By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Are Blogs a 'Parasitic' Medium?
"Could the blogosphere survive without the reporting provided by newspapers and TV networks?" Journalists are fond of saying that blogs depend on them for news. What I observe is that newspapers are parasitic on science, research, education and technology (to name a few). Look at the stories in OLDaily, or in the blogs covered here, and you will see real people struggling with real issues. The journalists just watch and wait while other people to say things, invent things, or do things - then they move in, create their own self-appointed 'experts', and act like they own the story. What has in fact happened is that other people are now doing to journalists what journalists have always done to other people. We are taking back the stories we create in the first place. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blogs Vs. Discussion Groups
I am extensively involved in both blogs and discussion groups (though the latter are notoriously hard to link to). So for me it has never been a question of deciding which one is better. But there does seem to be some factionalism. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Boycott Bloglines Image Wall!
Bloglines has created a new service that creates an 'image wall' out of harvested RSS feeds. Miguel Guhlin has created a bit of a stir in the edublogosphere by calling on educators to boycott it because "entering the Image Wall (and who reads those disclaimers anymore?), I was looking at pregnant women, a couple in a passionate embrace, and. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Four Platforms You Can Use To Make A Blog For Kids
Patricia Fioriello, Kids Learn to Blog, 2014/10/22
Just for the record: blogging still exists. It's still good for kids. Educational blogging is still relevant. "Blogs offer a powerful means of socializing and they are also lots of fun. Even though it’s hard to let your kids loose on the Internet with little supervision, it is healthy in some ways. Careful preparation will enable you help your kids launch their first blogging ventures". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. “The Linux of social media”—How LiveJournal pioneered (then lost) blogging
Steven T. Wright, Ars Technica, 2019/02/05
I was never really a LiveJournal person but I might have been. It was a coin toss when I opted for Blogger instead. LiveJournal competed well with blogs but weren't able to match social media. It wasn't lack of features; it was usability. "We had basically all the major features you see today, like a friends page. But we didn’t quite figure out how to tell the story or keep people interested. We had every option, but nobody could get it to work." Eventually the site was sold to Russian investors. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MyBlogLog - A Proper Community Around Your Weblog and 5 Reasons Why You Would Want to Install It
I have a MyBlogLog account. It's here. I've been on it for a few months now. It wants to charge me money for full stats, but I don't want that. It creates a sort of 'community' around my website. It has a sidebar where you can see the pictures of people who visited my website - well, only those visitors who have MyBlogLog accounts. But I don't like putting other sites' (slow) widgets on my web site (because they're slow). Do I use MyBlogLog? Not really. It would be neat if people who visit the site could leave some kind of calling card - that's why I created the referrer system so many years ago. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Egalitarian Nature of Blogging
Wesley Fryer quotes Scott Mcleod on the ever-emergent of blog list rankings: "I unapologetically admit that I care about my Technorati ranking. Why? Because I'm trying to make change. The bigger audience I have, the more readers I reach directly..." But what if this isn't true? What if the best way to influence people is to give away your ideas and to let other people take ownership of them? What if seeking to increase your ranking actually impairs your ability to communicate, because people become mistrustful of your intentions? There's two things. 'Being heard' is one of them. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blogging Restructures Consciousness?
Following the links here will lead you on an interesting excursion, one that visits the MyDD direct democracy website, analysis of Snakes on a Plane, and which also visits the fascinating excerpts from Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. The point of departure is a political blogger's realization that, "After two and a half years of virtually non-stop blogging, my perception of myself as a distinct individual has dramatically waned... I do not exist in the same way I once existed." His identity, he writes, has become subsumed by his blog. I have been overtly blogging since 1998, and writing online even longer. I don't know what it's like to think in writing, to think symbolically; my cognition is very much based around sound, the spoken word, and my pattern recognition is sub-linguistic, not even pictorial, but an intuitive grasp of non-representational relationships. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Fringe Journal
Haven't seen this before, but Susan Smith Nash (the E-Learning Queen) writes on assorted topics in this blog. The content resonates and sometimes haunts. I especially enjoyed her account of being (and not being) on the school pep squad. Also see her post on the meaning of 9-11 (aside: 9-11 has no particular meaning for me; the world did not change. We all expect Americans to get over it. I remember Pamela Wallen coming back from the U.S. in 2003 to tell us, "they're not going to get over it." I'm not sure people outside the U.S. can understand that - but this post helps). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tom Haskins[Edit][Delete]: I Found it Inside My Blog Reader!, growing changing learning creating [Edit][Delete] December 15, 2006
Heh. "All these bloggers I subscribe to appear to be learning without formal instruction... All these bloggers are self directing their own learning proceses, motivating their own progress, synthesizing their own meaning and constructing idiosyncratic mental models. How did all these bloggers get so resourceful and practiced at learning informally from the blogging they are doing?". More...