Will: trying something new

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September 21, 2004

trying something new @11:35 AM

I was talking with Tripp yesterday about the blog and decided that those of us who are online all the time spend too much time in this space basically just blogging like we were an editor for reblog or something.

Actually, there are a number of people on our site who don't do this, and their posts are typically most interesting, I suppose. Link dumping is not something I'm particularly fond of, and I'm not sure exactly why I've sort of regressed to doing it -- probably lack of energry to write things consistenly in this space. links are much easier, but less engaging.

I say all this with the caveat: linking to projects relevent to personal or related research is definitely still important, but it needs to be contextualized with a description -- how does this relate to my / our projects or research?

So my goal is to no longer have any post that is simply a blockquote followed by a link.

posted by will | comments (8) | get permalink

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I agree a lot with what you're saying. We've fallen in some ways into the "tech blog" side of the stereotypical divide of the "tech blog/war blog" categories. Link dumping is something that I think should many times be done in a personal journal log, rather than neccessarily thrown on a blog. Erik Nelson and I had a similar conversation Sunday night on this subject. One thing that annoys me (and I'm guilty of it) is long drawn out posts with lots of links and pithiness that ends with a "punch line" link, that in the end feels more like a display of "intelligence" than anything. I've been compiling a lot of research ideas offline, and have been meaning to get them online (but the EA event prevented that pretty well). I've been happy to see Erin's posting behaviour, and I think we need more of it.

I think trying to remind ourselves that we're grad students with a point of view, and not tech pundits helps.

Posted by: brad at September 21, 2004 12:42 PM

I agree with you fellows. I find it discouraging to see so many techno babble links. I have decided I should use the blog as a journal or sketch book. It's really hard though, I find myself always so worried about what I write, what I show, scared of the community, I would love to be more free, just posting without such worries. Shouldn't this be like the traditional sketch books of our youth?
We shouldn't have to always be displaying feats of tech or intellegence. Let's play, have fun, experiment, and most of all express with these very new tools.

Posted by: SEDinehart at September 21, 2004 12:50 PM

test Comment for TYPEKEY

Posted by: will at September 21, 2004 02:24 PM

as a side note, my last post about Get Smart was awesome, and I encourage everyone who reads this to sign the petition!

Posted by: will at September 21, 2004 02:37 PM

I think annotated links to interesting things still have some value (not everyone keeps up with all the big techy/arty blogs). Maybe save them for a weekly cluster of links in one blog posting?

I don't think Erik Nelson is in a position to pass judgement on other people's blog content until he makes it past his first "hello world" posting.

Posted by: Aaron at September 21, 2004 05:32 PM

Yeah, I think we should make it a point to give Erik a ton of shit until he posts... hehe

Posted by: will at September 21, 2004 06:15 PM

Brad: maybe you are just talking to the 2nd and 3rd year students who have had time to grow into their blogs, but I think the only standards someone's blog should have to live up to is those of the blogger themself.

Posted by: Aaron at September 21, 2004 11:49 PM

Timely post - we're in the process of redesigning the blog to accomodate many of our needs as the division grows: day to day things like event calendar, room schedule, as well as a research page to pull together the growing number of sponsored research projects we're involved with. And the original intent for the main page was to consolidate what's happening in this quickly evolving field of interactive media and to develop some common ground for ourselves - seems this should include posts on new technical gizmos and widgets as well as addressing the social and cultural issues of what we do and how that's changing. Strong and varying points of view definitely welcome. Judging by the number of sites that now lnk to and reference ours, it appears to be a useful resource. Regarding the personal pages, it's not a clear as many of these comments point out. We actually have a research project now with Annenberg Center to develop guidelines and prototypes for using social software like blogs, wikis, etc. in an academic research environment like ours. And one of the big questions is whether it can evolve into a platform for our community to actually 'publish' our work and ideas in contrast to the traditional glacial conference and journal regime. So, any suggestions or comments on how to use this 'venue' would be much appreciated.

Posted by: sfisher at September 22, 2004 07:06 AM