More and more and more LL stuff

Stuff I need you to know about in time for Monday:
The notorious blackface incident. Here is my own little account of my involvement.
The crashing of the Lieberman website. There's a link somewhere else in all this mess, but by all means conduct your own investigation.
The rise of YouTube as an important site for bloggers to post stuff about the race, and, especially, the development of a kind of "gotcha" video that might have profound implication fo this race and others to come.

Is Ned Bloggy?

I was over visiting Joe Squarepants and he got me thinking: Maybe one of the questions for us to ponder is the actual fit between Lamont in the flesh and the cyber-insurgency backing him. I mean, those of you who've seen him -- if only on TV but maybe even at appearances -- may find him to be a strange choice for some of the funky, transgressive people backing him. And does that matter?

Fame

It's starting to look like the BBC, among others, might be with us on Monday night, as part of their ongoing LL coverage.

Rhetoric

Oh, and you guys pissed off Coffee

Part 3

You might want to check out this timeline. And click on all the stuff I put in this post.

And read this from one blogger:

Greetings Colin,

I think its great that you're doing a class on blogging. Since I'm
rather opinionated on the subject, I can't help but add my thoughts
on the matter.

Within the political world, at this stage of the Internet, I don't
think blogs have had much influence on races, including the, as you
refer to it, Lamoeba race. The primary race kinda distorted things a
bit because you had the very same bloggers going to campaign events
in shall we say a very activist way. Like the float. Like the kiss
buttons. And I think this is am important factor, because in the
absence of staged activism, what bloggers have left is just opinion
writing which either resonates within its political echo chamber or
transcends it. The later is very difficult to do.

If msm didn't talk about the bloggers, exposure wouldn't have been as
rapid as we saw this past summer. But again, it wasn't that the blogs
broke news, it was the staged events that incited the coverage. Think
lonelygirl for a non-political version. I think an analogous
situation is the frenzy we see of kidnapped white girl coverage on
tv. It's the circus of coverage that propels the coverage to some
extent, and the subject itself ceases to be the story after a short
while. And without the circus, the black girl gets kidnapped story
sinks to oblivion. So without the float, the controversy of the
float, the attention to blogging would have been much less. The same
thing happened with meetups in 2004.

On the non political front, there's plenty going on.

I think there's an interesting thing going on though with the
breakdown of who posts. Some bloggers are just activists or
enthusiasts about a particular issue/subject/person/campaign.
Personally I enjoy Lawrence Lessig's blog, as well as Fred Wilson (a
VC), Juan Cole, and a few others that are rooted in subject matter.
Yale, for example has a great legal blog too. But what binds all of
these is that the blogger is posting somewhat real time about
subjects occurring real time in addition to their regular publishing/
speaking activities. And all break that personal opinion/neutral
barrier about those postings. Then there are the unknown bloggers who
happen to cover something important to the reader. Like some obscure
technical device working with some other obscure technical advice.
Suddenly, with a well googled search, you can discover just how to do
something. To me, that is the real power of the blog, since without
the software, platform and freeness of the hosting, these "experts"
wouldn't have posted. And that resource of expertise is a deep
reservoir that has lots of public good benefit.

cheers, Turfgrrl" @ Connecticut Local Politics

The LL Story Continues, Part 2

There was, in Connecticut, a rather spirited group of of progressive bloggers who already had it in for Lieberman. This guy had been blogging for at least a year already. This one started in February and quickly became an indispensable clearing house of info. The guy was recently hired by the Lamont campaign. This guy got going a couple of months later. By the time of the state convention, he had emerged as kind of a celebrity and was one of the bloggers leading the way with the use of video. Spazeboy also became a minor celebrity. He has already committed to vist us for our first class after the election. My Left Nutmeg became the DailyKos of Connecticut, where people could post diaries and cross-post from their own blogs. Please visit all these sites. Jump around a little in time. Don't stay on the page I linked to. See how the story changed. And feel free to leave comments for the bloggers. Ask them questions!!! They (probably) won't bite you.

And so it begins ...

Way back in the late winter, national blogs decided to get involved in the Lamont campaign. MyDD was one of them. You can see how MyDD's interest and style of coverage evolved over time. (Don't limit yourself to what I link to. Use tags like CT-Sen to browse around. There's even a piece about viral marketing.) Eventually MyDD blogger Matt Stoller showed up in Connecticut to cover the race.

In the state there were many, many indigenous blogs, most of them liberal, many of them virulently anti-Lieberman. Pro-Lieberman stuff showed up on a handful of conservative blogs and, perhaps most significantly, this attempt to run a bipartiasan, even-handed blog.

I need to do a little more reading myself on this this week, but my sense is that national conservative blogs were slow to match support for Lieberman with what Lamont was getting from the other side.

You might also read the Time magazine piece, referred to in class this week, on the whole concept of "netroots." There will be MORE TO COME in the days ahead, so keep stopping by.

Interesting site

Kristen recommends.

Class topics from your blogs

Just reminding myself to discuss this today.

Maybe the blogger who linked to this can discuss it.

And Brenda Starr kind of ties it all up.

Memes in class

In the Wikipedia entry for memes, the "evolutionary forces" section is the most important one.
We could pick almost anything from this moment -- Chris Wallace vs. Bill Clinton? -- and ask ourselves why one meme about it trumps another.
(Hint: somehow, you have to be able to propagate outside your pre-existing "pool".)

Pulling Apart a Blog

How many of you got to this link in DailyKos? It's kind of the whole deal. We'll discuss it in class.

Everybody Blogs

From the New London Day

Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley, the leader of the Boston Archdiocese, has found an effective and direct way to communicate with Catholics while on a 10-day religious trip to Rome. He's going to carry on an active blog, which a staff member will post on a Web site along with photographs of the trip. While carrying on an ancient tradition, he will be putting modern dress on the occasion through the Internet.
Newly made a cardinal, Cardinal O'Malley is traveling to Rome to formally take charge of his titular church there, Santa Maria della Vittoria.
Catholic officials in Boston say they believe Cardinal O'Malley may be the first Catholic cardinal to communicate via a blog. The cardinal maintains a very active e-mail correspondence in the work of the diocese, his aides said. So this innovation was a natural step forward.
Estimates are that there are some 12 million bloggers in the United States and that about 57 million people read the blogs

Let's make a new friend!!!!

A class experiment. I discovered a blog while following up an idea I got from Brenda Starr's blog. This is obviously the work of an intelligent person, and she has already posted today. So here's the experiment. A few of you should think of some excuse to link to it from your blogs. Don't go there from this blog (in fact, that's why I'm NOT creating a link from here), or the game will be up pretty quickly. Instead, grab the url from here and work with it on your own. See if the blogger notices that you've linked and contacts you. You might even look in this blog to see if you can extract a meme. Maybe I'll do that too in my Courant blog.


Here it is:

http://www.u2literary.com/blog/

Here is an example of what I want you to do. The juxtapositions link is our new friend. You do something similar. Take something she's written that interests you and link to it. Or push "It’s about things that happen, things that have nothing else in common other than they happened to you." as a meme.

How to do your homework, Part XVLIIII

Most of you have blogs up now, but a much smaller percentage of you are posting regularly as you read the assigned work and offer up ...you know...thoughts ... about it. I suppose most of you postpone homework until the day before class, but, in general, this is going to work better for you if you blog your homework the way bloggers blog. Which is to say a little at a time, several days a week, if not every day. Those of you who do this will be amazed by what happens. One of you has already attracted an interesting comment from a pretty significant Connecticut blogger.

Questions, questions

Now that you know more about memes, read about another way of analyzing the spread of information. And note how many websites even work "meme" into their names. PLEASE stay away from the dinosaur porn. I never did figure out how this one aggregates, although they do link to me every so often. Now look at DailyKos. Try to analyze it's structure and rules. What is its mission, in terms of memes? How does it really work? Is it a good way to spread memes? If not, have you seen anything that is?

La Memessa

If I were going to assign one book on Memes, it would be Susan Blackmore's. Fortunately, she has a very cool website.

Meme Old Man

Bora, I mean Matt, from last year's class wants you to check this out.

A Reminder

Go back and read Nonsense Man even more carefully. If he's not dead of a speedball from the pressure of blog celebrity, he will visit us on the 25th.

Featured Classmate of the Day (Even Though He's Already Vain)

Check out some of Scott's ruminations. Maybe even comment to the dude.

Tuesday Morning Quarterback

The thing I forgot to tell you last night about your blogs is to experiment and have fun. comment on other blogs. Link to things. See what happens. Meanwhile, we do need a theoretical framework to put around blogs, so begin by reading this fairly complete Wikipedia entry on memes. Aslo, here's somebody who tried -- perhaps a little too bluntly -- to artificially engineer memes.

The Cradle of Blogging

Re-reading Kottke's blog, I kind of stumbled over to this link, which is about Jorn Barger, who did perhaps the first blog I ever saw, Robot Wisdom. As the now-out-of-date essay indicates, the early blogs were often not much more than an attempt to make order out of the web chaos. The idea of a voice would have seemed faintly ridiculous to those guys.

Also inevitably, articles have been written -- in Salon, The New York Times, Wired -- consecrating Web logs as yet another New New Thing: At one time or another in the last 12 months, they have been the future of journalism, a budding branch on the tree of literature, or both.

In fact, they are neither, say some members of the Web’s weary anti-hype brigades. "Sorry, buddy -- you’re just a dork who can’t come up with anything more than a paragraph or two to say every day," wrote Teeth e-zine’s Ben Brown in an open letter to Web loggers last spring. "You’re not a designer, you’re not a writer, and you’re not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you’re not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it’s true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it’s also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

How to do your Homework

As soon as you get your blogs up, use them to analyze the assigned reading. Don't be afraid to post comments on another blog when you read it. Put links in your own blog when you're describing something elsewhere. Brenda Starr has the right idea.

How to Read a Blog, Part 2

One reason I encourage you to dig back is that bloggers change their voices. For example, Ms. Coffee Rhetoric is in kind of a pendantic mode right now, but if you check out this string of posts from the past, starting with the imagined interview by a French director, you see how this young woman was REALLY using this blog in a much more interesting and confessional way.

Why I love Trinity Bloggers and hate its critics

Optional reading.

One of the things we'll be talking about -- on and off -- as the term rolls along is the issue of persona and psyche on a blog.

The recent New Republic scandal, also covered here and here, gives you one sense of how weird things can get.

Back to Work!

Thank you to those who e-mailed.
Just to recap:
In order to get ready for next week, you need to
1. build a blog if you don't have one already.
1a. you might also send me the URL when you have it so I can put up a link here.
2. read as much of those proto-bloggers as you possibly can.
3. Read the McLuhan thing if you have time.

I'm really sorry

My mom died at around 6:50 p.m. I'm so glad to have been there.
But we have a lot of work to do. And a lot of fun to have. This is an amazing subject about which to take a course.
I'll be posting to you all week. And feel free to email me.

Totally Useless Syllabus

9/18 -- Proto Bloggers. Why DO people blog?
9/25 -- Meme theory, Clotaire Rapaille. Blogging as a way of moving information, especiallly political information -- as broadly construed. Kos, et alia.
10/2 -- The Lieberman and Lamont campaign. Wow.
10/9 -- YouTube and other Vlogs.
10/16 -- Wikipedia and other Wikis
10/23 -- Teilhard de Chardin and blogging as collective intelligence. Poolings of information. Metafilter. Plastic. BoingBoing, Engadget. MySpace and communities of blogs. (This may have to be a whole separate class session.)
10/30 -- Writing and rhetoric in blogs. Blogs as literature. Some exploration of speciality blogs, especially sports and religion. Humor! Three Bulls!
11/6 -- A second glance at blogs as poltiical engines on the eve of the election.
11/13 -- We will get as many players in the Lieberman-Lamont blog story as possible in the classroom for a post-mortem.

That's as far as I'm going right now. I can guarantee that we will have to return to the idea of ollective intelligence before the end. It will all change anyway. Also, tell me what YOU want to delve into.

Why do blogs exist? For reasons ranging from the exploration of ideas to the exploration of non-ideas.

Week 2 of class: From Nutmeg to Megnut

We begin, as we must, with the proto-bloggers -- the people who blog, therefore they are. Blogging really does seem to have begun as a strange from of self-expression, the diary gone (semi)public.

Begin with a few of the less famous (and in many cases) local examples. This woman seems to have two blogs, with sometimes identical posts. I think Nutmeg Grater is better known, but this second one seems more like a prototypical blog. Also check out of one last year's class bloggers. Dig back to see what he was doing in previous months. Here's a local blogging icon with a distinct writing voice. She is experimenting with video now, but, again, dig back. And Sally became a class favorite last year. You have to check her out as she began her blog and then in the days when she fled Katrina. Note the comments from Trinitites.


OK, that's the first half of class. Now, what happens when the early proto-bloggers get a little famious? You get Jason Kottke. and the very-related Megnut who seems to have parked her personal musings over here. Probably because things got a little complicated. Dooce is one of the few very personal blogs to have acquired a big following. Lastly, visit Rebecca Blood, for her own blog and her "Bloggers on Blogging" interviews, which include one with Kottke.

Basic Requirements

1. Class participation. Lots of it. In seminars, we teach each other.
2. Use of your blog to analyze homework assignments. After you read, write on your blog about what you read. Be analytical.
3. Use of your blog to link and interact with other blogs in the class and, for that matter, other voices out there in blogdom. I'll explain in class what I mean about that.
4. A short final paper. Which you could also blog.

How To Read a Blog

Much of the homework in this course will entail "reading""a blog. When I assign one, what I'm asking you to do is read at least the most recent four weeks of postings and then scan back a little. Sample a few entries from the more distant past. Look at the first week ever. And then, where appropriate, pull the blog apart a little. Are there rules? (The group blogs like Metafilter tend to have all kinds of rules.) If there a history posted? What other kinds of information is shared? What's the hosting service? What's the look? What are the comment threads like? Does the blogger mix it up on the threads, joining in the arguments and discussions? Consider leaving comments. There are dozens more questions you'll learn to ask.

L-L Cool J

One thing I want to mention to incoming students: Even though this class will look at blogs as literature, as culture, as anthropology, I expect that we will devote a little more time than we did last year to the political nature of blogs and, specifically, to the role of blogs in the Lieberman-Lamont race. There will be at least one full installment of the class on that, and perhaps part of another. It's just such a great opportunity to watch this unfold before our eyes and to speak to some of the bloggers involved in this.

This may be a turn-off if you hate politics. On the other, my experience of this camopaign has been that the personal, the cultural, the rhetorical, and the political have all mixed together in the blogosphere. Part of the fascination is the way the political establsihment was not ready for the quintessence of blogs. And keep in mind that, for example, one of the key players in this drama is the producer of "Natural Born Killers." This is not strictly a political story.

Marshall McLuhan, What Are You Doin'?*

Before he changed his name to Eminem and began a rapping career, Marshall McLuhan predicted a lot of what would happen on the internet and in blogging. The trick was, dude predicted this in 1964. Anyway, I don't have world and time for you to read "Understanding Media" or his other books, because I need you reading blogs. You must, however, read this Larry Press essay. It will tell you most of what you need to know.

* First spoken by Henry Gibson

Go Blog Yourself

Job One: You have to create a blog, if you don't already have one. If you do already have one and it's heavily dedicated to some other obsession of yours -- knitting, bestiality, the overthrow of some West Indian government, I would urge you to consider creating a new blog.

Things to consider: It's actually kind of cool if your class blog has a fair amount of other proto-blogger kinds of stuff in it, but you have to remember that your classmates will be dropping in on a regular basis. They may or may not want to read about the person you brought home from the bar last night. And it's sort of a drag for all of us to have to wade through extensive posts about new tanks and rocket launchers just to find the stuff relevant to the class. On the other hand, the people who were most successful last year ran blogs that kind of mingled their personal observations with their homework.

Another thing to consider: Feel free to use any blog-hosting site you like. This is the new beta version of blogger, which is owned by Google. I also blog on typepad too. I'd be willing to bet that the hosting service interacts, in a McLuhanesque way, with the content. Anyway, there are lots and lots of hosting services, and it would be good for our class if a few people dabbled. Last time, LiveJournal was strangely unsatisfying, but it might be interesting to think about what that was.