Scientists dispute climate sceptic’s claim that US weather data is useless

February 16, 2010 at 9:56 am · Filed under blogs, data

An interesting twist on the Climate Change debate. When data is made public, so too is the basis in which this data was collected. Data is part of a scientific argument; it isn’t ‘absolute truth’.

It appeared to have shaken the credibility of one of the most important global warming data sets in the world. A blog-inspired campaign by amateur climate sceptics seemed to show that numerous weather stations across the US were so poorly located they could not be relied upon (link).

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State of the Blogosphere

September 13, 2009 at 5:36 pm · Filed under blogs, web2.0

Here is the annual Technorati State of the Blogosphere (2008) report:

Welcome to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, which will be released in five consecutive daily segments. Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind. For the first time, we surveyed bloggers directly about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially. Our bloggers were generous with their thoughts and insights. Thanks to all of the bloggers who took the time to respond to our survey (link).

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Lords of the Blog: Life and Work in the House of Lords

September 9, 2009 at 9:42 pm · Filed under blogs, political communication, politics

Lords of the Blog is a collaborative blog written by Members of the House of Lords for the purposes of public engagement. The aim of the blog is to help educate, raise awareness and engage with the public on a range of issues relating to the role and business of the House of Lords. The blog is authored by a group of Members from across the House. Each Member has their own profile and personal section of the blog. A ‘homepage’ provides an at-a-glance digest of the latest post from each Member

(An initiative from the House of Lords and the Hansard Society).

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The value of slow thinking?

June 23, 2009 at 9:24 am · Filed under blogs, deliberation

(thanks to that wonderful blog net.effect for the image)

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Blogging & Tweeting Academia

June 12, 2009 at 1:59 pm · Filed under blogs, web2.0

A HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forum open now at http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forums/04-16-09Blogging-Academia

As the tools necessary for creating blogs and other forms of micro-publishing (podcasts, videocasts, microblogs) have become more readily available, many academics have been quick to embrace these new forms of communication. However, academics blog for many different reasons, such as disseminating scholarship, demystifying the inner workings of the academy, or promoting themselves in an uncertain job market. Many academics are employing blogging in the classroom, assigning podcasts as required reading, creating collaborative class blogs, and experimenting with Twitter to develop classroom community. In this forum we will be discussing the theory and practice of academic blogging. The academy has not yet settled on the role that digital scholarship will take in relation to more traditional forms of scholarship, and for this reason scholars are still struggling with questions about the role that bloggers play in spreading disciplinary knowledge, and how this kind of activity should be measured. Likewise, the pedagogical value of blogging, let alone “best practices” guidelines for incorporating blogging into the classroom, are still somewhat up in the air. Join us as HASTAC Scholars John Jones and Ramsey Tesdell facilitate a discussion about such questions as:

Read the rest of this entry »

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jill/txt writing with a little help from your friends

May 27, 2009 at 3:38 pm · Filed under blogs, digital humanities, e-science, eresearch, humanities computing, internet, web2.0

One of the blogs I try and read regularly is by Jill Walker’s from the University of Bergen in Norway .  Jill’s research is within the ‘new media’ field and in large, offers analysis of the use of popular technologies  such as blogs, wikis, and other social software applications within the public sphere (a blog about blogs) .  She is an active participant online and her well-written and insightful blog is well-know in the broader new-media research field  (I wish I had more time to write like this!).  Plus she has been a tireless blogger since 2000;  a good three years more than this blogger.

A recent post on ‘collaborative authoring’ caught my eye.  She is writing a article about social patterns that appear online through Time, Relationships, Context, and Geography.  I like how she relates these to trends to ’stories’ although I am still having a few problems making the leap;  perhaps it is because I am surrounded by people who insists on counting things! (link).

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Grand delusions…

April 16, 2009 at 10:12 am · Filed under blogs, digital humanities, e-science, web2.0

(the Round Reading Room)

Today I am working from King’s fabulous Maughan Library. I like it here, it not only expands my ever decreasing perspective on the world, but humbles me before all the great European mistakes.

I am writing a series of case studies for the project I am working on called Arts-humanities.net The case studies are about eResearch and the use of computational methods in the humanities. These methods are used to find stuff out that we didn’t know before.

In the book shelf in front of me I can see a book about fascists and another with the interesting title ‘The War Hitler Won’.  If I turn my head, I can see a book on Armageddon, the Battle of France, D-day, and Stalin and the German invasion of Russia called ‘Grand Delusion’.

I wish I could read these book to understand more about this pile of rubble I am sitting on called Europe.  But I have way to many other grand delusions to navigate my way through in this wonderful city.

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(Guardian) How G20 Ian Tomlinson footage spread shock around world

April 11, 2009 at 1:05 pm · Filed under blogs, political communication, politics

Here is some interesting media analysis from the Guardian newspaper relating to the use of amateur footage during the recent G20 protest. Increasingly, the democratic power game is being fought out in the media and I am surprised the police didn’t realise this and moderate their tactics accordingly. For a broader analysis of contemporary new media politics, see Manual Castells lecture at the Oxford Internet Institute titled ‘communication power in a network society’ (link).

Should anyone still doubt that the era of a citizen-led, electronic news media is on the way, then the sudden arrival and rapid global spread this week of the Guardian video showing police mistreatment of Ian Tomlinson shortly before his death at the G20 protests provides compelling evidence.

Firstly, the footage was shot by a non-professional – an American fund manager visiting London – rather than one of the scores of news crews who were there at the time. More dramatically, within hours of the video going up on the guardian.co.uk website on Tuesday afternoon, it was being watched around the world as an ever-widening network of newspapers, bloggers, Twitter users and others spread the word and passed on links (link).

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Video Blogging Week 2009…

April 3, 2009 at 9:13 pm · Filed under blogs, social media, video, video diary, web2.0

The 6th Video Blogging week is happening from the April 5- 11. Everyone who makes a movie and posts it during this day; either on YouTube or Vimeo, should tag it with “videobloggingweek2009″ so that they can be mass aggregated. Here is the link for more details. I haven’t done my video diary in some time; now is a good time to start again! (link).

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Bloggers pan Government’s ‘e-democracy’ bid

December 11, 2008 at 11:25 am · Filed under blogs, political communication

Prominent Australian bloggers have lashed the Federal Government over its first attempt at public consultation via a blog, which has already been hijacked by critics of its plan to censor the internet.

In a move dubbed “e-democracy”, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner announced this week they would be taking feedback from Australians for two weeks on a new blog canvassing Australia’s digital economy (link to the Melbourne Age)

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Obama by the Social Networking Numbers

November 14, 2008 at 3:58 pm · Filed under blogs, political communication, politics, social media

(from Cathy Davidson HASTAC; thanks to Torsten R for the link)

Jeremiah Owyang, whose blog is Web Strategy by Jeremiah, posted these numbers on November 3, his comparative analysis of the social networking of Barack Obama’s campaign and John McCain’s and their relative followers. Pretty interesting! Here’s the link for the blog posting that is filled with comments, more links, and analysis.  Bottom line:  Of course Obama won!

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/11/03/snapshot-of-presidential-c…

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Is writing this blog killing me?

April 7, 2008 at 2:22 pm · Filed under blogs, web2.0

The New York Times reports that two men were so obsessed with internet activity, their health was fatally damaged (Link)

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Politics: Web 2.0: An International Conference: Second Call For Papers

October 6, 2007 at 8:30 am · Filed under blogs, political communication, politics, social media

Politics: Web 2.0: An International Conference: Second Call For Papers

Hosted by the New Political Communication Unit, Department of Politics
and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London.
http://newpolcom.rhul.ac.uk

April 17-18, 2008.

http://newpolcom.rhul.ac.uk/politics-web-2-0-conference/

Second call for papers

Has there been a shift in political use of the Internet and digital new
media – a new Web 2.0 politics based on participatory values? How do
broader social, cultural, and economic shifts towards Web 2.0 impact, if
at all, on the contexts, the organizational structures, and the
communication of politics and policy? Does Web 2.0 hinder or help
democratic citizenship? This conference provides an opportunity for
researchers to share and debate perspectives.

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Australian Blogging Conference

October 4, 2007 at 9:23 pm · Filed under CMS, blogs, collaboration, conferences

Over the past decade, the internet has democratised publishing, transforming the way in which society communicates and researches. Once web page creation required a sophisticated knowledge of HTML, but user friendly tools now make it possible for anyone to create a web page. The easiest and most common web page to create is a blog, (or a weblog). These blogs take the form of an online journal or diary and can cover any topic – from the life of a high school student to complex political analysis and debate. With the proliferation of blogs over the last two years, their authors have had a significant influence on popular culture, scholarship, journalism and politics (link).

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A Blog Philosophy

July 20, 2007 at 12:33 am · Filed under art, blogs, collaboration, communuity informatics, digital humanities, humanities computing, hypertext, internet

If a blog can have a philosophy, then the philosophy of this blog is that there is nothing particularly radical about the new. The new may be radical to some, but the new can only be new in the context of the old (or their ‘old’). Some of the old may be threatened by the new, but then again if the new isn’t new, the the old is only threatened by what it already knows, or what it has already learnt the hard way (remember Nuremberg). The new never follows what is new, the new leads in the context of ‘olds’ and what it keeps is a sign of how civilised it is, and what it discards, is often a sign of how lazy it is.

Few things are truly new and even the ‘new’ has a history of ‘newness’. Thus finding what is new and applying it to positive and progressive tasks, is far from a walk in the park. A blog is not an end in itself, it is a way of gaining perspective over-time, a cognitive perspective on what is new, what is useful, and how this can progress our knowledge (and make it new). Fundamental to the advancement of knowledge, is moving through knowledge, sharing knowledge, and imparting an alternative perspective to those who don’t look for it and to those who should.

What is new about new media, the Internet, and hypertext? It depends who you ask. In that famous line from 1972, Henry Kissinger asked the Chinese Foreign Minister, Zhou Enlai, for his views on the French Revolution of 1789. He responded, “It’s too soon to tell.”

Blog on, we might learn something.

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