MITH looks at weblogs
A small informal speaker series orgainized by University of Maryland group: Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) took a look at weblogs a couple of Tuesday ago (6 May) . They brought in Mathew Kirschenbaum an assistant professor of English to give the talk. He is currently teaching a graduate class in digital communication and runs his own weblog MGK . Since MITH is down in the basement of McKeldin library where I work I stuck an 'at lunch' sign on my desk and hit the staircase.
There where about 25 people in a room that was set up to seat 15 comfortably. Kirschenbaum worked off a laptop running into a projector, switching between powerpoint and his browser. He ran down the origin of the term 'weblog', which leads you through the evolution of the personal homepage and the current variations on the weblog theme {linkfilters, journals, tech or focus blogs, such as warblogs, being generally how that sorts out}. The unifying or common elements that allow weblogs to be recognized as a thing-in-itself are self-contained dated entrys or 'posts', and a side-bar filled with an honor roll of other weblogs or favorite sites. While you can do a weblog type site by hand (as I did for 2 years), the key is page management software. He ran down a list of the top five or so weblog tools available: Greymatter, Blogger, Radio Userland and its elder sibling Manila. Eastgate makers of the hypertext authoring tool storyspace has one called Tinderbox. There's Slash, and finally Movable Type which is the one he uses. These run the gamut between free to costly, and tools limited to straight blogging and tools which are earnest content management systems (like Movable Type). Another scale to think about is which tools encourage you to be your own author, or editor, and which require you to be your own systems admin. Note that Prof. Kirshenbaum runs MGK on Maryland's "otal" server which allows CGI bin scripts, required for Movable Type. Where on the "wam" server which doesn't, I run a Radio weblog.
He made a point early on, which I liked, about the general vox of weblogs. An element almost as pervasive as a blogroll to most sites is the similarity in the read they give. His take on it is that blogging as a new technology requires a new - a particular - voice and cadence or rythmn. He also noted that in line with their pervasive hypertextality much of the action in a well made weblog is in the marginalia: Blogrolls, trackbacks, indexes, reading lists, much of the 3rd party add-ons, the toys, the concentrated linking occurs in a weblogs margins. Trackbacks is a feature some weblog systems offer, to look at the web to identify referenced links to your site by another site, as many people will do that rather than comment to a post directly.
The comparison of weblogs to listserves came up. Particularly the question will weblogs kill list serve? My own feeling is that weblogs have largely supplanted the listserve as technology. The community weblogs I am most familiar with (Kuro5hin, Metafilter, even Slashdot are more stable, more long lived than any list serve or usenet group that I remember. Most listserves tend to very finite lifes, an early period of high-minded passion and a pointless horrible death reduced by flame warriors, trolls, or pendanticism. Community weblogs sidestep this a number of ways not only are discussions - threads - based on single posts ensuring that fresh topics are always forming, but layered membership and rating systems allow community vetting on the topics thrown open (through front-page previews) and on comments rendered (-1 redundent). Prof. Kirschenbaum brought the question around to what he sees as the real question, whether the autonomous individual weblog through its format and various toys and ties coheres into a whole. Into a blogsphere, or as he put it a self organizing discourse network .
The key to this beyond anything mentioned so far are two further elements. One is webloggers' prevalent early adoption of the creative commons license over the more restrictive copyright. This allows for discussion and commentary on weblogs to be treated (given proper attribution), as a common open source dialog. The second is technological: RSS - often supposed to stand for really simple syndication. I was thinking about this while listening to Louis Rosenfeld talk the other week. RSS is an application of extensible mark-up language (XML) the follow-on to HTML. Weblog applications create a XML metadata summary of your weblog and anounnce its availabilty for automated pull-down at a routine ping. It is this functionality that allows the weblog ecology to operate, what gives it its living dynamic interactive nature.
The term Social Software got thrown around as it usually at this point. as it did in talk about the recent Emerging Technologies conference that O'Reilly publishing sponsered. Social software is just too broad a catagory to mean much. What it does mean could also be read into any conception of the internet as an evolving thing. Weblogs in their feedback loops of syndication are social software , so are WIKIs which are related to weblogs - open-edit encyclopeaedias one might call them. So also are MUDs (multi-user domains), and MOOs (object-oriented MUDs), and online role playing games often refered to now as massive multi-user role-playing games (MMRPGs) which have been around for years. Not to mention the more prosaic but equally intertwining e-mail and instant messaging. A good book on the subject is online communities : designing usability supporting socability by Jenny Preece. Community weblogs don't do any usenet didn't do, they just do it better. Along with certain influential personal weblogs they form a nucleous amalgamating thousands of individual weblogs into a whole. The role of these inflential weblogs has attracted controversy. with some noting the overwhelming number of pointing links these sites attract (I frequently see the ratio 20:80 discussed), which elevates their importance in the Google search engine, aggravating those who fail to see weblogs as a journalistic or even semi journalistic enterprise. Others, noting this, are apprehensive of the tendency of web societies towards what has been termed a monglossia or domination by a single voice or social discourse (Evans, cyberspace and...democracy. First Monday
Prof. Kirschenbuam closed his talk with a "Why I Blog" mea culpa. Everyone has their own reasons, many of his were familiar. At one stroke of a pen - or rather push of a 'post' button he can efficiently keep open lines of communication within in his field and practice the art. Try out new technologies as they are being advanced. By linking, posting and having this archieved by a content management system, doing this to all significant phenomenon encountered on the web; he notes he has turn his blog into a database of the internet as he perceives it. Half the time one is weblogging to ones self. The point is to capture a unit of information from the extremely ephemourous flow that is the web, until such time that you can place it into a context and make larger use of it. To write about it, Because that is what writers do - write.
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