January
by Jon Garfunkel
In the realm of online political commentary, there are blogs, and there are things which resemble or are thought to be blogs. It’s vital to know what’s what— not to castigate some as being on one side of the divide, but simply to help researchers and practitioners understand, what salient features they are referring to when they talk about “blogs.” A closer analysis is needed to understand which characteristics– including those that are inherent with the setup of the software, as well as those that are emergent— should be explored or employed for a particular situation.
by Jon Garfunkel
Proposing a series of questions that should be asked for analyzing online content. These questions should encourage the development of standards and software for qualifying online content such that it can be automatically analyzed. I am tempted to call this discipline media architecture, and I will check with others in the field about the appropriateness of the term.
by Jon Garfunkel
From the department of “Breaking News”:
by Jon Garfunkel
What role did the bloggers play in taking down CBS's 60 Minutes, Dan Rather, and the "liberal media?". The conventional wisdom is that the blogosphere played a central role, and that the mainstream media missed the boat. Too bad that the defenders of the mainstream media are still missing the facts to make a solid analysis.
by Jon Garfunkel
What if there were no blogosphere? Would participitory media still thrive? I’d like to introduce some alternative constructs which may perhaps be as virtual as the blogosphere, and just as instructive in understanding the new media.
by Jon Garfunkel
For Theories of the Bulge, I needed to come up with a timeline of when theories were developed. I researched through the core websites, and had a look at a few more that were linked. Afterwards, I gave this a bit of structure by splitting it up into weeks. And then I thought, what else was going on in the news that week? This was quite a busy month– and it didn't help that four debates were cramed into the first half of it. If the debates were spached out by a week or two over a longer period of time, it perhaps would have allowed the country to spend more time on the issues covered– as well as the meta-issues like this.
by Jon Garfunkel
Whatever happened to the bulge on President Bush’s back, visible in the Presidential debates? It was referred to by the usual family of -Gates: AudioGate, PrompterGate, and, my favorite, “The Battle of the Bulge.” I had followed the story develop first-hand on various blogs, and saw how it played out in the national media, fading out by election day. It’s returned to the news, briefly, courtesy of a Dan Kennedy column in the Phoenix. I thought I’d take another look at the story, and try to answer the question as to why the Internet blogs, for all their supposed powers, could not shake the truth out. This is part of a series on “Truth Exposure: Getting the Facts to Light.”
by Jon Garfunkel
Tonight the Powerline Blog, on a roll from its December triumph as Time magazines “Blog of the Year,” relays this blurb: “Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal reports the news that has been roiling the blogosphere today: ‘Dean campaign made payments to two bloggers.’ Roiling? Will this roil blogosphere? There have been three trackbacks to Powerline, and two of them have debunked this as truly being news. This will be third, but I promise the most thoroughly written and the most fun.
by Jon Garfunkel
A fifteen minute podcast conversation between Dave Winer and Joe Trippi sheds a little light on the Zephyr Teachout-Wall Street Journal controversy… and even less on blogger credibility.
by Jon Garfunkel
Is it necessary for journalists to reveal their personal biases?
This comes from the folk bloggers such as Dave Winer, and, to the best of my knowledge, pushed for by folk-blogging supporters like NYU’s Jay Rosen— that journalists are just like normal people and probably have opinions about things they right about, and thus they ought to be as transparent as a blogger. I’m very skeptical about that approach.
by Jon Garfunkel
If only it were easy to find out what a given person thinks of a certain entity, and by extension, what a given person thinks of anything, or what people think of a certain entity. This, I believe is the goal of “information transparency” that is anticipated by the blogger visionaries.
by Jon Garfunkel
On Martin Luther King Day, I celebrate by listening to WGBH’s Eric Jackson‘s salute to the great man, which he does by interespersing King’s speeches with jazz music. There are very few evenings on the radio as
by Jon Garfunkel
THIS IS A DRAFT. Posting this in the hope that someone else can do it
better– like someone who researches for a living. The goal here is to try and determine “leading indicators” of online
political writers, and find out who we should be reading more, and trying to
avoid the trap of the”power law”, (see Shirky) which holds that people read the
writers largely because other people read them.
by Jon Garfunkel
Why study the Daily Kos? Is it possible? Is it necessary?
Quite simple. Consider it in evolutionary terms. There are some necessary long-term objectives of your community: grow. colonize. survive. (Paul Lukasiak suggested I rearrange this document so people can get right to the questions. For details about the questions, read the rest of the document.)
- Does dKos have room to grow?
- Among the “Big Five” most read bloggers by journalists (according to a study this past summer), there’s only one liberal site– Talking Points Memo. Is this a problem? dKos is further down the list. Should it crack the top five?
- Do the sheer number of contributors make dKos stronger?
- Why be part of dKos, and not be part of MyDD? From a handful of measures, dKos is 10x bigger; what if there were two equally strong collectives to crack the top 5?
- Do you consider yourself part of the blogosphere?
- Do you see any values or methods used on dKos which should be shared with the larger blogosphere?
- Would you see a benefit in extending Scoop to institutions which are considering setting up blogs?
- How much do you use the dKosopedia vs. the classic Daily Kos diaries?
- How about the citizenry and local party leaders/activists? Should they be engaged through dKos? or through scoop-like sites, or through anything in the netroots?
- Do you understand what Kos’s ethics are?
- Are you worried that, given Kos’s penchant for saying what’s on his mind, he may put the entire website in jeopardy? considering all that you have on the website.
- Do you think that Kos is deserving of the revenue for the site? Has anyone considered a revenue-sharing program? Or, at least a way to offer reward top contributors with prizes?
I’d post on my own in Kos, but I don’t have a diary yet, so Paul said he’d try to post this in his. I suppose it’s easiest if dKos members want to post their answers on there and not here. I hope that this is even more helpful for the dKos community than it is for me. I originally started out writing a piece on Kos as an instution/advocate/observer, particularly related to the DNC Chair race and netroots efforts– this had 7500 words by the end of Decemeber. I held onto it do a little more research, and to work on other things. I now realize I ought to continue the research after the DNC Chair race is decided. This discussion is incidental, but is very helpful in shedding light on the big picture.
by Jon Garfunkel
I thought I'd be able to weigh in, umm, subjectively on the blogger vs. journalist question; I'm in neither camp.
by Jon Garfunkel
Friday night at the Harvard Faculty Club, after the amuse-bouche ordered a bottle of wine outside the house selection, we played spin the bottle. The way you play it blogger-style is you spin the bottle, and find out which of the rotating definitions of blogs should be embraced. David Weinberger was the designated spinner for the evening, and delivered a half-hour talk over dessert. By the last third of it, he started speaking from the heart, and got to the core of what he felt blogging was all about.
by Jon Garfunkel
There have been a few summaries about the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility Conference, co-sponsored by the Berkman Center and Shorenstein Center at Harvard, along with the American Library Association. Most of them focused on what the insiders have said– NYU Professor and conference presenter Jay Rosen even titled his summary “ Big Wigs Confer.” I thought I’d take a separate angle, and look at what some of the little people said. This includes the little voices around the big table; the voices of the observers in the room, and even people on the Internet– bloggers and others who care about the future of ideas– who felt excluded from the conversaion in the first place. And I thought I’d do this using the framework of inclusiveness.
February
by Jon Garfunkel
“Blog This!” the button on your browser’s Google toolbar beckons. You click the button, and see a prompt for name and password. Sign up, and boom! you’re one of 27,000 people a day who create a blog– perhaps most of whom don’t even know it, or may not be sure you wanted to do that.
As I’ve explained, blogs are different things to different people. Rebecca Blood one of those people who is more respected than most, and here’s her recent definition: “The weblog is at once a scrapbook, news filter, chapbook, newsletter, and
community.”
by Jon Garfunkel
When Jay Rosen proclaimed that in 2004 News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation” it’s clear that he values conversation. I’m still holding out for a good conversation on his PressThink site, so fortunately for us, Shelley Powers has submitted her own thoughts on conversation. I thought I’d ask some questions about conversations and news.
by Jon Garfunkel
For the last couple of months, there’s been a man panhandling by the Store 24 on Beacon St., between the streetcar stop and the Griggs path. Today I gave him a buck, which is the same amount I gave him a couple of weeks ago, only that time he gave me a 1960 silver quarter in exchange. There’s been panhandlers before on the corner in years past, but no one really stuck around much, as far as I knew. Maybe he’s stuck around a bit because I asked him his name and give him a few words of conversation. So I see him once every couple of weeks; I’m not sure what his pattern is.
by Jon Garfunkel
To bring order to the universe— at least that part we call the Hub here in Boston, home of the repeat NFL champion New England Patriots and World Series champion Boston Red Sox, Adam Gaffin has organized the Universal Hub. (I’ve only lived here seven years, and live in neighboring Brookline while working in neighboring Cambridge, but one of the first things I learned was that Oliver Wendell Holmes originally dubbed Boston the “hub of the universe.” It’s the hub of my commute, for sure.)
by Jon Garfunkel
Should we care about what happens in a global forum planning the future of the world? Would we care more if our actions, or inactions, affect larger events?
by Jon Garfunkel
This may be the first sonnet I’ve written in fourteen years. It was not expressly for Rebecca MacKinnon’s Valentine’s Day Sonnet Contest, though it’s not too far from her requested themes of “love and blogging.” Instead, it had a more utilitarian purpose. Bob Cox had written a loooong email to a group of a people about the state of blogging, and I wanted to respond to some of the points, and offer a link to my latest piece, yet not bore everybody with a tedious post. Inspired by my recent diet of Leaves of Grass, I started writing, and one rhyme led to another, and this is what I emailed a week ago…
by Jon Garfunkel
I have a case for Walt Whitman being some sort of early blogger. It is the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Leaves of Grass, so no doubt he will be discussed in every school in this country this year. When researching “singer” as one of the main archetypes of today’s bloggers, I came up with that term as I remembered that Whitman was fond of singing as a metaphor for celebrating oneself.
by Jon Garfunkel
It’s a strange country where Peggy Noonan, columnist for the Wall Street Journal, peddles anti-elitist populism in the media wars. She suggests that the future of the media belongs to people who reject professionalism in all forms. I think there’s a better way.
by Jon Garfunkel
On Sunday I went to hear Howard Zinn speak at the Boston chapter of the National Writers Union. He said that he sees more activism today that any time during the 1960’s.
I wasn’t there then, but it’s possible that the perception leads reality. Wherever one looks on the Internet, there is activism, though the physical evidence, and quantifiable acheivements, are harder to discern (Zinn did not admit to much web-surfing, let along blog-reading, other than reading his email).
by Jon Garfunkel
“Jeff Gannon” was originally outed as a conservative operative in the White House press room one year ago. Why did the story take so long to break?
by Jon Garfunkel
What’s promising about the Internet, it’s been suggested, is that it can facilitate conversations, particularly among people who wouldn’t ordinarily meet in everydate life. Online I purposesly try to seek out people different from myself.
by Jon Garfunkel
Presenting a set of blogger archetypes: the singers, the wingers, the fingers, the ringers, and the stringers. Update March 14th: For an abbreviated version of this, read What type of blogger/self-publisher are you? Update October 23rd: I’ve added the archetype flinger.
by Jon Garfunkel
There have been increasing calls for integrating bloggers as “citizen journalists” in traditional publications, based on the premise that bloggers are now making the news. This deserves further scrutiny. There’s more than meets the eye here.
March
by Jon Garfunkel
This should be the central obligation of any publisher: legitimacy to the readers, the audience, the constituency. Whether it takes priority over responsibility to the public at large, or even the truth, is a separate, though necessary, discussion. Here we try to help anyone new to publishing consider– questions to ask in assessing how well they are serving their readers. It’s absolutely necessary as the number of readers grows. Call it the Media Contract. (read a longer introduction on media legitimacy)
by Jon Garfunkel
The ideal of journalism is to be responsible to the truth. Whether individual journalists or publications meet that ideal is often debated, but they all, at a basic level, have a definitive responsibility– to their readers.
by Jon Garfunkel
There was another “BloJo” confab last week up here at Harvard, officially titled Whose News, but from all outward appearances, it looked like BloJo Redux. That’s Blo for Bloggers and Jo for Journalists, and while we’re at it. Re for Rehash, and Dux for quack quack. This time, the meeting of the minds sponsored by the Media Center at the American Press Institute and hosted at the Nieman Foundation. I was curious whether I missed anything. So, it turns out, were the attendees.
by Jon Garfunkel
There’s been many questions and opinions about what the nature of the online community of bloggers and others is composed of, and very few facts. Here I propose some basic identity questions to ask, as well as other series of questions I have posted previously. At the end I discuss some technical means for taking such a census in a sustainable fashion.
by Jon Garfunkel
This page contains a number of research projects I’ve undertaken in order better study blogs and other online journalism comparatively.
by Jon Garfunkel
Why it took over two years of conversations to get to this point; Why it's important; What can be done; Where we should go from here.
by Jon Garfunkel
A review of Internet discussions over the last two years regarding promoting women’s voices in blogging. This is not a complete list, but a spotlight on some of the more well-known participants and discussions. This was part of the analysis Promoting Women Bloggers.
by Jon Garfunkel
There’s been a lot of talk about the “A-List” in the blogosphere– the top bloggers who get all the attention– and this often inspires speculation about parallel B-lists and C-lists. What many people don’t know is that the designations go all the way to Z. Here is the full list:
by Jon Garfunkel
A set of questions to be framed for investigating online participatory media.
by Jon Garfunkel
If you want to know something about social media, blogs, etc. these are the people you might look towards and this is the information you may be able to collect. I have consolidated the data in this chart. Unfortunately, it tells you nothing at all — nothing about the particular expertise of each person in producing good information or interpreting it.
by Jon Garfunkel
A response to The National Review Online.
April
by Jon Garfunkel
April First re-introduction: Today is my birthday, I am once again a prime-number age after what has been my longest stretch away from being in my prime, six years. (You do the math). My sister just gave me the best gift ever, a mechanical fifty-year calendar paperweight, which may outlast this operating system, if not social security. Also recently the National Review Online has had some problems understanding what content here is self-parody, so I thought I’d help out by republishing a foolish little piece I wrote on January 24th. According to my new paperweight, I spin the wheel and find out that it was a Monday.
by Jon Garfunkel
Proposing a scaleable solution for sending tips to publishers.
Last month, I wrote that publications, traditional and online, have a primary responsibility to demonstrate that they are responsive to their readers, and that a majority of the questions along these lines should be concerned with how they handle tips. This month Jay Rosen recognized the problem in the midst of a PressThink discussion and spelled out some guidelines for sending in tips (e.g., “Write a post in PressThink’s major areas of interest that gets other people talking, and makes an original point or two.”) This is a good start. Here’s a longer proposal for how it can be done that meets goals of accountability and fairness.
by Jon Garfunkel
A stark look at the challenge of the old gatekeepers– and the possible emergence of new ones.
First in a series on The New Gatekeepers.
by Jon Garfunkel
…where I learned just who the new gatekeepers were, and why people are suspicious of their roles.
Second in the series on The New Gatekeepers.
by Jon Garfunkel
In the last 4 months, I’ve written 60 articles. These fifteen are ones that I feel follow the style of Liebling. After the first piece, a rather sober analysis about media mistrust, I started diving headfirst into news stories. I looked at why stories broke they way they did. Like Liebling, I avoided jumping to the conclusion that some all-powerful conspiracy was to blame; instead these stories represent cirumstances where average people just ambled along, sticking with old habits, making simple mistakes, not listening to others. And it’s not just the press that’s wayward these days; it’s the new blog-press, too.
by Jon Garfunkel
Third in the series on The New Gatekeepers. There are a number of values associated with, and celebrated in, the blogosphere: Freedom. Anonymity. Immediacy. Talking. Breadth. Ego. Involvement. Serendipity. But we may view them in different light when we consider what values they displace:
by Jon Garfunkel
Fourth in the series on The New Gatekeepers.
A wonderful set of coincidences happened this weekend; I decided to take a break from writing, and then a beautiful woman flew into town and we happened to met, and we decided to go out Saturday night. Pretty quickly I had to find something to go see and a restaurant to dine in. Your dividend from all of this, dear reader, is an illustration about the different circumstances where gatekeepers are necessary or not: from theater shows to dining options.
by Jon Garfunkel
Fifth in the series on The New Gatekeepers.It’s been over two weeks since the that last part of this series. This gap in time can be partly rationalized by my hoping to build up some anticipation for this next part. We’re going to look at epidemics, cascades and the problem of crowds.
May
by Jon Garfunkel
Before I get to the solutions, I’ll spend some time summarizing what has been discussed in The New Gatekeepers series, this being part 6.
People around the world have discovered their voices, and enjoy
seeing their work published online for others to read. The tools they use are quite often blogs, and thus they call themselves bloggers. And by the bubble of blogging, the format been hyped as a panacea for solving the problems of the media, of business, or organizations. It just doesn’t follow.
by Jon Garfunkel
This is an addendum to the New Gatekeepers series (formally, part 7). In the series, particularly part 4, I described that the need for gatekeepers is a result of discursive postings; in order to minimize the influence of gatekeepers, we need aggregatable declarations.
by Jon Garfunkel
To read the headlines, or the bloglines, one might get the sense that the bloggers have arrived on the scene to challenge the “gatekeepers” of the big media. This is an essay in eight parts to examine this theme.
by Jon Garfunkel
This piece brings the New Gatekeepers series to a close. I sketched out a future vision in the previous part, which I believe could happen, sometime. In the meanwhile, I will write about the future as it has happened over the past four months.
by Jon Garfunkel
Here’s a summary of reactions to The New Gatekeepers series– and some brief responses back from me. Also see reactions froom delicious as well as Technorati. February 11, 2006: The number-one ranked site for "The New Gatekeepers" is no longer this series but a thousand-word essay with that title that Tristan Louis posted last Friday. I have a lot of respect for Tristan as a guy who has contributed a lot of critical thinking and original research on Internet and media over years. And we correspond somewhat, not as much as I do with Seth, but I would have figured that he might have Googled the title, to see whether it has an active promoter of it. Dave Rogers was first to comment to Tristan’s piece, sending him the link to this series.
June
by Jon Garfunkel
It’s now my 200th post. My hundredth post was a year ago. It took me five months to get to that first hundred. I don’t expect to keep up that pace in the next year. But I have a hunch that many of you– my regular readers, which includes 54 bloglines subscribers— would like me to. I really want to get back to the coding that I put off a year ago. I’m looking to people
to help contribute editorial content. I’ll explain in the next part what I’m looking for, but I just want to expend a few words sharing with you how Civilities has evolved. Plus links to thirty-one pieces, some of which you may have missed.
by Jon Garfunkel
Reading Civilities, one might get the impression that I have no respect for the work that Harvard’s Berkman Center does
(I happen to have sympathy for Seth Finkelstein’s case), or respect for the “A-List Gatekeepers” (Mike Sanders does not say that, though he uses that quoted phrase), or even respect for women bloggers (Shelley Powers lumped me in with some alpha-bloggers, and later modified that, downgrading me from an onion to a scallion.)
Let me correct those mis-impressions which I’ve just made for myself:
by Jon Garfunkel
Several weeks ago, I spoke to Brian Keeler who co-founded ePluribus Media with Susan Gardner earlier this year. Their first project, propagannon, was an offshoot of distributed research done on Daily Kos about the identity of White House “reporter” Jeff Gannon. Susan had brought it to the attention of the Daily Kos diaries after reading about it from David Brock of the liberal Media Matters for America watchdog group. The diaries had been a beneficial crucible for researching aspects to Gannon’s reporting (the site counts tens of thousands of liberal activists as members), but the group soon outgrew the capabilities of the Daily Kos architecture.
by Jon Garfunkel
Interviews are very underrated in the world of online media, and there’s a great potential for doing more of them. It’s a way to write if you don’t know what to write about. I think also there’s a good way to avoid the self-focus inherent in blogs. An additional person forces an additional perspective into the story. So I thought I’d ask to see what other people in online news are doing in this area.
by Jon Garfunkel
Checking the sequence of posts on Robert Cox's The National Debate blog over a sixteen-day period.
by Jon Garfunkel
Yesterday I posted the article Fixing a Blog in Time, which was a little experiment in reading a particular blog, and trying to understand how it covered 26 different posts over a period of a little over two weeks. I chose Robert Cox's The National Debate. I did not make fully clear, with each post, how much I was mixing my initial impression of reading it with subsequent understandings. This begs a larger discussion about the tradeoffs inherent in impressionistic news. Bob sent me the following response via email this evening. I post it in full here with my brief reactions interjected.
by Jon Garfunkel
As I’ve missed much of the debate over site syndication (RSS), I just wanted to put this brief question out there: will RSS ever take into account that Internet content may change over time, and thus it’s helpful to indicate the recent change, and reason, explicitly in the RSS summary?
by Jon Garfunkel
A decade ago, the term webzine came into vogue simply to mean a web-based magazine. I’d like to breathe new life into it to describe an alternative format to the weblog for online publishing. Whereas the design fundamental of weblog is the reverse-chronological format, the design fundamental of the webzine is separate departments based on the style of the writing. I’m going to describe here how this would be useful for online communities/publishers.
by Jon Garfunkel
On Monday, Steve Outing of the Poynter Institute stacked up the eleven layers of citizen journalism. Stack may be the wrong word– that’s mine– but layers isn’t exactly right, if we are thinking about network communications layers. They’re eleven concepts used to frame a number of concepts related to the new media called citizen journalism, with some helpful examples. But it can use a little more work. Here’s my citizen additions.
by Jon Garfunkel
There are two fundamental styles of writing which comprise most of the writing around us. I call them normative and narrative, though it shouldn’t surprise me if this has been thought of communications theorists prior. Each style lends itself to a different type of publishing platform. I will explain here what the ramifications are for online publications.
by Jon Garfunkel
I’m looking for a team to help me continue to keep Civilities relevant and moving forward. It’s been exhausting for a year-plus doing this all myself, and I need some assistance so I can concentrate more on the software parts. I’m especially looking for people who aren’t bloggers, that is, with have no prejudice about what online personal publishing should be. Here’s what the work here involves:
by Jon Garfunkel
This is a technical design document for the Webzine module for Drupal. It will be updated in an ongoing basis as I work with other Drupal developers.
July
by Jon Garfunkel
I’ve prepared this document as a general how-to guide for what a community organization should consider in upgrading their website– something to serve the organization and the community. The fundamental choice from the start of the design is what architectural decisions to make. I explain why an open source CMS solution is a good architecture to pick, and do point out Drupal as a worthy example for that.
by Jon Garfunkel
Dear Readers, I had dropped some hints last month that I’d be slowing my output considerably (as like last summer). I wanted my sleep back… But I’ll be, gettting up again at this ridiculous hour in one week when I catch a 6am flight to Portland by way of Dallas/Fort Worth (!), to get to the O’Reilly Open Source Convention for a reasonable fare. I’ll be helping out the Drupal booth and otherwise getting to know some of other folks who help develop this fine software. Unfortunately I won’t be making the BlogHer conference, but I’m still appreciative that my early contributions to it have been recognized by the conference organizers.
September
by Jon Garfunkel
I’m returning from my summer break away from writing. As I hinted three months ago, I’d be on a bit of a break for a while– work had gotten pretty intense, and I was in the process of moving across town (which caused two outages of over a day last month: one by my poor planning, one by Verizon’s mistake in fixing my phone line), and then setting up the new place. And I wanted to get some normal sleep.
by Jon Garfunkel
I’m a software architect in Boston, Massachusetts. My day job is working for a software company in Cambridge that makes business process management software. A hobby of mine is doing research into media structures, the output of which you see here. What is “media structures”?
by Jon Garfunkel
While the podcast medium has not ushered in much of a revolution so far– downloadable audio files have been around for years now, and their marriage with RSS has not made it that much easier to skim them, as it has for bloggus bloviatus, the common blog– there is one use where the aspect where podcasters make a brilliant use of the format.
October
by Jon Garfunkel
That the Supreme Court of Delaware affirmed the right of anonymous free speech shouldn’t be news. That they affirmed the precedent that there is a tradeoff between anonymity and credibility– this should be news to people quick to celebrate this decision.
by Jon Garfunkel
Last spring, I spent several weeks, and many hours at a time, putting together an essay which ultimately comprised eight parts and 14,000 words, titled The New Gatekeepers. One of the main themes was analyzing the architecture of the blogosphere, which I observed had stressed “immediacy over thoroughness.” I developed the argument that if we wanted a system to promote different values– favoring throughness over immediacy– we would have develop a different technology to do that. I had hoped to start that here on
Civilities. Unfortunately, my argument has been undermined by my having rushed the writing and editing of some of the series. There are five glaring problems which I wish to address.
by Jon Garfunkel
Ok, you’ve written a really good, original, article on your blog or webzine or civ or whatever. Your next step is to promote the heck out of it: not just get people to read it, but get people to reference it later, and recognize you as the smart person behind that idea.
by Jon Garfunkel
Some questions to ask to help you determine one blog from the next. This is a short quiz to spare you from having to read the 5,000-word essay on Presenting Blogger Archetypes that I wrote in March 2005. This essay replaces one poorly titled The Four Questions— as there are now five questions for five categories.
by Jon Garfunkel
I have a confession to make, which may surprise close readers of this space. Earlier this year, I wanted to actually start a blog– you know, write off the cuff like a blubbering fool about any topic that crossed somebody else’s mind. I needed help, some of my curmudgeonly correspondents to help breathe life into a made-up person named Fabio Folio. Nobody wanted to help, and then I discovered that a Google search revealed that “Fab Folio” was the name of a real person in Italy, so I retired the character. I’d like to say that my second choice was “Valerie Flame,” but I can’t find the piece of paper where I wrote that. I bring this up to expand on some points about fake blogs (flogs?).
by Jon Garfunkel
The word “blogger” gets thrown around quite a bit these days, with shape-shifting definitions. Having studied this over the past year, I thought it best to cleave out four senses of a definition. (Note: The definitions have been updated with clearer names from the original post twelve days ago.)
by Jon Garfunkel
For community journalism, there’s no easier story to carry than the one I’m about to describe. The ol’ “Mainstream Media” broke it first. Now we would expect the blogs to enter stage front and take the case, maybe organize some advocacy journalism. Heard of made-for-TV? This one’s made-for-blogs: it’s got an underdog community media effort against an out-of-town one trying to push it out. The Maynard (MA) High School radio station is about to lose its license to a California-based religious broadcaster which has been scouring up licenses nationwide, with the FCC’s neutral approach enabling it.
by Jon Garfunkel
In researching Maynard’s Radio Needs a Boost, I wondered how community journalism stacked up against traditional journalism in reporting and amplifying. If community journalism missing clear and present stories like this one, and is content in its own static, than it has a long ways to go.
by Jon Garfunkel
If you’ve been reading Civilities through an RSS reader, as 79 Bloglines subscribers presumably are, you may be missing some of the design changes I’ve introduced today. I really wanted to make the front page more pleasing to read on its own, and also get ready (or rather, procrastinate) for the long-overdue Drupal upgrade.
The logo is sharper. The old Civilities logo was a
November
by Jon Garfunkel
I’ve been leafing through a six-year old copy of Brill’s Content— a goldmine of hindsight-foresight, grist for an upcoming Civilities piece– and I couldn’t shake loose a media prediction for 2005 from the August 1999 issue: “TV AND THE WEB WILL FINALLY CONVERGE BUT IN UNEXPECTED WAYS.” That’s hedging your bets. Maybe the unexpected ways would be it would be not television, but radio, which would first convervge in a natural way with the web. And the best example of that today may be the five-month old Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
by Jon Garfunkel
I had thought of going to the Online News Association conference
in NYC this past weekend, but I passed and read the commentary
online. All I’d wanted to do was just ask some questions of some
members. I figured it’s just as easy to ask on the mailing list.
by Jon Garfunkel
Here are my own brief answers to Who’s Respected in Online Journalism? These are quick thoughts, and I have ludicrously high standards, and I have the bias of working on reactionary theories. I’m still most curious to learn what other people think.
by Jon Garfunkel
Welcome to Civilities– and the latest “about” page (this is a long-overdue update of previous versions). My name is Jon Garfunkel and I’ve been publishing my research, observations, and documentation on Civilities since January 2004. By “publish” I mean that I stand by the words written in articles, and I keep a higher standard for what is written here than what I would articulate in spoken conversations or in private emails or in public online forums. Comments are open to registered users, and reflect the views of their respective writers.
by Jon Garfunkel
Last night I stopped by the Symposium for Social Architecture, sponsored by Corante and the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School (I hosted one of the panelists, and another one crashed on my couch following a red-eye flight from San Francisco). The “social architecture” up for discussion is really about social software, which has proved to be a very useful term for framing contemporary Internet technology. I was curious about how it should apply for businesses and other community of practice, and whether it is all-encompassing. But first, I wanted to make sure I had a complete understanding of what the term has meant over time.
by Jon Garfunkel
Recently there’s been a rash of cultural artifacts glossed with the suffix “2.0” as if they were software products prematurely released to the marketplace as version 1.0. Journalism 2.0, Web 2.0, Recovery 2.0, God 2.0. Which leaves a good portion of the cultural dictionary yet unadulterated. So I wondered… what about the Times 2.0?
December
by Jon Garfunkel
The following statement appeared in a leaked memo from a Deputy Managing Editor of the most obsessed-about newspaper in the country: "People can use it any way they want to. It has no inherent ethical or moral quality, though it does have its own special power." I invite you to come up with a possible explanation of what "it" is: a) Wikipedia b) a blog c) a Colt .45 d) the new Oral-B computerized toothbrush e) the 82nd Airborne Division
by Jon Garfunkel
I was at the Massachusetts BlogLeft conference this past Saturday– I should have posted a stub post earlier letting people know I’d be there. One of my readers, Bruce Wilson, told me about it a few weeks ago, and suggested to conference organizer Lynne Lupien, that I’d be a good person to lead a breakout session.
by Jon Garfunkel
The current movie Good Night and Good Luck, about Edward R. Murrow and directed by George Clooney, has been co-produced by a group called Participant Productions. They got a good head start with setting up companion websites (using the Drupal software, no less) for their films (which also include Syriana, Murderball, and North Country), but these are mere baby steps. If they want to have an activist mission, they must have an educational mission first. And it would also be best of them to avoid the scattershot "blog" approach and instead adopt a constructive media approach. Here’s my review that I also posted on their site.
by Jon Garfunkel
A year ago I had theorized that if you shrunk the blogosphere to a much more compact pundisphere, the majority of people who use the Internet for something like getting political information wouldn’t notice. That was a useless prediction to make as it can’t be test. But what would be useful for the lesser pundisphere to do is to actually track predictions that the greater pundits make. It doesn’t take many people to make predictions, so it’s probably more of a noble calling for the rest of us to keep score. With the A-List, if you can’t join ’em, beat ’em. In thinking about how to write up a Civilities-style proposal, I started mining the old Brill’s Content magazine– which for a few years at the turn of the millenium was a handy gloss of the information age. Its hundred-and-fifty pages,were news about the news, reviews of the news, and just about everything would look for in a magazine if one weren’t lookinf for advertisements. It had a running gag which took the trouble to actually rate how many of the predictions made by the Sunday pundits came true. For kicks, the magazine also compared them to a prognosticator on loan from a local zoo, Chippy the Chimp. (In his debut in the August 1999 issue, Chippy went 3 for 6 , “good enough to beat George Will and John McLaughlin”).
by Jon Garfunkel
Comments are back– after I had suspended them several weeks back when I upgraded to Drupal 4.6. And this after a half-year of promising them to various people. After a year ago at the Berkman Center conference where I promised that they’d be done "just in time for Christmas." After almost two years since I wrote the original prototyope for ViewPoints in Drupal. And after over four years when I first came up with the idea for ViewPoints. I’m still amazed that no one else has taken the idea and run with it. Anyways, you get the idea. Coding takes solid concentration, and I have to manufacture some time over the last several weeks to get this done. Perhaps a dozen articles have been on hold in the ensuing time. But we’ve got comments once again. For some reason it’s no longer preserving line breaks. But I have made several key improvements over the 2004:
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