Tag: Weblogs

Mathemagenic On Blog as Personal Productivity/Knowledge Management Tool

Lilia Efimova has a nice summary of using a weblog as a personal productivity/knowledge management tool. Efimova is currently finishing up her PhD and frequently posts to her blog about ideas/information that she has that are relevant to her thesis.

Communication and information sharing. Sharing information via a weblog is not a specific activity, but a by-product of writing. In most cases it’s an advantage; however it limits potential uses of blogging when access to some of the weblog posts have to be restricted. Weblog is not good for a goal-driven communication to a known few people, but it is a perfect instrument for non-intrusive sharing of ideas in cases where potential audience is not well defined.

In the comments, Dave Ferguson expands on this idea,

I agree with several of your points. Usually I’m on the same computer, so accessability isn’t that big a deal for me… but accessability for others is. I have many friends and contacts who aren’t big on blogging. It’s easy for me to say, “go to my blog and search for XYZ. I have a link in the post, so you can go to the original.

I do that all the time to people because, well, I do it all the time myself. The weird thing is there is this other woman who portrays herself as an expert on weblogs and has a very successful business doing so who pretty much says you should never just write a blog, essentially, for yourself that consists largely of things that you want to keep around to reference later. Instead, apparently, it’s not really a blog unless you’re writing for some specific audience, however vaguely you might define that.

Pshaw. People occasionally tell me they this or that post here useful, but for the most part I blog about things that strike a chord in me that I know I will forget about unless I write about them here so I can look them up later. In fact, more than once I have Googled for the answer to some specific problem or another only to find my site comes up on the first page of links, and I think to myself “I wrote about that? When?” (Seriously, I’m not so sure about the Singularity, but I’m ready for a pill that expands human memory like yesterday).

In fact, I love the name of Ferguson’s blog — Dave’s White Board.

That’s also what annoys me so much over the received wisdom from elitists that blogs are useless precisely because they are assemblances of random stuff without any real connecting thread (i.e., they do not tend to be like 500 page nonfiction books or 15 page New Yorker stories). That’s not a bug, that’s a feature.

Blogs — What Are They Good For?

If you read any sizable number of blogs, you soon realize that one of the most popular topics are endless self-referential posts about blogging itself (see, even I’m doing it!) And amongst the endless “666 Tips to Increase Traffic to Your Blog” bullshit posts, you see a lot of “It’s Not Really a Blog If…” posts.

Lorelle VanFossen, for example, informs us that a blog can’t simply be an online notebook where you post things that you find interesting. Oh noes, that would never do.

Your blog is not a resource for you. Sure, you may think that, and treat it accordingly, but a blog is not a place you can store your notes to come back to and remember how to add a Gravatar to your blog. There are bookmarking services for that.

A blog is a device through which you can create a dialog, share information, ask questions, get answers, give answers, and show the world what you know, and what you don’t know.

The right thing to say is: My blog is a resource for my readers.

First, all a blog is simply a reverse chronological series of posts — nothing more or less than an updated, web-ified version of the old Unix .plan files that used to serve much the same function.

Second, you could do a lot worse than to simply ignore the latest SEO tips and silly guidelines that have resulted in a plethora of boring, pointless blogs that nobody reads. Blaze your own trail. Use your blog to note and keep track of ideas, cool sites, helpful information, whatever.

Just throw out the cookie cutter for goodness sake.

Speak for Yourself, Andrew

In an exchange about weblogs on Slate, Andrew Sullivan has this to say,

But the speed with which an idea in your head reaches thousands of other people’s eyes has another deflating effect, this time in reverse: It ensures that you will occasionally blurt out things that are offensive, dumb, brilliant, or in tune with the way people actually think and speak in private. That means bloggers put themselves out there in far more ballsy fashion than many officially sanctioned pundits do, and they make fools of themselves more often, too.

I hate to break it to Sullivan, but some of us do actually fact check what we write on our weblogs and feel a need to be as accurate as possible.

What Sullivan is describing here is a personal problem — Sullivan is simply a old school pundit exploiting the weblogging format and like all such pundits, the goal is to speak as loud as possible and make the most outrageous claims for attention, with things like accuracy and fact checking coming in second.

When Sullivan claims his weblog entries are more hurried and likely to be wrong than his old media articles, surely he is speaking only in degrees. Sullivan has never struck me as a particular stickler for accuracy, especially when that might interfere with a good angle.

It is telling that when Sullivan took a break from his weblog for awhile, he managed to sucker Camille Paglia into covering for him. Could anyone imagine a more perfect replacement for Sullivan?

Bloggers vs. Big Media

This is just pathetic. LA Times staff writer Tim Rutten wrote a column which complains that weblogs are factually challenged. According to Rutten,

Wednesday, for instance, Kaus posted an item on his personal site (www.kausfiles.com) praising former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee for allowing reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to publish their articles on Watergate at a rapid pace, even though that “sometimes meant revealing unsubstantiated or simply wrong information.”

The only problem is that the quote in question is not from Kaus but rather from historian Stanley Kutler. In his post, Kaus both attributed the quote to Kutler as well as setting it off in quote tags.

It is simply mind boggling to see so many professional journalists make such fundamental errors while taking pot shots at weblogs for being too loose with the facts.

And, of course, unlike many weblogs, there is no discussion system linked directly to the article to point out Rutten’s error (nor is there any sort of link to e-mail him to taunt him about being such and idiot).

Source:

To Err Is Human, but to Think Out Loud … Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times, June 21, 2002.

Scripting News Shows Why Weblogs Won’t Replace Newspapers

And wouldn’t you know it, Dave Winer himself presents an excellent example of why weblogs will never replace newspapers — because so many webloggers, including Winer, cut corners on fact checking things they publish. Look at this piece of nonsense Winer wrote yesterday,

Theoretically, a week from yesterday, we will know who Deep Throat was. The Washington Post, whose reporters invented the name, says “Only four people on the planet are known to have the name — [Bob] Woodward; his partner, Carl Bernstein; Ben Bradlee, the former executive editor of The Washington Post; and of course, Deep Throat himself.” If this is true, then we know that Deep Throat is John Dean, who plans to spill the beans in his book, coming out next Monday. John Robb thinks Deep Throat was Alexander Haig. Others say Henry Kissinger, William Colby (CIA) and L Patrick Gray (FBI).

As I keep saying, doesn’t anybody use Google to verify facts?

Yes, John Dean is writing an e-book to be published by Salon.Com about Deepthroat. No, he is not going to out himself as deep throat.

Dean has been openly speculating about who Deep Throat was for years. In 1975 Dean claimed that Deep Throat was Earl J. Silbert, one of the Watergate Prosecutors. In his 1982 book Lost Honor, Dean changed his mind and fingered Alexander Haig has Deep Throat.

Now Dean says that he’s spent 20 years investigating and this time he’s certain he’s identified the real Deep Throat. If Dean is going to out himself as Deep Throat, it is odd that he told the San Francisco Chronicle,

There’s one person who’s headed into Richard Nixon’s eternal history who outranks me as his worst enemy and that’s Deep Throat. Nixon said Dean was a traitor and Deep Throat was even worse. I wanted to visit with this person.

In fact it’s clear that Dean is just going to throw yet another name into the pot of people who have been identified over the years as Deep Throat. How Winer arrived at the bizarre idea that Dean was going to out himself is beyond me.

Personally, I don’t think Woodward and Bernstein were truthful when they claimed Deep Throat was not a composite character.

Matt Welch on the Difference Between Newspapers and Weblogs

Matt Welch really caught the cultural difference between weblogs and traditional media when he told EPN World Reporter that with weblogs,

All readers are urged to create their own sites — think about that: this is a medium that by definition encourages readers to establish competing media. That’s awesome and wonderful, I think. Glenn Reynolds, about a month ago, asked people to e-mail him if they had started blogs partially because of his own example. More than 200 people mailed in. When’s the last time any publication or writer encouraged 200 people to start publications within six months?

That just really captures what is best about the weblog trend.

I was reading John Dvorak’s latest screed against weblogs in PC Magazine the other day. Dvorak was ridiculing weblogs with a guide to create a “perfect blog” which included using excessive jargon, bitching and whining when some other blogger doesn’t link to you, suck up to others in the weblog community, etc.

In the print version of PC Magazine, the reader turns the page after Dvorak’s piece and finds his “Inside Track” column, which of course is simply nothing more than Dvorak’s rumors and innuendos which he uses to alternately suck up to or bitch and moan about technology companies. The column features several goofy poses of Dvorak looking like a retarded John McLaughlin and phrases and words randomly appearing in bold.

What pisses off Dvorak is that weblogs make it possible for anyone to become a lousy hack if they so choose. The web rendered Dvorak’s schtick as a sort of technology pundit irrelevant, because plenty of people with weblogs fulfill that role much better than Dvorak does.

Not all traditional media folks react as negatively as Dvorak has, but enough of them do that it presents a fascinating look at what people in the media really think of their audience. Welch and others think one of the best things about weblogs is that almost anyone can start one and share their ideas and opinions with others.

To people like Dvorak, though, that’s a bug, not a feature.

Source:

The Welch Report – Go Publish Yourself EPN World Reporter, April 2002.