Serendipity35 - Blogging

The Writing Initiative Blog

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:04:20 -0400

I don't really need another place to blog, but the Writing Initiative that I direct at Passaic County Community College has an Initiative blog that we use to communicate with our campus community. Though some of the posts are directed directly at our students and faculty, a number of the resources we write about are useful to anyone doing writing across the curriculum.

For example, today's post is about an article from The New York Times on "Tech Tips For Teachers: Free, Easy and Useful Creation Tools."

The tools include free online sites to help students visualize texts (with tools like Wordle, Tagxedo or The New York Times Visualization Lab), create timelines (using Xtimeline, Time Glider or Timetoast) and design presentations that go beyond PowerPoint (with Glogster.edu and Museum Box).

For prewriting, mind maps on paper, and now electronically, are popular idea-processing tools. Their use was popularized by the British IQ specialist Tony Buzan starting in the 1960s.

Bubbl.us, CoSketch.com and Cacoo are good starting places that also allow collaboration by student pairs or groups. Of course, students can also use The Times for generating ideas on many topics across disciplines from math to fine arts.

Bill Gates: Blogger

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:02:00 -0500

Bill Gates launched his personal blog called The Gates Notes this past week. He has a category for Education and already posted a piece on lifelong learning and some courses he has downloaded from The Teaching Company and a post on educational reform. He says that he will be posting about open courseware soon too.

The navigation is a bit too elaborate and I didn't find an RSS feed to subscribe, but it nice looking. It looks like he has good tech support.

Has Bill turned into an edublogger? Not quite, but it's certainly on his agenda. I like that he has a category for what HE is learning about these days (economics is on that list).

From what I have read about the blog, it is actually Bill doing the blogging. I hope so, and I hope he keeps at it and doesn't pass the writing over to someone else.

Oh yeah, he's on Twitter now too.

The State of the Blogosphere

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:50:00 -0400

Last week was the BlogWorld & New Media Expo which included the 2009 "State of the Blogosphere" report compiled by Technorati and delivered by their CEO Richard Jalichandra.

Since 2004, Technorati's annual State of the Blogosphere report has followed growth and trends in the blogosphere. This year bloggers were surveyed directly to provide the data for the report.

The 2009 State of the Blogosphere survey demonstrates that the growth of the blogosphere's influence on subjects ranging from business to politics to the way information travels through communities continues to flourish. In a year when revolutions and elections were organized by blogs, bloggers are blogging more than ever, and the State of the Blogosphere is strong.

Technorati released five segments that you can now access online. They started with demographics on Who Are the Bloggers, then onto the What and Why and the How of Blogging. The last two segments are of less interest to me and most educators - blogging revenues and their political impact - but are probably where the most interest is in blogging in the larger part of the blogosphere.

In addition to the survey results, there are also interviews with some big names from blogging:

Michael Arrington, TechCrunch
Penelope Trunk, Brazen Careerist
Steve Rubel, Edelman Digital, Micro Persuasion
Alex Santoso, Neatorama
Henry Copeland, Blogads
Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post
Jonathan Salem Baskin, Dimbulb
Mathew Ingram, Toronto Globe and Mail
Seth Godin, Squidoo, sethgodin.typepad.com
Simon Mackie, Web Worker Daily
Dan Gillmor, dangillmor.com
Duncan Riley, The Inquisitr

Blog Action Day 2009

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:45:58 -0400

10,000 bloggers voted and chose as the topic for Blog Action Day 2009 "Climate Change." If you are a blogger, you can go can register for Blog Action Day 09 at www.blogactionday.org

To be a part of this year's event, you commit to writing one post, in your own voice, on October 15, on the topic of climate change. Many top blogs - Mashable, The Official Google Blog, TMZ,
Autoblog, Daily Blog Tips and Serendipity35 - are already registered.

Bloggers of all types and sizes, involved in discussing the wide-ranging way in which climate change affects us all is what will make the day a success.

You can also learn more about the issue of climate change and see sample topics you might
write about - like the connections between climate and clean energy, food choices, green products, health, transportation, and the broader economy - at blogactionday.org.

You can get the latest by following them on Twitter at twitter.com/blogactionday.

One issue, one day, thousands of voices.

A Comments Comment

nospam@example.com (Tim Kellers) — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 14:42:00 -0400

Anyone who has read my posts about spam knows that I am the spam executioner. I admit that I am an anti-spam fanatic and my spam controls on this server are Draconian even by Draco's standards.

There are many misconfigured e-mail servers out in the wild that blithely relay spam email to its targeted destination. The most notorious of these mail relays that daily task me is one of the e-mail relays at yahoo.com. Another wildly inconsistent e-mail relay is one of the AOL e-mail servers -- my efforts to bring Yahoo and AOL into the legitimate e-mail fold have met with indeterminate success. Sometimes their e-mail relays behave and deliver real e-mail and sometimes they go round the bend and spit out scads of spam.

I'm committed to overcoming the automatic rejection of reader's comments by the spam filters and, if you have a comment rejected because of a spam block on the s35 server, please send an e-mail to s35@serendipity35.net and I will remove your e-mail address from the automatic spam filters.

The posts that Ken and I write are not one-way valves. We both value (if not crave) your feedback.

If you have something to say, please say it; if the anti-spam gods object to your post, send along your e-mail address and I'll make sure the gods are appeased.

Making a Living At The Fifth Estate

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:44:00 -0400

From the Wall Street Journal site, comes "America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire." Nothing shocking in the headline. I know that a few people blog for a living. But wait - I read on and discovered that:

"...there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters."

Really? I can handle that the number of people doing it for at least some income is approaching 1% of American adults. In the studies used by the WSJ, in the U.S. with 20+ million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, we have 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income.

The article's author, Mark Penn, says that if journalists were the Fourth Estate, then bloggers are becoming the Fifth Estate, and a real business has arrived. Bloggers not only are used to launch new efforts, but for companies and products that depend upon blogger reviews. He points to a similar trend in "Opinion TV" where those opinions get far more attention than the gathering of facts.

I am not alone in questioning those numbers, and anyone who looks online for the "facts" on blogging and blogger numbers will discover a real lack of agreement. As a non-profiting blogger, I also wonder at a poll done by Technorati saying that those bloggers who had 100,000 or more unique visitors made an average income of $75,000.

Serendipity35 averages about 12,000 unique visitors, so does that mean that Tim and I could be getting $16,000 to blog? Who is paying? What's the business model? Good questions.

Like almost all online ventures, blogs get most of their revenue from ads and readers clicking on them. Some bloggers get paid by the post ($75-200), and some "spokesbloggers" are paid by a company to blog about their products.

Entry into this field? No tests, degrees, or any real regulations. Though Mark Penn may joke about a future "Columbia School of Bloggerism," it is more likely that many more self-made bloggers will move up the pay scale. Mark Zuckerberg wasn't studying social networking at Harvard when he created Facemash and then dropped out to build it into Facebook. (Okay, he was a computer science major.) So, why should budding bloggers study journalism?

Comparing Job Numbers in America - Bureau of Labor Statistics
Lawyers = 555,770
Bloggers =
452,000
Computer Programmers
394,710
CEOs
299,160
Firefighters
289,710

75% of bloggers are college graduates. Most are white males reporting above-average incomes. Though one third of young people report that they blog, only 2% of those make a living at it. Most bloggers are like myself - doing it for about 35 months and making a few hundred bucks.
(Tim: We have about ten months to make a few hundred dollars and then quit so that we can be typical!) Of course, there are those blogging professionals who work at
corporations or write for
the big sites with lots of traffic. (Penn surmises that "at some point the value of the Huffington Post will no doubt pass the value of the Washington Post.") The pros make $45,000 to $90,000 a year for their blogging and 1% make $200K. The hours are long - 50 to 60 hours a week - but very flexible.

Sounds pretty sweet. Of course, they still need to deal with unemployment insurance, contracts, deadlines, their status as "journalists" (my quotes), libel suits etc.

No one has offered me the big blogging gig yet, but I'm certainly open to doing it as a living instead of just doing it. I'm guessing some much younger bloggers are thinking the same thing.

Blogging As Reflective Practice

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:13:00 -0400

Today, I am presenting at the 10th Annual NJ Best Practices Showcase on using blogging as a reflective process for my students. You can view the presentation on my Slideshare page. NJEDge.Net and the host school, the College of St. Elizabeth, are also recording the presentations and hoping to post them to the new NJVid site. In this post, I want to go into a bit more detail than I can do in my presentation about reflective practice itself.

Though I reference the book The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action by Donald Schön, what I am discussing does not appear in his book since blogging did not even exist in 1995 when the book was published. He was an MIT social scientist and consultant, and in that book he examines five professions (engineering, architecture, management, psychotherapy, town planning). The book is very much about how professionals go about solving problems.

He introduced reflective practice as a continuous process that involves the learner considering critical incidents in his or her life's experiences. The concept immediately gained traction in teacher education, and also health professions and architectural design. For a teacher-in-training and active in the field, the process of studying his or her own teaching methods and determining what works best for the students is essential. I think it is important that all students (practitioners-in-training) also consider their own experiences in applying knowledge to practice, especially while being "coached" by professionals (instructors,mentors) in their discipline.

Education is my focus here, but all three disciplines also make use of portfolios of a kind. If you use portfolios (paper, electronic or objects), you are probably already using reflection as a part of that practice.

Late in his life (he died in 1997), Donald Schön took an interest in the use of computers in design and the uses of design games to expand designing capabilities. That also appealed to me because I teach a graduate course in the elements of visual design at NJIT, and computer design has become a large part of the course.

Schön's exploration of the nature of learning systems and the significance of learning in changing societies, for me, has applications not only to what is called the "learning society" but also to the movement of that society online. The importance of networks and feedback online changes our ways of knowing.

Schön looks to what some people have called a more "existentially-oriented approach" to studying social change, as opposed to the rational/experimental model that is generally used.

The progression in the past decade of blogs from personal web journals to a platform for established professionals, corporations and writers has created opportunities for education. In my presentation, I was talking about my use of blogs with graduate students at NJIT over the past two years as a method for regular student reflection on their learning. I have them use the free Blogger service Though there are other free and paid services available).

Blogs offer the easiest method for students to publish online to a large audience without sophisticated web design skills. This allows them to focus on specific topics and on their own knowledge construction. The built-in feedback tools allow teacher-to-student and peer-to-peer and, perhaps most powerfully, outsider commentary.

Though blogs can serve as e-portfolios and some teachers use them as such, I am more focused on reflection. I don't ignore using the blog to address writing concepts, publishing practices, intellectual property and using the blog's digital design as a learning portfolio, it is just not my primary concern. Is that what I tell students? Not immediately. The "assignments" that they blog about initially are reflective in nature without having to make that the "learning outcome."

My use of blogs at NJIT is easily incorporated into the MS in Professional and Technical Communication program which already has program competencies for students and an established e-portfolio program.

In education, reflective practice is a part of teacher research, but the journaling and discussion of your own teaching practices is not the same as doing traditional research. That is, students do not hypothesize and test ideas in that rational/experimental manner. What practitioners do in "the real world" is more likely to be testing their ideas against multiple forms of evidence, against multiple perspectives from their community of practice AND the research literature.

There's an old saying that if you want to know what you think, write it down. Writing about your practice is part of the process as it requires you to organize ideas into a framework.

Integration of the Disciplines Reflection in Educational Practice http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/ed555/zone1/reflect.htm

Reflective Practice and Professional Development. ERIC Digest http://www.ericdigests.org/2001-3/reflective.htm

Reflective Practice http://cstl.syr.edu/cstl2/

What Language Teaching Is - Reflective Teaching Practice http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/whatteach/reflect.htm

The Learning Portfolio: Reflective Practice for Improving Student Learning (JB - Anker) by John Zubizarreta

No More Educational Blogger News

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:00:00 -0500

February 2009 As Mike noted in his comment to us, EdBloggerNews is now salesforce.com. That's not a good sign.

POSTED July 2006 EdBloggerNews is a news site where users submit "bookmarklets" to articles about education, and the readers choose which stories make the headlines. It's similar to the site digg.com but it focuses on education news. Think of it as a news aggregator that is peer-reviewed.You can also look at sub-topics like technology and blogging in education. Looking at it today I discovered articles on MySpace and Adults, banning cell phones in schools, a review of blogging tools and using games in education.

Blogging as Pedagogic Practice Across the Curriculum

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:20:00 -0500

Blogging by teachers and students is something I have been thinking about more the past month. Today I am doing a presentation at nearby Bloomfield College's Annual Faculty Technology Showcase entitled "Blogging as Pedagogic Practice Across the Curriculum."

Most discussion and research on blogs and teaching and learning in higher education focuses on them as another technological tool. In this session, I'm looking at blogging primarily as a way to address traditional writing practices.

Blogging As Pedagogic Practice Across the Curriculum

View more presentations from Ken Ronkowitz.

Using college-wide blogging tools or free blogging services, instructors are addressing e-portfolios, audience, publishing, copyright and plagiarism, authentic writing, and writing in a digital age in varied disciplines.
Here are 2 quotes that I will use in my introduction.

"If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty-first century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates). For this reason, participatory media literacy is not another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers."
- Howard Rheingold, Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies

Those of us striving to integrate participatory media literacy practices into our classes often face resistance. Other faculty might argue that we are turning away from the foundations of print literacy, or worse, pandering to our tech-obsessed students. Meanwhile, students might resist too, wondering why they have to learn to use a wiki in an anthropology class. The surprising-to-most-people-fact is that students would prefer less technology in the classroom - especially participatory technologies that force them to do something other than sit back and memorize material for a regurgitation exercise. We use social media in the classroom not because our students use it, but because we are afraid that social media might be using them - that they are using social media blindly, without recognition of the new challenges and opportunities they might create.
- Michael Wesch, Participatory Media Literacy: Why it matters

Teachers are using college-wide blogging tools or free blogging services for different disciplines as a way to address e-portfolios, audience, publishing practices, copyright and plagiarism, authentic writing and writing in a digital age with hypertext.

It was only a few years ago that when I did a presentation on blogging I would have to explain that blog = Web + Log. In the early days, most blogs were in the personal “diary” genre, so educators did not take them very seriously. I think there are more public forum style blogs on a particular topic (politics, hobbies, disciplines...). And there are definitely more corporate and commercial blogs out there. The pros are taking over. Take a look at Technorati's top blogs and it is completely dominated by pros.

I saw this matrix back in 2003 on a blog post by Scott Leslie and it first set me thinking about blogs in education. He wrote:

"To help facilitate this discussion and my own thinking on it, I’ve worked up this matrix of some of the possible uses of blogs in education. A big caveat here - this matrix very much approaches the topic in the context of ‘formal’ education, and only really considers students, instructors and ‘the rest of the net’ as actors. Obviously one could add much to this - librarians, institutional RSS feeds … That’s why I titled it ‘Some’ uses of blogs in education. Even just considering this limited set of actors, I have definitely left much off."

I'll be curious how many in my audience are bloggers or blog readers. [Post-Presentation Update: Everyone had read a blog at least once. Two people write regularly on a blog. No one used a blog reader.] In the 2006 survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 39% of Internet users (57 million American adults) said they read blogs which was an increase of 27% from 2004. Then a study by Universal McCann (March 2008) determined that there are 184 million blogs worldwide and 26.4 million are in the United States. There are 346 million readers worldwide with 60.3 million being Americans and 77% of active Internet users reported that they read blogs.

So what do blogs offer teachers and students?
- online discussion through time-stamped comments
- a video and podcasting platform
- posting via email & cell phone
- free web space for class materials, portfolios, projects
- minimal web design skills required

What types of blogs are being created?
- Journalism (politics) & convergence journalism (NY Times)
- Promotional tool – corporate, product blogs
- Community of interest – poets, software (non-corporate)
- Personal writing
- Media delivery– Vlog (Video), Photolog, linklog, sketchlog (artist portfolio), podcasting

Where are blogs headed?
I think it's unfortunate for educators that Tumblelogs (like tumblr.com), microblogging (short posts using Twitter) and Moblogs (via mobile phones) are coming on strong. Some observers claim that students are writing more than ever (though the writing is not what we would call "academic") and others feel this is not a trend that will encourage more writing by our students.

A good topic to discus with student bloggers is the conventions of the blogosphere.
- the need for regular posting
- using hyperlinks to additional materials & sources
- referencing other blogs via links
- the blogger writing style (Is it all less formal?)
- allowing/encouraging comments, interaction and the sharing of content

GETTING STARTED
For blog hosting, I use and have my students use the free blogger.com (from Google) but others use livejournal.com, wordpress.com. A education specialty is edublogs.org where you can create your own ad-free fully featured WordPress blog including free assessment tool from the Chalkface Project and an ad-free wikispace.

Your students might be familiar with sites such as MySpace.com, Vox.com which offer blogging, but I stay away from them for coursework. I also don't use any of the paid services such as typepad.com. All these sites offer free templates for blog designs and you can customize if you know something about HTML & CSS.

Some early lessons you might approach with students:

- Your blog should have a basic “mission statement” or “about” that shows the intent of the blog
- Who is your audience? think about both an ideal reader & your emerging audience needs
- Developing a voice
- Conventions, formality
- Citation, copyright

Blog writers need to be blog readers, so it's worth saying something about subscribing to blogs using RSS and services that aggregate your subscriptions in one place. Bloglines.com or Google Reader will allow you to pull blog posts that you have subscribed to and show you unread entries all in one place. You can browse their directories in different categories and see what is popular. All it takes to add a site is a click.

As examples of some student blogs, I can point you to a few of my students from last semester who were using blogs as a type of supplement to their design portfolio with the posts being reflections on course modules, and they were using their blogs as a tool for web design.

http://globonautenglish.blogspot.com/
http://walkmethru.blogspot.com/
http://quirkitecture.blogspot.com/

Another class blogging project that I can reference is one that I saw at a conference. It was called "Blogging for Dollars" and was done by Jonathan Goodman, a business professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He had students do blogs as a way of examining firsthand the growth of online advertising dollars. His students built individual blogs, chose subjects from horticulture to who is hotter, installed Google's AdSense advertising application and analytics program and trying to earn some ad dollars! Then, they analyzed who visited, when, and how they spent their time on the blog. It's not really a writing activity as much as a business lesson, but perhaps they learned that well-written posts drive traffic.

Some Colleges Blogging As Marketing using students as bloggers
http://mylife.udayton.edu
www.clarkson.edu/clarkson_experience/blogs
Ball State University http://www.bsu.edu/reallife
St. Thomas (Minnesota) www.stthomas.edu/admis/undergraduate/blogs/
University of Vermont Admissons http://adms.blog.uvm.edu
University of Sydney http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/sydneylife/
http://archinect.com collects blogs by architecture students at schools all over the world.

I like having students look at Corporate Blogging too to get a sense of what "pros" are doing with blogs. Google has a number of blogs http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ and Sun Microsystem's offers blogs to "any Sun employee to write about anything" http://blogs.sun.com. Like other tech companies, Microsoft has several public product blogs, like this one for its Internet Explorer browser http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/

It's also interesting to see the "convergence journalism" happening at "old media" sites like the New York Times which has a number of bloggers. http://www.nytimes.com/ref/topnews/blog-index.html Back in the early days of blogging (5 years ago), many of those Times blogs would have carried versions of print materials, but most print publications have significant amounts of original material running on blogs as "web exclusives."

Finally, I would point students to some media blogs that use video, images, or audio either exclusively or as the major content of the blog. Ian Shive is a nature photographer who has a photoblog that supplements his website and is a great marketing tool. There are lots of photo blogs at Reuters too.
I'll end with a funny and clever blog that I've been reading for a few years called INDEXED that is a daily index card with a hand drawn chart, graph, diagram. This is one hat started as a little Blogger project and became a book.

FURTHER READING
Learning through Blogging: Graduate Student Experiences
By Robert Davison, City University of Hong Kong

One last Call For Paper Proposals for my NJCEA panel on teachers blogging. Details and contact info

The Roles of Bloggers part 3

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:13:00 -0500

This is my third installment about the roles bloggers might take on in doing their work. It's a question I ask of my students who are required to maintain a blog for a communications class.

In part 1 and part 2 of this topic I noted some of the jobs I saw myself doing here online, and I asked my students (who were all new to blogging) to think about the possibilities they saw emerging.What I ask is for them to think about the roles or jobs they see for bloggers. We are thinking about independent bloggers rather than corporate or commercial bloggers who may well have other people who assist with the blog.

For example, my students use Blogger, so Google is serving as their IT department in many ways. Someone blogging for a big blog like the Huffington Post has employees who maintain formats and redesign for them. Still, it's good for students to take all that into account and think about the roles that they may need to take on themselves to make the blog successful.

(themselves & others) based on their experiences and by studying "professional" and corporate bloggers.

These are the roles that students have typically written about (there's some further explanation in the earlier posts):

Reader - what writer doesn't read others in the field?

IT support - who will host your blog, fixes the bugs, updates the software?

Writer - and what type? tech writer, reporter, author,
poet, storyteller...

Librarians - maintaining organized sites and collecting links and information for others

Experts in a particular topic or field, (subject matter experts) blogs as testaments to their experience and know-how, so others may learn from them (whether that is teaching, bonsai, or fly-tying) and

Educator for those bloggers who want to "teach" even if they are not in education.

Designer - once you get beyond the default templates, adding HTML, playing with the CSS, embedding video etc. It's a way into web design for some people. Minimally, you are your own art director.

Depending on whether you use images from other sources (as a photo editor) or if you do your own, blogs are generally visual, so you might be a graphic artist or photographer.

Editor is an obvious one, including proofreading the writing but also purging outdated & redundant information and giving updates.

Entertainer - there are blogs that aren't trying to change the world, and most of us try some "web cetera" once and awhile.

Marketer (what one student called a rainmaker) - whether you are selling yourself and you blog to gain readers or actually trying to drive traffic to your ads and links. You may develop into a

Partner in a business sense with other sites.

Reviewer - many blogs review products including technology, books, films, music...

Reader and researcher - I spend more time reading and researching for most posts than I do actually writing.

Compiler - filtering the best of what is out there and putting it together for others

Publisher -particularly if you develop a group blog with multiple contributors.

Activist - some bloggers take on causes. Some of the best of those lead bloggers to also become a

Discussion leader - especially if you can get good comments

Chris Shamburg commented on an earlier post that he thought Witness might be a new role (not the same as reporter) as we see more and more bloggers giving first hand accounts from places in the world amidst crisis and catastrophe.

Anything you want to add to the list?

A Blog Post A Day

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 06:17:00 -0500

I was working on something for today, but then from Malcolm Coolidge came a blog link that tries to convince all of us bloggers that we don't need to post daily to get readers and attention.

I'm thinking about it...

The Blog Is Dead, Long Live the Blog

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:35:00 -0500

Paul Boutin tells readers of his Wired article, "Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004" (October 2008) that blogging is dead. Keep in mind that Boutin works for a blog, Valleywag.com, which is an industry gossip blog.

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug. Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

On the other side is my friend Karine Joly saying that "Blogs aren’t dead… even in this Twitter age" on HER blog collegewebeditor.com. So some are announcing the death of blogs, and some are declaring blogs to be healthy - and they are bloggers, and are doing their announcing via blogs.

The supposed blog killers are newer media applications like Twitter. Twitter limits each its text-only posts to 140 characters. This is known as microblogging. (Add Tumblr, Jaiku, and Pownce to that list) The analogy is made that Twitter is to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004.

In defining microblogging, SearchMobileComputing.com says:

The appeal of microblogging is both its immediacy and portability. Because posts are so brief (typically 140 – 200 characters), a microblogger can update his microblog often enough to keep readers informed as events, whether large or small, unfold. Anyone with a cell phone can send and receive updates any time, anywhere. Users can send messages as text, video or audio. Several social networking Web sites, including Twitter, are promoting microblogging as a convergence of several types of presence technology. Here's Twitter's self-description: "A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?"

Boutin points to Technorati's list of the top 100 blogs and the dominance of professional blogs with staffs of writers posting a few dozen times a day. These kinds of blog sites - Huffington Post, Engadget, TechCrunch - are new media machines. How can individual bloggers compete?

Some big name bloggers of "the past" - Scoble & Calacanis for example - have passed on blogging to take up Twitter. Why? I suspect that short attention spans and a lack of willingness to sit down and compose an intelligent post plays a part, but also because Twitter is faster than the blogosphere. For example, Twitter posts can be searched instantly without waiting for Google to index them.

Boutin is in on the fix:

As a writer, though, I'm onto the system's real appeal: brevity. Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times. Twitter's character limit puts everyone back on equal footing. It lets amateurs quit agonizing over their writing and cut to the chase.

@WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won't find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook?

Don't give up your blog. Twitterish apps will not replace the blog any more than television replaced the movies or USA Today replaced The New York Times. Blogs serve different purposes.

I agree that attention spans have been decreasing - for about the last 100 years. People don't read as much as they used to "a long time ago." Writing letters on paper is mostly a thing of the past. Still, I can't think of any worthwhile post I have ever put on this blog that would have ANY value as a 140 character "tweet."

As more and more writers from the print world begin to blog, I see posts becoming longer and more thoughtful - not the other direction.

I find it satisfying that when Twitter decided to explain more clearly their network status (because of having so many down times), they use a competitor in the microblogging field, Tumblr, to do it. Why? Tumblr, though micro, allows longer posts, photos, links etc. 140 characters just doesn't make it.

What need is microblogging apps like Twitter fulfilling? I think it is the current perceived need for presence technology. Presence technology is a type of application that makes it possible to locate and identify a computing device (and therefore its user) wherever it might be, as soon as the user connects to the network. Instant messaging is a more common example. I log into my Gmail or Facebook account and you can see that I'm online. (OK, on Gmail I can actually click a link and become invisible so I don't get bothered.) I'm not going to write more here about why I don't use Twitter ( I did that already.), and it does seem to serve some purpose to some people. My argument is that it doesn't even come close to serving the same purposes of a blog.

Does Serendipity35 have to compete with Techcrunch or Engadget? No. We have a different (educational) niche in the tech world. Actually, do we even have to compete with other educational technology bloggers like Hargadon, Richardson, or Nussbaum-Beach? I don't think so, especially if I'm not interested in selling books, or putting myself out there as a speaker or workshop leader.

Technorati has an interest series of pages on The State of Blogging 2008. They catalog and track blogs and there have been a number of attempts to quantify the size of the Blogosphere. How many blogs are there? How many are active? How many people read them? The answers vary, but there is general agreement that blogs are a global phenomenon that is now mainstream and they aren't going away.

One study, from Universal McCann (March 2008), determined that there are 184 million blogs worldwide and 26.4 million are in the United States. Blog readers total 346 million worldwide with 60.3 million being Americans. Most impressive is that 77% of active Internet users report that they read blogs.

Wikipedia defines blogs (a contraction of the term "Web log") as "a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order." The blogosphere is the collective community of all blogs. Since all blogs are on the Internet by definition, they may be seen as interconnected and socially networked.

Out of the Cloud

nospam@example.com (Tim Kellers) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Miller Airpark

A few Saturdays back, I was at Miller Air Park fueling the Piper Archer airplane I had rented for a flight down to Cape May County airport. It was a busy morning for the airport and several planes were in pre-flight, being taxied to the northeast end of the runway, or were already cocked into the wind --holding-short of runway 24 doing their pre-takeoff run-up. Each pilot in turn completed the safety checklist, pivoted onto the runway, firewalled the throttle and lifted the aircraft into the smooth gray sky. In the 30 minutes or so that I had spent pre-flighting and fueling my own plane there were 7 departures but, except for a pre-solo student and instructor locked into the never ending left turns of take-off and landing pattern practice, no other aircraft arrived at MJX.

Ken and I are sometimes like the FBO staff at Miller Air Park. We send post after post off into the internet clouds and, every once in a while, we receive an arrival. A returned comment here and there lets us know that the posts we roll off our internet tarmac aren't falling off the edge of our flat earth. Ken builds almost all of the wordcraft we launch and I spend most of my time clearing turkey buzzards and deer off our virtual runway, but once in a while, I get to fly a post of my own. And on that Saturday morning in Whiting, NJ, I held the nose on the centerline and rotated that Piper into the air.

I climbed to 400 ft and turned left toward the coastline. Over my shoulder, as I approached 1000 ft, I could see the massive airship hangars of Lakehurst Naval Air Station and the abandoned, but standing, stall of the Hindenburg, unoccupied since May of 1937 when the dirigible burned at her mooring. When it departed Frankfurt, Germany on May 3rd that year, the crew that launched her expected a return, too. Though it was scheduled to fly back from North America to Europe with a full manifest of transatlantic passengers en route to the coronation of King George VI of England, its final destination remained in New Jersey.

Fifty years after the famous crash, long after it was branded a mystery and pursued only by academic enterprise, the actual cause of the craft's incineration was discovered. The paint that protected its outer skin from the harsh ocean crossing, burned like a magnesium fuse when lit by lightning over land.

I quickly flew through Atlantic City's airspace and continued inbound to the Sea Isle City VOR. My checkpoints, spaced on my chart at 10 minute intervals, rolled underneath my right wing at 8, then 7, minutes. I was ahead of schedule and soon I'd arrive at WWD 10 minutes before my flight plan had estimated.

Traffic was light at Cape May County. I radioed the airport's CTAF for the active runway and entered the downwind pattern for 28. There were no other aircraft in the pattern (or rolling on the ground) and I touched down just past the threshold markers and turned off at the first taxi-way. Not stopping to visit, I headed back to the east end of runway 28, throttled back up and, five minutes after I had first touched down, was airborne again and heading home.

I flew back to Miller through the same airspace that the Hindenburg traveled on its last day. I landed, safely, just a few miles from where the dirigible fell to the ground. It had only taken a couple of hours but I returned to the airport from which I'd departed -- a luxury the Hindenburg pilot never had.

Maybe fifty years from now, like the paint on an unburned scrap of the Hindenburg, some word, sentence or phrase from Serendipity35 (or some other internet archive) will drop out of the internet cloud and reveal some small unintended truth about the lives we lived today.

Blog Action Day: Poverty

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:25:00 -0400

Blog Action Day 2007 last October had more than 20,000 bloggers with an estimated combined audience of over 15 million viewers, reading and discussing issues on the environment.

In 2008, the topic will be poverty. Bloggers who sign on will discuss that issue from the view of their own blog. Serendipity35 will try to cross poverty with learning and technology, for example.

Blog Action Day will be on October 15th. If you have a blog of any kind, you can sign up to participate.

It would also be a good classroom activity, whether you are a blogger or not, to look at he poverty resources and information that will be online that day on participating blogs.

An example is The Global Fund which combats AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria which have a crippling effect on the fight against poverty. Blog Action Day for this year encourages bloggers to donate their day's earnings to The Global Fund as their official Blog Action Day charity.

Two other resources for the classroom are the Causes of Poverty at the Global Issues site, and the Stand Up Against Poverty site.

Some of the worldâ€™s most popular blogs (according to Technorati) have agreed to participate in Blog Action Day this year, including: TechCrunch.com, ReadWriteWeb.com, Mashable.com, SmashingMagazine.com, GigaOm.com, Jauhari.net, Problogger.net, CopyBlogger.com,DailyBlogTips.com, ZenHabits.net, Inhabitat.com, VentureBeat.com, Mentalfloss.com, PronetAdvertising.com, TorrentFreak.com

Webby Awards

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:16:00 -0400

Earlier this month the Webby Awards were announced. There are lots of categories, but I'll just point you to a few blogs.

The Huffington Post won best Political blog. PostSecret is the best cultural blog, and FT.com Alphaville won for business blog.

The Webby Awards is a contest for the best of the internet from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and they announced the winners for dozens of categories covering blogs, websites and video.

Here's a complete list of winners.

One thing I do like about their awards ceremony (in June) is that winners of the Webby Awards must restrict their acceptance speeches to five words.

Pruning the RSS Bush

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 07 May 2008 00:07:00 -0400

Every once and awhile I go to a site like YouTube and do a wildcard search. Enter an asterisk as the wild card in their search box and it looks for ALL videos. A few weeks ago it came up as 79,600,000 videos. (Just now I tried & it and maybe they are disallowing wildcard search; it said "1-20 of millions.") It's overwhelming.

And it's spring cleaning time, so I started going through my RSS feeds for blogs and deciding what to thin out. I have had to do this before. I have been a longtime user of Bloglines, but a few months ago I started adding a few feeds to my Google Reader since I use Gmail, Documents and their calendar (which now syncs with the Outlook calendar on my school office computer) every day. I'm starting to ignore my Bloglines feeds, and if you do that for a few days or weeks, the amount of UNREAD posts is frightening.

(Still not sure about what RSS is all about? Watch this simple and plain English video explanation.)

Using Google Reader means I need to snip away at my existing Bloglines feeds. But what to prune away?

Pruning #1 Right off are the blogs that post multiple short posts each day so that I can't keep up with reading. They must be part of this current interest in Twitter and other microblogs that I just don't get.

Have you tried Twitter? Users post all day with short bursts of "news" updates: "I'm having some soup; heading to a meeting; at the gym; just saw the new Porsche drive by." You can sign up with your mobile number and enter text either via the form on the site, or send text messages to the service. Depending on your privacy settings, the messages will be displayed right on their public page or just on your private page, visible only to you and your friends. I don't need to follow anyone that closely, and no one would want to follow me either.

#2 Then there are a few bloggers who have turned too commercial for me. There are two educators in particular that I have followed for a few years that I just dropped. Reason? Their posts have just become a series of tales about all the conferences and workshops they are doing. And their resource links are the same old wine in new bottles. They work hard at finding new ways to title the same talk on Web 2.0.

#3 If you want to have a blog, you have to blog. There were 7 blogs that haven't had a new post in more than a month. At least they don't pile up, but, alas, farewell.

Is Google Reader better than Bloglines? Each has some small advantages/differences. For Google Reader, for me, having in front of me when I open my Gmail is good. Subscribing and categorizing feeds in folders is equally easy. There are small things that matter (maybe just to me) like: in both I can email someone a blog post but in GR I can select my own subject line (in Bloglines, it creates an uneditable one for me. Choose either (or comment below with your own favorite reader) but if you read blogs on any regular basis, use a reader.

Hit a Million Times and Still Smiling

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Sun, 04 May 2008 20:18:00 -0400

Reading Tim's thorough dissection today of the blog getting a million hits in April is illuminating, but it doesn't address what gives me the most pleasure from the numbers.

Last year at this time, I wrote a post called "Bookmarklets and Favelets" about using social bookmarking tools and sites. It's a very average post with a useful list of links to social bookmarking sites. The week it was posted it probably has about 100 direct hits. (The number at the end of each post tells you how many people actually linked directly to that post. A hit on our home page probably leads someone to read the latest post but that post doesn't get any "credit" for that in the count.) I looked at it today - 21, 333 direct hits. The post has a life.

I thought briefly about being a journalist when I was an undergrad. If I had ended up making it to the big show - say at the New York Times - I would write pieces that people would read and then throw away. True, some pieces get reprinted, clipped out and saved (I still do that all the time), anthologized or end up in books, but the vast majority disappear. That's depressing.

This post (and hopefully some others that are much better) will be read more in the months to come than it will be read this month when it is fresh and new. I like that a lot. Traditional (and paid!) journalists are also reaping this benefit of online publishing. Their writing gets read again and again online long after it appeared in print on paper.

I guess Tim & I could think of getting hit on a million times in another way too. I checked the dictionary and found "hit on" (No, not to make, especially sexual overtures to) also means to discover or meet especially by chance. That's a perfectly serendipitous way of looking at this.

An Anthology of Blog Posts

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:25:00 -0500

Add another milestone to the history of blogging. I read "Finding the 'Ultimate Blogs': An interview with Sarah Boxer" posted by Kelly Heyboer on the Jersey Blogs site last week.

Sarah Boxer has put together an anthology of the best blog writing. She admits the term ultimate is:

"kind of tongue in cheek. (I guess I needed an emoticon to cue people how to read that word.) There are no ultimate blogs, of course. The blogosphere is an endless stream of constantly changing material.
I went through hundreds of blogs, following recommendations, links, contests, and the "favorites" lists of bloggers I like. I looked for variety in terms of subject matter, use of language, age group, geography, and type (there are a couple of poetry blogs, a few cartoon blogs and one photo blog in the book).
The blogs I ultimately chose are the ones that I thought were exceptionally well written, bloggy in tone, and -- most basically -- would work in a book."

The former New York Times reporter is not a blogger herself, so she created this traditional book of paper about digital writing.

Ultimate Blogs: Masterwords from the Wild Web is made up of posts from 27 blogs. Some blogs are pretty well known (Go Fug Yourself ,The Smoking Gun) others are not - though I suspect their ht counters will surge this month.

An American-abroad blog How to Learn Swedish in 1000 Difficult Lessons,
military blog Midnight in Iraq
classical music blog The Rest is Noise.

Boxer was asked

Q: Did you have a favorite blogger? Were you surprised by what you selected for the anthology?
A: I love all of them actually. The ones that really stick in my mind are the ones I think of as alter-ego blogs or character blogs: AngryBlackBitch, Eurotrash, El Guapo.
I also love the cartoon blogs Micrographica and Get Your War On. I find I Blame the Patriarchy hilarious. I can't pick. They're all great.
There are tons of fabulous storytellers in there: There's an Iraqi blogger who tells an amazing tale about a t-shirt. There's an American Marine interviewing some Iraqi kids. There's an American living in Sweden who is a master of short anecdotes. A music blogger tells the story, with the help of Mozart and Wagner, of how applause between musical movements came to be frowned on.
Another blogger retells the story of the Iliad and Odyssey from the point of view of one of Odysseus's sidekicks.
I was surprised that so few of the bloggers in the book turned out to be political bloggers. I have only two -- Rootless Cosmopolitan and Matthew Yglesias. It is incredibly hard to find any political blogs that don't rely heavily on links and that don't go stale the day after they're written.

Do you use blogging in your classes? I know that there are courses taught at the college level on blogging. I wouldn't say that this anthology is appropriate as a textbook, but the sites and some of the examples might well be used to show the styles & genres that are developing in blogging. Did you know that there are cartoon blogs? (Personally, I like indexed.) Could you use under odysseus in your classics unit or pair it up with Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead to talk about changing the point of view in a story?

Will we see a time when there will be Best American Blog Posts (though "American" may not work for the Net) as we now have the Best American Poetry or Best American Stories et al?

Using Blogs in Your Classroom

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:22:00 -0500

I use an open source blog software for this blog, and the "commercial-but-free" Blogger software for a poetry blog. I also have created blogs on other sites - mostly just to experiment with the software - as with nes I have on Eduspaces, VOX, Xanga, and even MySpace. One site that I probably should have investigated earlier is Edublogs.

Edublogs was started in 2005 in Australia as a blogging platform and community for educators. It has grown to host over a hundred thousand blogs. There's even an enterprise blogging solution called Edublogs Campus that might be a good solution for your educational institution.

There's a recent post on their site called "10 ways to use your edublog to each."

It's a good list of educational uses of a blog. You can read their full text, but here's my take on the list.

1. Use a blog to post materials and resources - especially useful to those of you who have no access to network/server storage for your classes that will be accessible by your students from school and home.

2. Host online discussions - having students respond to blog posts and discuss topics without a CMS. AS a teacher, you can receive emails when comments are made & you can manage and edit all responses.

3 & 4. Create a class publication - do a class newsletter, offer parent information, a site for a club or group. Students can be contributors, authors and editors.

5. Get your students blogging - your blog can be a "hub" for their work and a place where they can easily visit other blogs. Teachers of writing should be writers themselves. Teachers who ask students to blog, should be blogging.

6. Share your lesson plans - That may seem radical to some teachers - to open source your plans.

7. Integrate multimedia - embed online video, multimedia presentations, slideshows without CDS, coding knowledge.

8. As an organizing tool - clubs, activities, student government, single events...

9. Get feedback - You CAN allow anonymous commenting on your blog (or force all comments through moderation) but if you're not afraid or even welcome feedback...

10. Create a fully functional website - blogs can look like multimedia rich websites. No one says you have to do all the comments and typical blogging functions. (Though I suspect that if you use a blog for a few months, you will WANT to use those functions!)

2007 EduBlog Awards Finalists

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:26:00 -0500

The finalists are posted (no, not Serendipity35). Check them out. Good things to read there and you can vote if you wish.

Try the Most Influential Posts as a starting place.

Gone Fischinâ€™ - Dangerously Irrelevant

How to Grow a Blog - blog of proximal development

How to Prevent Another Leonardo da Vinci - Wandering Ink

Is It Okay To Be A Technologically Illiterate Teacher? - The Fischbowl

The Ripe Environment - Discourse about Discourse