yes, we’d like all of it to be different-better. But sometimes it is different-worse. And one way it could very well be different-worse is that blogging for a living, from home, means you lose all those little moments of human contact, of a little bit of exercise, of a little bit of fresh air.
Continue reading ‘Blogging and Work-Life Balance in a Digital World’
I can’t call this a “money quote,” but it might qualify as a “mind-numbing quote.” Via NPR:
The average Atlanta resident with a job drives 66 miles every day. In fact, people here drive so much that if you added up every commute and every trip to a store or soccer practice on just one day, you’d get a number that’s larger than the distance between the Earth and the sun
Still with me? Does this not strike everyone as profoundly disturbing and yet–if you’ve ever driven through metro Atlanta–possibly a conservative estimate? Morning Edition featured a two-part series this week called “Life in the ‘Burbs,” detailing the environmental costs of American dreams involving jobs in high-rises miles away from bucolic suburban homesteads (these people work for NPR, so don’t assume for a second that they didn’t consider how many folks listen to the show during their morning commute).
Continue reading ‘Suburban Life In Perspective’
I wrote a little while ago about mashups, and defined them as “two or more sources of information on the web ‘mashed’ together to make a new, useful tool.” As it turns out, mashups are actually much more encompassing than that. The two or more sources of “information” do not necessarily have to create a “tool”; indeed, the sources don’t have to be “information” in the traditional sense at all.
For example, there are music mashups — entirely new creations that consist of clips and samples of tracks already in existence. Remember The Grey Album, which spliced together Jay-Z and the Beatles? Mashup. There are also video mashups, which combine video and audio from different sources to make something completely new. There are countless examples of these, but one hilarious illustration that I’ve just happened upon called There Will Be Vader mixes audio from There Will Be Blood with clips from Star Wars.
So just as “utility” mashups are useful remixes of several sources of information, “creative” mashups are expressive remixes of several sources of inspiration. The tricky difference between the two is this: utility mashups generally make use of what are called APIs, or application programming interfaces, to obtain and manipulate data. The easiest way to think of it as a sort of Rosetta Stone that a company provides to developers to allow them to access and interpret the information in their products. For example, Google Maps and Twitter each have an API that, when correctly manipulated and designed by a developer, can become something like Twittervision.
Music and video, though, are not really the same.
Continue reading ‘Mashups and Conversational Media’
