Ed Cone: “If you want flow, if you want a huge number of people to come to your website, does anyone know the one-word answer to that? Porn. Another way to get high flow is to be super partisan.” He says: “I’m trying to build the biggest community for my voice that I can possibly build.” Is that a noble experiment in niche community-building or megalomania? He emails links to.. Read More
The ultimate vanity press: “If you didn’t think that you had anything to say, you wouldn’t be doing this.” Silflay Hraka is talking about his Carnival of the Vanities. It was an attempt to hack the Blogdex rankings. Now we’re talking about The Long Tail. Someone to my right says that blogs are an example of the long tail: more people followed the later news on Rathergate than watched the.. Read More
BabyBlog: that’s a new term on me. Ben MacNeill is talking about his blog, The Trixie Update. I love the graphs. This is like the Alton Brown of babyblogs: the science of everyday things. Ben asks, for life events, do you post in real-time, or save it up & post long updates? He suggests that you lay groundrules so your audience knows what to expect & doesn’t go away unhappy.. Read More
Anton says that the price for admission to this free conference is that you have to share your experiences. This is one of the things that I think will be most interesting coming out of this conference: to look at the live blog posts made during this event, after it’s over. The cross-section of the event, the artifacts created during the event, through the eyes of everyone here. I left.. Read More
I realized yesterday that this will be the first time I’ve live blogged anything. Be interesting to see how that goes. I realized this morning that I’ve communicated with some of the people here more via our blogs than I have in person. I said this to Sally, & her comment was, “there are all kinds of communities.” Indeed.
I’ve been thinking about the question I posed the other day, What do communities do? Not being a sociologist, I don’t believe that I can answer that question. I would expect that this would vary widely across contexts. But one function that I would expect all communities must perform is communication. I can even see an argument that communication is necessary for a community, otherwise how could anything communal even.. Read More
Parents protest radio ID tags for students, from CNN The only grade school in this rural town is requiring students to wear radio frequency identification badges that can track their every move. Some parents are outraged, fearing it will rob their children of privacy. The badges introduced at Brittan Elementary School on January 18 rely on the same radio frequency and scanner technology that companies use to track livestock and.. Read More
I ride the bus to campus in the mornings with a man who is the Assistant Editor of an Elsevier journal here at UNC. I don’t know if he’d want me to name him, so I won’t. We’ve been talking over the course of a few months about scholarly publishing and Elsevier and predatory pricing and institutional repositories and the scholarly communications convocation. Anyway, this morning he hands me a.. Read More
As I was thinking earlier today about blogs and community, I thought to look at the Triangle BloggerCon‘s site again. I rediscovered that the Blog Together site is “a wiki about using blogs to build community.” This wiki is to be a resource for tools and tutorials on how to build community around a blog and how to use a blog to build community. So there you are: even a.. Read More
I’m getting into the spirit of the Triangle Bloggers Conference, so as Anton has requested, here’s my first post on blogging and community. One topic that’s occupying a lot of my thinking these days is community development of information resources. I and Jane and Evelyn and some folks from the NC Botanical Garden just submitted a grant proposal to the IMLS to fund the development of a digital library of.. Read More