11D

Blog Endorsements

I love that the mommybloggers have figured out how to make money from blogging. From the New York Times,

Colleen Padilla, a 33-year-old mother of two who lives in suburban Philadelphia, has reviewed nearly 1,500 products, including baby clothes, microwave dinners and the Nintendo Wii, on her popular Web site Classymommy.com. Her site attracts 60,000 unique visitors every month, and Ms. Padilla attracts something else: free items from companies eager to promote their products to her readers.

More on Blogosphere 2.0

My post on blogosphere 2.0 has gotten a lot of attention over the past few days. I'm a little embarrassed that I managed to garner so much attention by employing guilt. More comments from Dan Drezner, In The Agora, and  History News Network.

The Blogosphere 2.0

July 14th, Bastille Day, will mark my sixth year of blogging and quite a few of you all have been around for the ride. (Thanks!) I've had a comment section for five years, so you all have contributed quite a bit, too. A few years ago, I decided I wanted a hard copy of everything that I've written for posterity. But after copying a few months of posts over to Word, I gave up. It was using up too much paper.

What will happen to all these words in my posts and in the comment sections? Will anyone ever read it? Steve thinks that all these blogs will be most useful in the future for social historians, who will use all these thoughts to document ordinary life. I hope to polish up some of our better discussions and publish them elsewhere. We'll see.

But this morning, I just want to write about how blogging has changed in the past six years.

Skills Matter

One of the worst possible, most horrific thing that can happen to an academic is that someone else independently comes to the same conclusions as you do, but publishes them more quickly. It's actually not a terrible thing, because the important thing should be that the good idea comes to life, but there are big egos involved here and my ego really needs its own house.

I'm watching Eszter Hargittai's fantastic talk on internet skills at the Berkman Center at Harvard. Small vomit in my mouth at first, because it seemed she wrote my paper and did a much better job, but we're different enough to complement each other, rather than compete. Whew.

Internet Culture

The blogosphere is chattering away about Mark Helprin's Digital Barbarism and Douthat's review of the book in New York Times. There's a lot of discussion about copyright policies and general dislike of Douthat. I'm mostly interested in the Helprin's discussion of Internet Culture, at least how Douthat describes it in his review.

Iran and New Media

New Media continues to undermine national boundaries. As the riots unfold on the streets of Iraq, I'm getting photographs and updates through Twitter. Twitter: It's More Than Ashton Kutcher.

With Twitter, CNN, Facebook, blogs, YouTube, and cellphones, domestic affairs can't be insider affairs anymore. We have access to them, and they have access to us. Media and Politics is traditionally taught as an American government class, but media is really an international creature now.

So here are some links from the blogosphere on Iran. Sullivan has tweets from people on the street. And Sullivan has a great weekend round up here.

UPDATE: A video from the New York Times on New Media and Iran. From the New Yorker, Laura Secor: Iran's Stolen Election.

Sullivan asks why isn't MSM covering the Iran election? McArdle says, "The print media is hamstrung by the fact that they've slashed their foreign bureaus to the bone--and then amputated the bone.  There are too few journalists in too few places to cover a big story like this."

Bloggy Goodness

Yes, my grades have been submitted, and I'm officially slacking off.

This picture is from Awkward Family Photos.com.

I also recommend The Blog of "Unnecessary" Question Marks.

Quote The Blogger

I caught Kos on MSNBC this afternoon, while I was at the gym. He was being interviewed about the Maureen Dowd plagarism deal. He was trying very, very hard to not look so pleased. He made the point that bloggers are always accused of stealing material from MSM, while it looks like MSM does some taking from the bloggers, too.

Yes, they do. A couple of years ago, I surveyed reporters to find out if they read blogs, which ones, and what they thought of them. They're reading blogs, though mostly the ones that specialize in certain topics.

Dowd's case is a clear cut case of plagiarism, but there are a lot of reporters and opinion writers that are getting ideas for stories and figuring out what the hot topics are from reading the blogs. They really need to spread love back in this general direction. They have to delurk and admit that they are reading us. They have to give us credit in their columns.

How Does Populist Fury Become Populist Protest?

In an op-ed in Sunday's New York Times, Sudhir Venkatesh wonders why the "populist rage" regarding the Wall Street and A.I.G. and the bailout hasn't led to riots or protest. He writes, "Today widespread anger and collective passivity exist side by side." We're angry, but we're not going to do anything about it.

How to Blog Carefully

(I've had several unrelated conversations about blogging in the past couple of weeks. Thought I would share....) There is much information about how to blog in order to get bigger audiences and win acclaim in the blogosphere. However, it is a much trickier proposition to balance blogging with a professional life. Some advice: