Ideas & Proposals
January 3 Media | Language/Structure | | trackback url
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.
Responses & Reviews
January 9 Media | United States | Building/Consensus | | trackback url

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.” It’s returned to the news, briefly. This was one developing story which I observed “first-hand” through the Internet, participating in the discussions of how it would be shaped. This is part of my ongoing analysis of we in the Internet community can aid in getting at the truth.

January 6 Media | United States | Access/Network | | trackback url
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.

December 29 Media | Language/Structure | International | | trackback url
When an earthquake and a tsunami hit and cause deaths in the tens of thousands, what should a blogger do?. There’s three broad things that a media publication address: honor the victims; provide relief for the survivors; consider how to mitigate the risk for the future. I have reviewed the responses from the last three days of 25 online political writers (bloggers and columnists). I wasn’t expecting much, as I had picked those who cover on the American political scene (some of the “independents,” as I call them, actually dabble in many subjects). But this is a global world, after all, and it is cataclysmic events like this which should bring out the best in writers.

December 23 Internet | Language/Structure | | trackback url
The next leader of the Democratic party may be important to some people, perhaps not nearly as vital as the next Director of Homeland Security is, but it ought to have some importance to the 55 million whose were disappointed that their candidate didn’t win. The news is to be found on the Internet, in the blogs, and for many party people, it’s the DailyKos. “Kos” has been covering this story regularly since the end of the election, and he has most readers of any weblog.
Analysis & Reports
January 9 Media | United States | Building/Consensus | | trackback url

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.

January 2 Internet | Language/Structure | 1 comment | trackback url
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.

December 4 Media | Familiarity | | trackback url
I took a brief trip to the mid-nineties last weekend, going to my tenth high school reunion, leafing through some old Wired magazines, and picking up Thomas Frank’s 2000 book One Market Under God. A common theme: how did I view the “elites” then and now? Frank hypothesis, which he expanded in one of this year’s most informative political books, What’s the Matter With Kansas?, has been that an American political discourse continues to be defined by a demonization of the elites. This is not very much different from high school, as it turns out. Who the elites are, who gains by painting them as such, and whether they’re the same as the “mainstream” are questions we should consider– whenever we encounter someone raging against the media. Here’s a little exercise, weighing in at four thousand words.

Definitions & Explanations
June 4 | trackback url
Welcome to Civilities, one of the most innovative public interest publications on the web.
January 6 Media | Access/Network | | trackback url
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.

December 5 | | trackback url
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