Quite the Menu

Below are links and descriptions of the individual blogs from this course. Read a blurb, read a blog, change your life!

1 Take: Movies and everything else.

Behind the Times: "An abomination in the sight of all that is holy. --Charles Darwin
"This blog gave me herpes." --Lenard Nimoy

But How Much Did You Lose? is the newest blog attempting to get in with the worst of it. This poker blog is a welcome break from the otherwise ultra-serious personal blogs of pro and semi-pro players. Burdamania is not afraid to admit his losing ways in everything, whether it be poker-related or just expensive first-dates, but adds a certain sappy charm to it all. There's nothing to lose by bookmarking this new frontier of comedic poker posts!

Floriated Swashbuckling: Interwebular Cranium Cruising on the road to Mottled Wit

From the Brilliant Mind of Mags: A look at pop culture and fashion through the lens of a twenty something female intertwined with life experiences and stories.

Here's Your Opinion: One guy's take on professional, collegiate and UMass sports. You might not have one yet, so Here's Your Opinion.

Fill Me With Meaning: The author of this blog is a senior English major. Her blog is a random collection of thoughts, writing, and other miscellanea.

That's What She Said is a personal blog that displays Ludakristi's life as a
graduating college senior. In it you'll find topics ranging from serious to
comical, recipes to personal statements, and more. You'll especially like it
if you're into cats and karaoke.

The Commentary is On. All fiction. All the time. Sometimes it's not about you.

The Five Hundred: A comprehensive guide to pretentious, foreign, and domestic films, French New Wave, youtube clips and self-deprication, updated weekly and guaranteed to make you visit wikipedia.com at least twice.

Seth Sibley is a senior English major and Classics minor, graduating in
May of 2007. Seth's blog, "UMassDarkside -- Konami Code Kid," is, as the
title suggests, all about video gaming. Seth's been playing video games
borderline-religiously since he was three. And without showing any signs
of stopping, he wanted to share his knowledge about gaming, along with
gaming news, with everyone in the Blogosphere. So what'll it be:
Continue, Save, or Quit?

It takes a village...?

How do blogs create or express community? Do we consider our identities as fixed prior to our entrance into the blogosphere? Or does our interaction there construct a new identity? Do we join blogging communities based upon previous interests, or discover new possibilities for community and interaction by exploring blogs? Are these communities “real”? Why or why not? What purposes do they serve for us or for others?

Just like being there

I thought we looked at some really interesting ways that some blogs are using multimedia. Obviously, using images, videos, and sound are pretty common in blogs, but how these things get used in the service of the blog's purpose is where it's worth focusing our attention.

So, how have you been using multimedia? How do you present images, video, or sound? How might the multimedia be used in relation to the purpose or operating theme of your blog? What's the relationship of the multimedia to the text?

NEW POLICY

I just wanted to remind everyone of the new posting policy. You can still post absolutely anytime you want, but please have your posts done by Monday night. It was just getting too confusing trying to determine how to give credit (last week, or next week?) for posts that came in right around 3-5pm on Tuesdays. Especially when the timestamps aren't always set for Eastern time.

I hope this doesn't overly inconvenience anyone. Happy blogging, and we'll see you in two weeks! Check back here for a couple of questions we can be considering during our long hiatus.

Does the Cheese Stand Alone?

Who is reading your blog? How do you know? Have you recruited readers, asked friends, or engaged in cultivating an audience? Do you imagine that audience as you write? Do you have readers who you don’t know outside the blog? How did they find your blog? Do you comment on the blogs of strangers? How do common interests and reciprocity work in the blogosphere?

State of the Blogosphere (Your mother!)

With Spring Break upon us, we're nearly half done with our time together. Try not to cry. (Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in.)

So, much like our Commander-in-Chief (who won reelection by tens of votes), the duty falls to us to examine the state of our blogosphere. Ahem.

So, without further ado, I'd love you all to consider the following questions:

1.) What have I accomplished so far?
2.) Where do I see my blogs going?
3.) Is this getting easier, harder, neither, both?
4.) Am I coming up with new and different things to say each week? Is that necessary?
5.) What have I learned?
6.) Why should what I'm writing be a blog rather than something else?

Post your answers here!

Read Me!

Call it dereliction of duty. Call it laziness. Call me undedicated.

I have not been updating this page, and therefore haven't been giving anyone any incentive to check back here. Shame on me.

So, in an effort to get this up and running, I thought maybe this could be a place to start our discussion of the Internet and Democracy. Whether you've read the handout for next week or not, what are you initial thoughts on the notion that the web is a democratic space or medium? Is this an empowering thought? Are you buying it? What makes it democratic, or what could make it more democratic? Should the internet, or blogs specifically, be political?

Ex. Cell. Ent.

I really enjoyed this week's class. It was amazing to hear all the different projects you're doing and the beginnings of some very interesting writing. It seems like you've been very thoughtful in considering what formats, topics, and restrictions (or not) are going to work best for you. Congrats on taking that first step and don't worry if things change a bit as things start to take off. Some of you have already begun posting, and I've enjoyed reading so far. For those of you who haven't quite started yet, don't let the empty screen worry you. Just jump in and write something. I can't wait to discuss how your different processes are going.

I'm also very excited about your collaborative blogs. My plan for this class has been very "blog now, reflect later" so I'm glad you've already taken the initiative to try new things and have one much larger collaborative blog than I anticipated. This is why I'm going to try not to tell you how to blog this semester: you have better ideas on your own!

As I mentioned in class, spend this next week looking for blogs you find visually interesting. That doesn't have to mean blogs that are slick or pretty, but rather things you gravitate toward intuitively based on the look of the blog. Bring one (or more) examples of this to class, and let's have a conversation about the role of image and design in writing and blogging. Until then, happy blogging!

For the record...

Here is the course description and grading policy, as passed out in class today.


Course Description

In July of 2006, technorati.com tracked its 50 millionth blog. Politicians, professors, soldiers, schoolchildren, programmers, critics, watchdogs, moguls, malcontents, caregivers—it seems everyone has a blog. We’ve accepted the word and its world into our lexicon, but how do we address ourselves to this medium? What’s it done and what’s it doing to the ways in which we write and think about writing? Where do we fit in?

This will not be a how-to course on blogging. There will be no discussion of the proper uses and methods of blogging. Why? Because the rules of this medium are in process; the rules are currently being written, and rewritten, by its practitioners. By you.

Rather than answer the question, “how do we blog?” this course will ask, “why do we blog?” So what will we do in such a course? We will be writing ourselves into the blogosphere. We will be inserting ourselves into this medium by reading the blogs of others, by responding to the blogs of others, by writing our own blogs, by responding to the blogs of strangers and friends, classmates and teachers, and by engaging in the act and world of blogging.

We will examine blog genres, and consider the places were classification breaks down. We will write to audiences large and small, by variously conceiving and recruiting audiences for our writing. We will consider the world of public and private, as we negotiate a medium that positions itself as intensely personal while existing on the largest distribution medium ever conceived.

How will all of this change our writing? Will we draft? Will we compose directly online, or write privately first? Will we alter content once it is posted? Will we integrate graphics or audio into our texts? How do visual aesthetics affect audience and readability? Will our text be standard, written English, or something more specific to our blog? Will we chose a genre to write within, define genre as the writing develops, or refuse classification? Does any of that matter to my audience or influence the way I write? What is possible on a blog that is not in other forms of writing? Does it matter?

Nuts and Bolts

In this course, each student will be responsible for two blogs. One blog will be an individual blog, whose content, purpose, and audience (beyond our class) will be solely defined by the single author. This blog can have an explicit purpose, or can be an exploration of possible purpose. This blog can seek wide readership, or choose to reveal itself as audiences find it. The space is what you make of it. You can post once per week or ten times per day. The only requirement is that you post a minimum of 500 words each week. Students wishing to blog primarily with non-traditional text are welcome to speak with me about how to do so while still meeting a workload requirement, roughly equivalent to the 500-word minimum.

The second blog will be a collaborative blog. Groups of three or four will write together on a blog of expressed purpose. Possible topics and/or genres will be generated in class, and students will place themselves in a collaborative group of their choice. Each member of the group will be responsible for posting a minimum of 250 words on this blog each week.

In addition to generating main posts, students will be commenting on the blogs of their classmates. Students will be placed in rotating comment groups, so that throughout the semester we will be reading and commenting on everyone else’s individual blogs. Students must comment once per week on the Individual blogs of each member of their comment groups.

Grades & Attendance

Since this is a pass/fail course, students wishing to pass the course must complete a minimum of 80% of the blogging requirements and miss no more than two classes. Students missing three or more classes will be unable to pass.

Welcome!

Welcome to Writing into the Blogosphere! I’m looking forward to a lively and interesting semester. For those of you wishing to get an early start, feel free to post here with any questions or comments, and feel free to get started blogging. This blog will serve as our class portal. Once we have set up our blogs for the class, I’ll post the links to all of our blogs here. After we have created our blogs, lists of them will be posted in the sidebar on the left.

Rather than use WebCT or another password-protected portal, it made sense to me that we should use a public blog site to coordinate our other public blog sites. Here we can post class announcements, links to articles and blogs that we find interesting, and generally have a central place to share ideas and point to features we’d like to highlight on our own blogs.

Welcome! I look forward to meeting you this semester!