Posts with the tag 'blogging'
One of the interesting features of Twitter is that you can delete a “tweet” you’ve written and it will retroactively disappear from any of your followers’ lists of tweets. This is different from RSS, where, once an RSS reader has collected the post data from a feed, the excerpt (or entire post) in the RSS reader takes on a life of its own, independent of the original blog post. So if you make any revisions to your original post after various readers have been “pinged,” then chances are those changes will not be reflected in the RSS feeds.
Case in point, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, posted a link to and some comments about a “news report” on how Barack Obama spends hours practicing gazing into the future pose. The only trouble was, this story, which Cowen appears to have taken at face value, was originally from The Onion. I read Tyler’s post on Google Reader, and when I tried to follow the story back to the Marginal Revolution site, I discovered Tyler had deleted the post, presumably because he realized his mistake. Here, below, is the only evidence that the post ever existed, a screen shot of the Marginal Revolution feed in my Google Reader.
This vanishing post brings up some interesting questions for the age of blogging. When is it necessary to delete a post entirely, versus tacking on an addendum? Why not let an erroneous post stay live, but let the follow-up comments sort through any corrections that need to be made, preserving the original post as a kind of historical document (much as Wikipedia archives every version of a Wiki entry as part of the entry’s “history”)?
The vanishing post also highlights the fact that in the digital age, nothing is ever “lost.” As numerous politicians have discovered, even something as seemingly ephemeral as a text message is preserved in some corporation’s database, subject to subpoena. Come to think of it, I’m sure even Twitter has a copy of those tweets I deleted…
Tags: blogging, Obama, Twitter
June 2nd, 2008
What would Jesus blog? It’s a question theologians have pondered for centuries. But the answer, finally, is here.
Yes, the Prince of Peace is back, and he’s online.
Blogging under the cryptic pen-name “Long Haired Jew,” Jesus tackles the issues of the day, such as terrorism (although he’s no Pope Benedict), global warming, and of course, what it’s like to be a bobble-head.
And for all you doubting Thomases out there, consider these divinely-inspired lines from Jesus’s blog:
There is a lot of debate going on about being “good stewards” with all of our natural resources. I admire many of your motives for wanting to keep the world pure and wanting to make sure there are plenty of resources around for generations to come.However, please don’t get carried away. This world was created for you. Use the resources wisely but do feel free to use them. Our Father knew what he was doing when he put the resources in place. They weren’t put there to never be utilized.
[...]
By the way, I didn’t mind walking everywhere but man oh man what I could have done if I would have had one of those SUV’s. The four-wheel-drive would have come in handy in those hills around the Sea of Galilee.
There you have it. Truer words have never been spoken. Unless you count all that Sermon on the Mount stuff, but who pays attention to that anymore anyway?
By the way, here’s the postcard Jesus mailed me. Direct mail–what an improvement over those old school marketing techniques, like that matted-hair, bug-eating, bearded, wait-where’d-you-go-with-my-head, prophet in the desert thing his cousin John had going.
Now if only Jesus had a myspace Facebook page, he’d really be hip.
Tags: blogging, Christianity, humor, religion
September 23rd, 2006
Ignore the different looks this blog will be assuming these next couple days. I’m updating my templates and it’s going to take a while to get it all done. Damn Movable Type for totally changing the standards of their templates from version 2.6 to 3.x.
It’s been such a hassle that I’m toying with the idea of switching over to WordPress–except that I can get my permalinks to work. That is, my old posts don’t export over with the same file names, so they’d be lost to Google and whoever else might have linked to them at some point (yeah, right).
Anyway, pardon the dust.
Tags: blogging, WordPress
July 29th, 2006
Slate has a new article on academics who blog, Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs - When academics post online, do they risk their jobs? by Robert S. Boynton. The article mentions the infamous (among a very small circle of academic bloggers) Chronicle article, Bloggers Need Not Apply, which essentially argues that academics who have their own blogs ultimately damage their careers.
Boynton’s take is much more nuanced, recognizing both how the academic publishing industry is rapidly changing (downsizing is more like) and what underlies the tension between blogging and universities (which academic blogger John Holbo calls in Boyton’s article the last vestige of the “medieval guild system”).
As for me, I don’t expect my blog–this blog–to affect my career one way or another. It’s not like I’m spreading gossip, sharing dark fantasies, or posting my neuroses.
Many of my posts are simply observations–the kind I would talk about with a group of friends, if I still had the time. But I’m too busy teaching and writing to sit around anymore and talk about these kinds of things. So I steal a few random minutes, spit them out on my blog, and then, I forget about them.
The posts that aren’t simply observations are usually ideas in incubation that will eventually surface (peer-reviewed, documented, cited, leeched of personality) in a conference paper, journal article, or someday a book. The posts are placeholders, in a sense, for the real intellectual work that lies ahead.
What my colleagues make of all this, I have no idea. I suppose the real problem with academics who blog is that they leave evidence that they’re not at that precise moment engaged in research or teaching. A blog is an index to one’s daily “unproductive” activity. If all of our other unproductive time (eating, commuting, watching television, basic personal hygiene) was likewise plotted and mapped for the world to see, then everyone would realize that everyone else is also making space for things other than “work.”
Tags: academia, blogging
November 16th, 2005
I’ve been fed up with the standard issue university courseware options–namely Blackboard and WebCT–so I decided this semester to wing it with my own version of courseware (what I’m calling “of-courseware”) powered by WordPress.
Although Sample Reality runs on Movable Type, I’ve been hearing good things about WordPress, and I thought I’d give it a spin. So now my Fall 2005 courses at George Mason University run on the open-source WordPress platform. The syllabi, links to online readings, and most important as the semester develops, the collectively-written class blog, are online, open to the public, indexed by Google, and just generally out there. Which is something you cannot say for courses kept chained up, locked down, and closed up by Blackboard or WebCT.
Here are the courses. The sites are in their embryonic stages (the semester hasn’t even begun yet), but I expect them to turn into full-blown resources as time goes on:
I should add that the subject matter of both of these courses–postmodern culture and new media–could not be better suited for an networked environment. It would be absurd not to develop these courses in an open, linked way, connected to the rest of the web. It’s of-courseware!
Tags: blogging, New Media, teaching
August 24th, 2005