Sometime around 2003 I discovered MovableType, partly because a few ‘A List’ bloggers had started to hit the scene and I wanted to emulate their fame and fortune. One was Jill Walker, an academic from Norway, and the other was Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing.  In my wisdom I registered the domain name history.net.at and installed MovableType on my server. Both were a bad idea.  Historical knowledge doesn’t really lend itself to blogging (Dan Cohen may disagree) and I couldn’t think of much to say in the oppressive day-to-day grind of the diary format. And the first MovableType software was a nightmare and the post categories, hierarchies and HTML updating were frustrating and Byzantine (and at times, even life threatening). So I didn’t blog for a while. I just watched other bloggers become rich and famous; go on the lecture circuit, get advertising revenue, turn their blogs into best selling books and tell us  they were at the fore-front of an enhanced democratic system where everyone now had an equal voice. Except for me because no one was reading history.net.au. I wrote about the history of the 8 hour day, then the Fringe Festival, then the Moomba Festival. But it didn’t seem to work.  The medium demanded something different from me; it was as though I was ordering slow cooked Peking Duck in a fast food restaurant. It just didn’t seem to work.

Then sometime around 2005 I discovered that some bloggers were vainly blogging in their own name. They were registering their own names as domain names and using this as the sites identity. So, I registered craigbellamy.net and installed WordPress on my server. (TBC)

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).

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).

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).

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

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:

* How are blogs being used in academic circles?

* Do blogs help spread information or create bubbles and isolation of highly specialized academics?

* Should blogs be counted for tenure applications? Should blog posts count as publications?

* How can blogging enhance student learning? What successful ways have you seen blogging incorporated into pedagogy, and what can we learn from less successful attempts?

* How does live blogging impact the experience of academic conferences or other such large, collective events?

John Jones is a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin where he studies rhetoric and technology. Currently he is an Assistant Director of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing’s Computer Writing and Research Lab.

Ramsey Tesdell graduated from the University of Washington after writing his thesis, entitled “An Ecology of New Media in Jordan,” through which he explored how various new media technologies are being utilized for collective actions. He now lives in Amman, Jordan and writes for 7iber.com.

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).

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.

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).