Wednesday, January 7, 2004

Oh nooo.... Should we be encouraging more webloggers?! I had fun yesterday helping some folks at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology start their first weblogs, so expect productivity at MIT to go crashing through the floor sometime soon. (I'm joking. At least I hope I'm joking.) Our leader, Andrew Grumet, provided an elegant one-line definition of a weblog for the class: "A frequently updated Web site consisting of posts listed in reverse chronological order." To get through his fine intro-class outline in the time available, perhaps the best next step after that one-sentence definition would be to dive into Michael Feldman's tutorial on Manila (which the MIT class is using, via Harvard), or into Blogger or Radio or something. Discussion of what each individual in the class might do with a blog and looking at examples could come later. Beyond Andrew's one-line definition, my additions are full of conditional words like "usually" and "often": ... which almost always has links to other sites, ... often summarizes or comments on the contents of those links, ... may focus on one or more consistent subject-matter topics ... commonly uses weblog software to make it all easy ... usually features "a single author's unedited voice" ... but may have a group of authors ... and they may follow a common theme or style. Beyond that, the use of pictures, design elements, calendars, archival links, blogrolls, multimedia, category structures, RSS aggregators, and all the other bells and whistles vary widely. Weblogs are as uniform as Jello... Are they journalism? Many are. Some do "news reporting"; others do "punditry" or a new citizen civics. Some have a history. Some seem to be accumulating book chapters. The bigger the group of authors and the more formal the style (even editing to provide a "collective voice"), the more a Weblog starts to look like a magazine or newspaper. Or a stack of them -- think of each day's edition as the time stamp on the "log," a fine word for a pile of newspapers made from dead trees. Unedited individual voices have great energy, but --my roots are showing-- sometimes I think it might not hurt if even single-author weblogs kept a dictionary handy and consulted The Associated Press Stylebook. Fussing to get things right is expected in journalism, but it can make weblogging take even more of your day. Personally, I'd blog more often, but I find blogging and fussing with details too tempting as ways to keep from getting things done. So, of course, are newspapers, television, music and books. Sometimes it seems my life is one big "to do" list with very little in the "done" column. I mentioned some of these issues to one of MIT's new weblogger's in an e-mail today, and the next three things that plunked onto my desktop through a topic-oriented weblog aggregator, were a nice feature on weblogs from USA Today linked above, news that the U.S. Navy is experimenting with weblogs (note my warning about M.I.T. productivity in the first sentence), and a timely note from Jakob Nielsen on Cleaning Up Information Pollution: "Summary:Better prioritization, fewer interruptions, and concentrated information that's easy to find and manage helps people become more productive and stop wasting their colleagues' time." Oh, look. It's almost 5. I'm getting back to work now. Are you? 4:28:14 PM    comment []

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