Jonathan Yardley has a review in The WashingtonPost.com of Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care' by John McWhorter which kind of slams what neverhtheless comes off sounding like an interesting book about how American discourse has been, big macked (my own phrase and I don't know how to spell it) or deformalized. Seems to me what the author and the reveiwer are really talking about is no the deformalization of American discourse but a change in the dominant aesthetic--we still have forms, they just aren't "traditional" or literary or traditionally rhetorical. 

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According to Cyber Atlas, based on stats from blogcount, there between "2.4 million to 2.9 million active Weblogs as of June 2003."  link.

[O]ur friends at American Demographics are interested in blogs and those who read them! (Isn’t that hitting close to home?) According to a study commissioned by AD with research firm Ipsos-Reid, only 17% of American adults are aware of blogs, and only 5% claim to have read one. The awareness of blogs skews towards men; 21% of male Internet users report they’re hip to the blogosphere, while only 13% of women are. Financially, visitors to blogspot.com are either rich or poor; those making under $25,000 or over $100,000 a year are over-represented, while middle-income visitors are under-represented.

"The Blogging Iceberg -
Of 4.12 Million Hosted Weblogs,Most Little Seen, Quickly Abandoned"

offers statistics about blogging based on information gleaned from Blog-City, BlogSpot, Diaryland, LiveJournal, Pitas, TypePad, Weblogger and Xanga. The upshot is that while 4.12 million blogs have been created on these servers, 66% are abadonded (not updated in the last two months).  The article offers some interesting demographic data: the upshot of which is that blogging is the purvue of young people teenagers and 20 somethings, mostly women who use them as a way to tell their friends what they are up to. Most blogs are read by what the authors of this paper call nonoaudiences, ie nearly no one. In sum:

The authors do admit that most of their data comes from live journal, which is as much about making friends as it is about blogging. (link)

Compu mentor is advertising for script savvy blog enthusiast to come over and help them create a blogging segment for their not-for-profit technology organization: remarkable.

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Here is an article from the Washington Post.com about blogging as a business strategy. Among other things, the article reports:

An article in the Columbia Journalism Review discusses how blogging has become the last free space for journalism uncontroled by big business or political interests.

I've spent the last few days working on a blog tool that will allow people to make their own blogs on rhetcomp, without having an account, and for free.

The software is essentially a clone of what you are looking at, but with an admin panel from which you can add to the resources list and mess arround with the color shceme. It's still a ways from finished, but it is working. Thanks to many people, including Jackey Hong, the man who wrote efolios.

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Scholars Who Blog

The soapbox of the digital age draws a crowd of academics

By DAVID GLENN
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From Metafilter:

According to a Wired News, article: 

WHY AMERICANS WILL BELIEVE ALMOST ANYTHING- Tim O'Shea (link)

Discusses the formation of modern public relations campaigns and the "father" of spin Edward L. Bernays, whom, among other things, convinced american women to smoke and all americans to each bacon for breakfast, or so Mr. O'Shea would have us believe.

I should look up EL Bernays' book Propaganda.

If you really want to know, ask a blogger

John Naughton
Sunday June 1, 2003
The Observer

(link)

Back from Purdue a bit early on account of our all being eager to get home for various reasons. The conference was interesting, not withstanding, and blogging is obviously a topic of moment. My paper went well enough. Michalel Haynes and Jack Nerad gave excellent performances.

I will have to change my about this blog statement and to do that for real I will have to move on to other topicss. Or maybe just make links to a wider range of stuff that catches my eye. I need to get ready for the Waterloo conference during which I'm to talk about the ways classical rhetoric influences or is at least echoed in modern online writing practices.

From MicroDocs, a study of the life cycle of stories in the blogosphere. 

From WebRaw a piece entitled "Weblogs will save the world"

WhyIBlog is a page that records (via email) people's explanations for why they blog. Among them are self-discovery, therapy (same thing?), a hobby, self-expression.  

Where is Raed? now has company

Are blogs to be trusted. According to Wired Flight risk is a blog that perports to be the tribulations of an heiriss on the run from her family. Her father has arranged a marriage and she wants no part. There is some debate about its authenticity. Most people think its a fiction and lots of fun to read. She's apparently been offered a book contract if she can verify her story. But she's not yet done so.

There have been similar debates about the authenticity of Where is Raed, said to be a blogger from Iraq during the war.

So here we have fiction invading journalism (shock horror) and realism finding a new lease on life. Be nice if we could have a magical realism blog next.  

Dave Winer reports:

An opinion piece from Wireless Net Factor argues that blog software needs to be more sophisticated than it is to move it beyond being just a boon to self-publishers. It needs a data backend.

PBS Online NewsHour ran an article yesterday about blogging and jouranlism (link).

Trent Lott is mentioned as an example of the power of weblogs as compared with traditional news outlets.

Could file this under extreme blogging (link). BBC reports on a blog from the top of Everest.

Graeme Daniel and Kevin Cox (link)
22nd July 2002

A time line with links to historically significant blogs (starting with Mosaic's 1993 What's New Page and a discussion of the definition of a blog. The athors construct their definition out of quotations from other blogger's definitions, a very bloggy approach. 

Anonymous blogging site:

from flit a blog from TO

For the last week or so I've been thinking about rejecting a definition of blogging as my starting point for this 2003 paper, and my thinking has been reinforced now by the thread on techrhet today. From that, though, came a link from Traci that offers several "attempts" to define blog and the suspicion that it can't be done.

SixApart, the company that makes Moveable Type will offer a service like Blogger by May 2003. It's called TypePad
(link)

If found this (link) via metafilter. It is Anil Dash's blog which includes a side blog, a list of links with no link text. It seems (I'm making this up I don't know what he was doing) that the original link/link text space was filled with longer and longer posts, which left the quick note to self of potential interest to others with no place to be, so a list of links periodically updated appeared down the lefthand side.  

from a metafilter search for blogging

As I dump yet another quotation from elsewhere into my blog I'm reminded of Plato's Socrates' compaint at the end of Pheadrus that writing destroys one's memory by filling it full of reminiscences, faximilies of thought. I wonder if copying and pasting has become for me via this software a substitute for close reading.

Timbu :: Musings
April 22, 2003
Blogging is not defined by existing art forms (link)
"To make rules for blogs seems about as useful to me as making rules about what can be put on paper. We declare that all words published on wood pulp must follow journalistic ethics. Seems silly doesn’t it. "

On the Trail of the Memex
Vannevar Bush, Weblogs and the Google Galaxy

"A weblog is a textual genre native to the World Wide Web, comprising a regularly-updated collection of links to other documents, together with commentary that evaluates, amplifies, or rebuts the off-site information. A cross between an online diary and a newspaper clipping service, a weblog is important factor in the ongoing democratization of hypertext – that is, a means by which ordinary people who do not think of themselves as programmers or designers can efficiently harness the power of hypertext, and thereby add their voices to the community of global villagers."

"My search of the Usenet archives for “weblog” reveals that, before Barger’s posting, the word invariably referred to an automatically generated record – a log – of web server activity.  While the public response of the Usenet community to Barger’s announcement was lukewarm at best, almost immediately, the whole community of computer experts ceased using the term “weblog” to refer to “the automatically generated log of web server activity,” and instead adopted the term “server log”.  Even if weblogs themselves spread more slowly, the “weblog” meme was firmly implanted in the online community.  "

"But weblogs are part of the great paradigm shift in textual culture, which eradicates restrictive print-based terms such as center and margin, and advances post-structuralist concepts such as network and connection.  Weblogs are making the Internet more interactive, more “writerly.”   " 

link

The Great Blogging Ethics Debate (link)

By Cynthia L. Webb
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 9, 2003; 10:10 AM

Discusses plagiarism and blogging. Specificlaly, "the case of Sean-Paul Kelley, a Texas blogger who admitted to Wired that he copied material from a subscription service for his popular war blog, The Agonist. Kelley lifted verbatim material from Stratfor, a Texas-based intelligence firm, apparently to jazz up his own war posting and to curry favor with potential intelligence sources. "

"Filter readers have chimed in. The verdict? Many don't seem to think that Kelley's actions were that big of deal. They insist that blogging is free -- i.e. a free-flow medium and not a journalistic endeavor. But a number of voices have spoken up on the other side of the debate, including blogger Ken Layne, who has come down squarely against Kelley. "

Samizdata.net offers a lexicon of bloggery.