“Blogs may enable academics to climb down from the ivory tower,
while bringing some of their purer air with them...”
April 27-28, 2006, held by Berkman Centre for Internet and Society,
Harvard University, Boston, USA
...The above quotation will be the introduction of my lecture that will be given to the students of my dear friend Semiha Baban who is an economist also holds an MPA from Harvard University and recently teaches public relations at the Faculty of Communication , Istanbul Bilgi University. In the meantime, I thought that making a presentation through one my weblogs would be more flexible and amusing comparing to powerpoint's molded templates...
In fact the debate whether the "Bloggership" transforms the legal scholarship that was started by Berkman Centre in the above Conference in last April has not ended. It has still been progressing through different platforms such as "The Future of Legal Scholarship" which was initiated by "The Pocket Part", so called as "a Companion to the Yale Law Journal" since the Conference ended. -If we could visit the latter during the lecture at Bilgi tomorrow, only this cartoon might have indicated us which wing of the ongoing debate is being owned by the Yale students who also are the editors of this brilliant publication: The Ribstein's view!
...Then, I will mention about the evolution of the blogs by taking the students to the following -linked- resources in order to show them they could start an academic publication similar to Yale's just by using blog software and techniques. Why not?...
...Then, I will mention about the evolution of the blogs by taking the students to the following -linked- resources in order to show them they could start an academic publication similar to Yale's just by using blog software and techniques. Why not?...
Not only was it “cheap” and “instantaneous” but because of the ability of interaction with other converging information technologies, blogging also became one of the most attention-grabbing phenomena of the first decade of the 21st century.
... Before going further, referring to the three sorts of ICT literacies may be better (Computer, Digital and Information literacies)...
Although blogs started mostly in the form of personal web diaries and a great majority of them was interesting only for their owners, in time, they formed a great opportunity for “content creating and management”. Today from commercial business to NGOs, from individuals to state departments and head of nations, almost the whole world uses more or less the same blog technology in different ways, for different aims.
“The blogosphere”: All about blogs and blogging
Definitions: “Blogs” lack a single well-accepted definition as they are rapidly being transformed by the advancing information technology . Whilst academia and professionals have been developing taxonomy projects for this phenomenon since the 1990s, traditional dictionaries started to define blogging in their electronic version after 2000s.
Webster's New Millennium online dictionary gives the definition of the blog as follows
- an online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page; also called Weblog, Web log
- to author an online diary or chronology of thoughts
- a personal Web site that provides updated headlines and news articles of other sites that are of interest to the user also may include journal entries, commentaries and recommendations compiled by the user.
Etymologically, “blog” is the short form of neologism “weblog” which consist of “web” and “log”. It was first coined by Jorn Barger in 1997. “Blog” has been chosen as “the top word of the year 2004” by Merriam-Webster, the US dictionary publisher that gives the definition of blog in online version as follows:
"A Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments,
and often hyperlinks provided by the writer".The ongoing “Blogtalk - a European Weblog Conference” initiative owns Blood’s definition:
"What is a weblog? A weblog is a form and a format: a frequently updated website containing entries arranged in reverse-chronological order. But this simple form is infinitely malleable, and weblogs have huge potential for professional and private use. Easily maintained via computer or mobile devices, weblogs are organizing businesses, creating and strengthening social ties, filtering the World Wide Web, and providing a platform for ordinary people to publish their views to the world."
(See: Blood, R., "Weblogs: A History and Perspective", Rebecca's Pocket. 07 September 2000. 08 January 2006. http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html )
(See: BBC News, “Blog' picked as word of the year”, December 1, 2004. In the same news, a spokesman from“Oxford English Dictionary” said that the word “blog” has been already included into the printed version of the Oxford English Dictionary in 2003 and they were about to add “blogosphere” as well in 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4059291.stm )
Facts and figures
According to the latest survey of David Sifry, the founder and the CEO of “Technorati” the “blogosphere” is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago. On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day. Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour and classify them through the 100 million author-created "tags". Today's "tagging" is a really important "categorization" work and quite different from yesterday's categorization concept! and Approximately 8% of the new are spam blogs (“splog”).
Evolution of the blogs
Dun Burstein takes the roots of blogging back to cave paintings of the Ice Age and finds similarities between the subjects of those engravings and today’s very first blog entries as part of a “conversation” which is stored and archived for future access in "Blog!: How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture" that was co-written by himself and David Kline (2005). Further looking for “bloglike” phenomena in the history of civilization, the author identifies “proto-bloggers” such as the commentators of Talmudic tradition, Renaissance artists and thinkers whose works and diaries have taken the form of “commonplace books”.
According to Burstein, “blogs embed themselves into our new cultural DNA” because the needs of human beings “to communicate, argue publicly, learn collaboratively, share experiences and archive collective knowledge, have suddenly been married with incredibly powerful, fast, ubiquitous technologies”.
Mainstream media (MSM) of the 20th century that democratized communication, the author stresses that it made the majority of the “citizens voices heard but not always everyone’s voice”. Although the growing “niche and micro media” made their voices heard via radio, websites, cable TV, they were not enough to challenge the media monopoly and with blogging came along a “significant change in the equation”.
Recently, the BBC have announced plans to make its entire archives available for non-commercial use. The “BBC Creative Archive”, will offer more than 80 years of radio and broadcast programs free to anyone. Additionally, the latter will be the host of the next “WeMedia” Conference".
Recently, the BBC have announced plans to make its entire archives available for non-commercial use. The “BBC Creative Archive”, will offer more than 80 years of radio and broadcast programs free to anyone. Additionally, the latter will be the host of the next “WeMedia” Conference".
...I think I should stop here and discuss with the students of what I told so far...
Along with citizen journalism, politics, and education, one of the latest trends regarding blogging has been business-oriented usage as a new channel for corporate communications and as a niche-marketing tool. Including the mainstream media (MSM), blogs are being increasingly popular in almost all sectors of the business world in various forms.
“Since the e-mail, users on a very large scale are learning a new writing interface,” says Ross Mayfield, the CEO of Socialtext Inc. Cone (2005) .
Among the pros of business blogging are low-cost, basic tools, such as training, project management, internal communication, and getting instant feedback from the targets, fresher content, and “humanizing corporate image”. A recent research project of The University of Liverpool gives detailed information about reasoning of business blogs from the corporate point of view (Hill, 2005).
One of the substances of blogging as the shift from “media” to “we-dia” Reynolds (2006) .
Thus, “bloggers” are acting as the new news sources [Kline and Burstein (2005) and Hewitt (2005) ] for the traditional media. What made this possible is the Internet by being “Everyone’s printing press” (Hall 2006).
As a self-regulatory approach, citizen-journalism has been improving blog ethics. The first code was drafted by Rebecca Blood who put forth six rules for ethical standards in 2002 . “The Corporate Weblog Manifesto” (in 2003) and the code of “The Blog Ethics Committee” (in 2004) and “Media Bloggers Association” (in 2006) followed her work. Since then, much debate has focused on the point of professionalism versus independency on the bloggers’ side.
Now, I have to prepare another entry in order to be able mentioning about law and blogs...
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