Ten Reasons Why

I hereby declare these topics dead and/or resolved. They will not be written about anymore. By me, at least. I’m sure some other joker will continue to harange their readers with these moot points.
What’s the definition of a weblog? “A collection of discrete, dated entries that are organized sequentially in time and published to the World Wide Web.” From here. There. Done. Finished. Finito. Moving on.
Are blogs journalism? Idiotic question. Blogs are a medium, journalism is a practice. It’s like asking whether folded paper is journalism or videotape is journalism. The media of the form doesn’t make itself journalism; what someone does with the form makes it journalism.
Do blogs make education better? No. Good teachers (and good parents and good peers and, occasionally, the odd good administrator) make education better. Good teachers might use blogs as a tool to make education better, but they might use an egg carton, a meadow, the Library of Congress, or any number of other things as well (or even more effectively). Bad teachers with blogs (or egg cartons) don’t suddenly become good teachers.
Atom vs. RSS. Really, no one (except a handful of developers) cares.

Uncategorized

JournalCon 2004 will be held in DC, practically in my backyard. Eh, well, not my backyard since that’s really not a backyard and more of an actual alley, and it’s kinda several metro stops or a 30 minute walk away from my backyard/alley, but you sort of get the point. It’s, like, really close, man.
JournalCon is a “gathering of online journalers, diarists, personal webloggers and other web writers.” Of course, I don’t really know what JournalCon is like, having never been in the three years they’ve been holding it, but it can’t be too bad of a way to kill an August weekend.

Weblogs

Open Park is a Washington, DC, non-profit setting up public open wireless Internet access points on the National Mall.
Coverage is pretty limited now, but maybe soon I’ll be working from the sculpture garden at the Hirshorn. :-)

Culture

The Tech, an MIT newspaper, has published an interview with Jack Valenti, CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Valenti comes off as uninformed about the nuances of the copyright debates and seems only capable of speaking about the issues in soundbites that feel, to me, a bit pre-programmed — like this is going to be his response to any question regarding copyright, no matter the nuance. I imagine his PR flack reminding him before the interview, “Stay on message, Jack!”
It’s all the more apparent because I’m about halfway through Free Culture, by Larry Lessig, which you can purchase in the bookstore or download for free. In a testament to Lessig’s point, I read a couple chapters in PDF format, then bounced over to Amazon to purchase the physical object for more efficient and comfortable Metro and coffee-shop reading.
Anyway, Lessig, the anti-Valenti (or maybe the Valenti antidote, we can hope), presented both sides of the issue in a comprehensive, nuanced, and not-so-propagandic way. Highly recommended reading.

Intellectual Property

firstamendmentcenter.org: news:

HARTFORD, Conn. — Prison officials destroyed computer files containing inmates’ personal writing days after a prisoner won a national writing award, best-selling author Wally Lamb said.

Lamb, who teaches a creative-writing workshop at the York Correctional Facility in East Lyme, said yesterday that 15 female inmates lost up to five years of work when officials at the prison’s school ordered all hard drives used for the class erased and its computer disks turned over.

Heinous! The PEN American Center should do something in response.

Culture

AOL is moving away from their proprietary markup language.
AOL’s online service has always been a walled garden. At one point even, AOL users could only send email to other AOL users and were unable to view any content on the Interent — just content that lived inside AOL’s proprietary network. Since the late 90’s there’s been a hole in the wall that lets AOL users get out to the Web (and lets email come in), but all the content in the AOL garden was still authored in their own proprietary markup language.
That’s changing. AOL has started buiding their content in and migrating their services to HTML (though it will be interesting to see how standards-compliant they are).
Why now? Here’s the real kicker from the Post article:

“subscribers will soon be able to sign onto AOL.com from any computer without installing AOL’s special software and get most of the company’s content.”

That’s a big deal (and not only because it means no more CDs in the mail), but because it means their business model is shifting to be more directly competitive with Yahoo and MSN (advertising-funded services with premium content subscriptions). I’m sure there’ll still be a client-side app, if for no other reason than it’s a great ease-of-use benefit to newbies. But there are fewer and fewer online newbies in America these days, so that market advantage is shrinking.
A walled garden works great as a business model as long as what’s inside the garden is more attractive than what’s outside. For years, though, pretty much anything you could get inside AOL was available for free or cheaper on the Internet. When the flowers in the walled garden cease to be unique, it’s time for the walls to come down.

Technology & Internet

Will Richardson, who writes non-stupidly on this stuff, has summarized a conversation about blogging in schools that has been taking place across several weblogs over the last couple days.
I’m far from a Luddite, having made been involved with educational technology for more than a decade, made my living off it most of that time, and have worked with 1500+ faculty in 4 or 5 countries. Likewise, though I’ve been out of the teaching game for several years, I’ll put up five years of teaching several sections a semester of freshman comp or intro lit as reasonable cred to discuss writing pedagogy somewhat intelligently.
All of which is to say that this is stuff I’ve spent my entire adult life thinking about, so I don’t take it lightly when I paraphrase a former President:
It’s the writing, stupid.

Read more…

Education

Jason Kottke writes about why we should probably stop calling it syndication. It being this whole RSS/Atom/newsreader/aggregator universe of tools and technologies.
I agree wholeheartedly, and have for a while. However, I suspect that the term syndication will stick. It’s probably too entrenched to dislodge at this point.
The only things worse than the term “syndication” are acronyms and and technology names like “RSS” and “Atom.” And the only thing worse than those is meaningless orange XML icon.

Syndication & Aggregation

Google will begin searching on academic university repositories. Begs the question: what comes first, the search or the content?

Education

Given that I can’t sew or knit, this might be the only way I can ever “make” my own clothes.

Culture