Results tagged “blogging” from Collin vs. Blog

A month or so ago, I posted a quick blip about the latest State of the Blogosphere report, which had somewhat to say about microblogging platforms and their effect on blogging. While I would never argue that it's a simple either/or, it's hard not to feel as though it basically is an either/or, in practice at least.

Exhibits one and two come from Derek and Jenny, both of whom talk tonight about shifting intensities away from blogging. But I think Derek's right, that "the large scale diagnosis is too reckless to square with that peculiar set of conditions bearing on any one of our heres and nows."

I'll be keeping my space here, for a range of reasons, not the least of which is that, pace Jenny, I still need more than a sentence. Tonight's exhibit for the defense comes from Tim Burke, whose thoughtful interrogation of social construction was worth reading twice for me today. As I said back in September, I don't think that facebooking or twittering is likely to scale up, and so I feel like there is something we lose if we give up our spaces and give ourselves entirely to the frequently updated status report.

But I'm also thinking about shifting my activity a little more consciously towards the commonplace book sort of work that a few of us already do. We'll see.

It's been a remarkably unconferential spring for me--I bailed on CCCC this year, am not going next year, and currently, RSA and C&W are happening without me, and doing just fine, I imagine. But over round Blogora way, Rosa asks, "who is livebloggin RSA in Seattle?" and the answer would appear to be no one. I've seen a couple of entries, and a handful of tweets, about C&W, but nothing steady. So I'm breaking prose silence to offer up a modest proposal, one I think I may have talked about before...

If I were hosting a conference, I think I'd see about raising money in order to have a bunch of folk blog the sessions. I know that there used to be something similar for CCCC, but I think that that was strictly a volunteer effort. So here's my proposal:

Offer 5 travel stipends to graduate students at $1000 apiece. To earn that money, they must commit to blogging at least one panel during the majority of sessions during the conference. (I can't be more specific, because it would depend greatly on the conference format, breaks between sessions, keynotes, etc.) For the sake of argument, let's say that that number is 10. So $100 per session.

In an ideal world, the organization would provide the laptops. That is coming closer and closer to becoming a reality, financially. My ultra set-up cost less than $300, and the prices on these things will only drop as Intel gets further into the game. But for the sake of argument, I'm going to assume that most would have their own or one they can borrow.

Also, lap desks. They don't need to be from Levenger or anything. You can get a good one at B&N for $30. It's worth it.

Also, a lounge/room set aside for them to store coats, bags, gear, laptops, with Wifi, cable hookups if they need, and bottles of water and bagels/muffins. Also, if they prefer to type up handwritten notes, they could do that here as well.

Someone from the organization would coordinate with them, so that all 5 aren't blogging the same panel during a given session, of course. But otherwise, they'd just be turned loose on the conference.

The upside? It'd be awfully nice for the majority of people in any organization who don't come to the conference, yes. But it would also provide a means of archiving what is now our #1 source of almost completely disposable scholarship. I've given some interesting papers now and then, and the only record of them outside of my hard drive is the paper title in the program. It would give all of us access to a largely untapped area of our disciplinary scholarship.

I'm not talking about posting the papers themselves, although I sometimes will do that for myself, so it wouldn't be an issue of a pre-print threatening those who want to publish longer versions later on. But a good blog summary of a panel would be enough to let researchers know if they'd like to follow up and email a presenter for a copy of the paper.

Or, imagine that you're putting together a panel on X for a future conference. It'd be nice to be able to do a search for folks working on that topic. Or to gather some ideas about possible folk for an edited collection. Or to get some idea about whose work you might want to follow up on for an article of your own about X.

Right now, the scholarship we do for conferences vanishes into the ether for the most part. Blogging the conference in a semi-systematic fashion would mitigate against that, and it would make all of us who don't attend every single conference feel a lot more connected. That wouldn't be a horrible thing, either.

Let's say that we have 1000 people in an organization, which is probably an overestimate for some and under for others. But given 1000 dues-paying members, it would take and extra $5 a year to pull this off, and the result would be access to a cumulative database of 150 presentations per conference (5 bloggers x 10 panels x 3 presenters/panel).

Finally, it would be a nice way to support our graduate students and it would be, I imagine, a really valuable introduction to the breadth of our discipline for those who participated. At conferences like RSA and C&W, the majority of the panels could be blogged. It would be a little more of a drop in the bucket at a conference like Cs, but that's the organization most capable of scaling this up beyond just 5 bloggers, too.

Seriously, I'd pay $5 or $10 more a year if a database from each year of the conference was the result. If someone could get on that for me...heh.

That is all.

The design doesn't exactly float my boat, but I think that I've reached the point where I don't need to rebuild, at least for a while. It's going to take me a little while to learn the new MT syntax and page styles--it took me way too long to figure out how to swap the positions of recent entries and recent comments on the sidebar, but I did eventually figure it out. MT4 is much widgetastic than MT3: a lot of the templates are basically paragraphs of includes, and little else, which necessitates drilling sometimes 3 or 4 layers deep to find the places I've needed to edit.

First blush, though, is that this is a much sharper version than any that I saw with MT3, so I'm looking forward to messing about with it. That may change once I dip into the style sheets, but we'll see. I can already see, though, how some of the workarounds we developed for CCC Online are going to be supported as features in MT4, so I'm pretty happy about that.

Oh, and commenting. I've enabled anonymous comments, along with a default captcha, so commenting will require clicking on the "comment anonymously" link, and puzzling out a handful of letters. It's a little extra burden, but the tradeoff it represents (no more greenlists, no more junk drawer purges, no more picking through 100s of pending comments to find the few that are legit) should be substantial.

And the auto tag cloud, I'm hoping, will inspire me to be better about tagging my entries as I write them, and to slowly work back through the opening 1000 entries, tagging on the way...

That is all.

If my MT interface is to be believed, this would be my 1000th blog entry. I am only a little stunned by this fact, although it makes sense, considering that I've been at this for almost four and a half years now. This is the final roman numeral milestone, and so I offer three forms of celebration, in likely order of their achievement:

First, I present to you similarly roman numeralled entries, bolded for your clicking convenience: D C L X V I

I'm warning you now: it's a motley bunch of posts.

Celebration #2 is that I'm going to finally upgrade here to MT4, and I'm hoping that a new suite of antisp4m will cut down on the crap round these parts. I had to clear out close to 600 junk comments this weekend, and it's catching legitimate comments from new folk way too often. Maybe I'll slap a captcha on there too. Anyway, that's coming soon.

And coming a little later is a redesign. I need to redesign the CCCOA too, and that has priority, so it may not be until later in the semester. But look for that...

Wow. 1000 entries. Mmmmmm good. That's all.

I started the week with an idea for an entry, but not really the time to deploy it.

And as the week has progressed, ideas have come at me from all directions, but I've held back, waiting for the time to draft my early-week idea.

But now, I think I've mostly forgotten the original idea. Maybe I'll have a little time tonight to reconstruct it. Here's a tease: it's tangentially about the possibility of Welsh rhetoric.

More anon.