Digital literacy and radical education

Wikiworld, an online book with the subtitle 'Political economy of digital literacy, and the promise of participatory media', provides the kind of theoretical grounding many of us have been missing in much of the fare of literature about digital studies. The long-standing tension between technology and society is presented with reference to Marx, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Marcuse (among others); the radical conceptualization of education as life-long, everyday and emancipatory is related to the ideas of Freire and Illich. And the requirement for digital literacy – extending far beyond skill-building and schooling – is sketched and placed within the parameters of Web-based participatory media as exemplified by wikis. The book merits much more considered attention than I am now able to provide; here I merely wish to signal its publication and open access availability, and recommend its study.

Below is a descriptive paragraph from the book website:

The book out now!

Posted in announcements, education, social media, web 2.0 by vatsia on the March 21, 2007

WIKIWORLD
Political Economy and the Promise of Participatory Media

Juha Suoranta & Tere Vadén
University of Tampere, Finland

In the digital world of learning there is a progressive transformation from the institutionalized and individualized forms of learning to open learning and collaboration. The book provides a critical view on the use of new technologies and learning practices in furthering socially just futures, while at the same time paying critical attention to the constants, or "unmoved movers" of the information society development; the West and Capitalism. The essential issue in the Wikiworld is one of freedom – levels and kinds of freedom. Our message is clear: we write for the radical openness of education for all.

History of communication research bibliography

Following with interest an email-based discussion between Igor Vobic, Maja Turnsek and Saso Slacek on the distinctions between the concepts audience, public, and mass, I began looking for one of the references mentioned and stumbled on probably the most thorough of sources: the History of Communication Research Bibliography (HCRB). No links to online versions, but still valuable… and a RSS feed can be created to be informed of updates, although nothing new seems to have been posted for almost a year….

‘Audience’ as concept relevant to Web 2.0

This week we discussed several of the articles in the First Monday theme issue on Web 2.0 in the Ljubljana seminar, and during that discussion wondered about the relevance of the (mass) communication concept of 'audience' to Web 2.0 environments. During that conversation, Maja Turnsek reminded us of the following publication that may provide a starting point for exploring such relevance:

Renckstorf, K., & McQuail, D. (1996). Social action perspectives in mass communication research: an introduction. In K. Renckstorf, D. McQuail & N. Jankowski (eds.), Media use as social action; A European approach to audience studies, pp. 1-17. London: John Libbey.

The introductory chapter in that book does provide a valuable historical overview and does develop a typology to facilitate understanding the concept audience. The text does not, however, deal with either the Internet or the Web - understandably, since the book was published prior to that era. Similarly, it does not deal with the related notion 'user generated content' (UGC). Although this last notion is generally associated with Web 2.0 developments, the idea of users generating content has a much longer history and dates back to (at least) the late 1960s with the rise of alternative media associated with the counter culture and anti-war movements in the United States and, subsequently, with the rise of public access television in that country and, later, with the coming of community radio and television in Europe during the mid-1970s. This history has been traced is various publications, notably Community Television in Amsterdam (Jankowski, 1988), The People's Voice (Jankowski, Prehn & Stappers, 1992) and Community Media in the Information Age (Jankowski & Prehn, 2002).

No one seems to have placed UGC in an historical perspective such as the one noted above, and no one seems to have considered UGC within a Web 2.0 environment from the perspective of audience. I think the latter would be useful, but I think the conclusion from that exercise would be that the conventional notions of audience lose their meaning in a UGC environment. That environment may, in fact, signal the considerable deficiency to the various formulations of audience enumerated in the Renckstorf and McQuail chapter with regard to Web-based communication - even those in which traditional mass media are active (e.g., online newspapers, Internet-delivered radio and television).

Scholarly discourse supreme: RCCS

Those of you that monitor the Air-list have probably already seen the announcement post from David Silver about the recent book titles that have been reviewed on the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (RCCS). This particular list of titles is stunning with respect to the titles, the reviewers and the authors' responses…and all relate to facets of the Ljubljana seminar. Below is Silver's post from the Air-List:

Dear AoIR people,

happy soon-to-be april!

 

each month, the resource center for cyberculture studies (RCCS)

publishes a set of book reviews and author responses (

http://rccs.usfca.edu/booklist.asp ). books of the month for april 2008

include:

 

Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture

Author: Lisa Gitelman

Publisher: MIT Press, 2006

Review 1: J. Patrick Biddix

Review 2: David Heineman

Review 3: Michelle Rodino-Colocino

Author Response: Lisa Gitelman

 

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

Author: Henry Jenkins

Publisher: NYU Press, 2006

Review 1: Susan Keith

Review 2: Anne Kustritz

Review 3: Darby Orcutt

Review 4: J. Richard Stevens

Author Response: Henry Jenkins

 

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

Author: David Weinberger

Publisher: Times Books, 2007

Review 1: Lucinda Austin

Review 2: Geoffrey B. Cain

Review 3: Erika Pearson

Author Response: David Weinberger

 

Online Matchmaking

Editors: Monica T. Whitty, Andrea J. Baker, James A. Inman

Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007

Review 1: Trudy Barber

Author Response: Andrea J. Baker

 

enjoy. there's more where that came from.

 

david silver

http://silverinsf.blogspot.com

Social media & election campaigns, American style

Fred Stutzman posted reflections at techPresident on what he terms the 'social filter' feature of social media and how this seems to be generating a change in political candidate strategies and electorate engagement. Reading his piece, a commentary on a NY Times article, 'Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass it On', resulted in a longer-than-expected thread of related posts, some of which are summarized / addressed here.

The central point in this series of posts is that electoral politics is changing rapidly and radically; and, if we believe Stutzman's analysis and prediction, politics a decade down the road will be a different animal and hardly reflective of the 'politics as usual' cliché.

To begin with the NY Times article and one of the sources cited therein, a Pew report from last January suggests that media use during the 2008 US election campaign varies consistently and strikingly along age: half of the 50 and older respondents attend to TV for campaign news, 39% of the middle-age voters do so, and only a quarter of the under-30 crowd watch TV for their election news consumption. Some two-thirds of the last group, call them 'youth' for ease, rely mainly on social networking sites for campaign information.

In the context of this thread, social networking sites, although multiple and varied, encompass the very large social contact sites like MySpace and Facebook as well as file sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr and, and that vast terrain known as the blogosphere including 'micro blogging' as reflected in initiatives like Twitter.

The NY Times quote from Pew Project director Lee Rainie sums up the different way youth seem to acquire and process campaign information: "Young people are particularly galvanized in this campaign, and they have a new set of tools that make it look different from the enthusiasm that greeted other politicians 30 years ago …. They read a news story and then blog about it, or they see a YouTube video and then link to it, or they go to a campaign Web site, download some phone numbers, and make calls on behalf of a candidate."

The 'social filter' component of social media is reflected in the personal and informal character, 'between us, in conversation' as Stutzman puts it. He argues that these media are 'identity driven', that is, generated by individuals known in some manner to the other persons within a particular social network. The 'rub', of course, is that the nature of this knowing, the meaning of being a 'Friend' on SNS Friendster for example, is both thin and nebulous (see boyd's elaboration of this feature).

In an earlier post this month, called The Social Media Voter, Stutzman elaborates on how social media are being used in the 2008 US campaign and suggests a typology that he qualifies as a 'brainstorm' rather than research-based construction. Still, this typology has a ring of clarity and, for those of us weaned on various typologies of adoption patterns, familiarity. He suggests four types of social media voters: (1) Window-Shoppers, (2) Toe-Dippers, (3) Communicators, and (4) the Mavans (experts). Persons interested in the description of these categories should consult Stutzman's posting; what is relevant here is that a clustering of social media users in relation to their attention to election-oriented news is possible **and** that there is a increasing shift from consuming to producing such news in the typology. In Stutzman's words, "…the turn isn't consumption of information, but production and communication of information."

Another post from Stutzman, from almost a year ago, entitled 'Authenticity in Social Media', reflects on a conference panel discussing social media and the then upcoming US election cycle. Panelists talked about using these media to humanize candidates and, as paraphrased by Stutzman, to generate "the perception that candidate are actively engaging with digital supporters." He rightly points to the issue of authenticity with regard to social media and wonders whether such political strategy may back-fire – that voter trust may be undermined through such sham-style presentations.

There is, in other words, much to learn about the effective ways in which social media may be integrated into electoral campaigns; some of the comments to this last posting by Stutzman provide nuances of importance, such as one suggesting distinguishing between social media environments which by their nature accentuate socializing and activist networks that have a more action-oriented mandate.

Stutzman's concluding prediction-oriented paragraph merits repeat, in part because of its absolute expression of how tomorrow will be (as an aside, predicting the future is perhaps the most risky of enterprises, resembling more the soothsayer than the scholar) and because embedded in that statement is a hypothesis worth scientific exploration:

"… it is clear beyond a doubt that social media will play significant roles in 2008, 2012, 2016 and so on. The candidates that use social media most effectively will set the precedent that will resound for years to come. I've got a feeling that the candidate that most authentically represents her or himself online will be this precedent-setter, and they'll benefit substantially as a result."

Digital literacy: KNAW conference overview

Yesterday I attended a conference organized by the Royal Netherlands Academy of the Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam entitled 'Literacy in the Age of New Media' [Footnote: the book 'Literacy in the New Media Age' which was published just a couple of years ago and widely reviewed (see e.g., review1, review2), failed to receive a nod of acknowledgement.]

In a series of postings I plan to sketch and comment on the presentations. Here, in this introductory post, I wish to dwell on the objectives of the half-day event, the program, and the venue.

Beginning with the last, the venue, the Royal Academy is the home of the arts and sciences in the Netherlands. The building, situated in the 17^th century heart of Amsterdam, reflects the history, culture and wealth of the country – all projected in a modest and circumspect Calvinist manner. The conference was organized by a national scholarly commission appointed by the KNAW to consider literacy in a multimedia era. The commission was initiated and is still dominated by humanities scholars and institutions, although this 'bias' is seemingly changing. The new chairman of this commission, for example, comes from the Amsterdam Communications Department, which is – still – dominated by a behaviorist, quantitative conception of communications scholarship. This means, among other things, that the commission is expanding from a humanities perspective on literacy to one more pluralistic and embracing of the social sciences.

The objective of the event, according to the announcement text found on the KNAW website, is to facilitate exchange between media, language and literature scholars; and representatives from educational institutions and from publishing industry active in the world of new media. The final sentence of the conference announcement, in translated form, suggests much: 'a search for refinement of collective analysis and for refinement of the terms through which societal and educational discussion [on the topic of the conference, literacy in the age of new media] can be conducted'. The obvious question, emerging from this objective, is to what degree this conference contributed to such a broad and ambitious intent. Obvious though it is, the question is impossible to answer at this point in anything other than subjective, impressionistic terms. Here, then, are a few personal impressions….

As far as academic conferences go, this event faired well: the speakers were well chosen and knew their trade, the conventional conference formula – presentations and panel, short moments for interventions from the floor, long coffee breaks and a concluding reception – was successfully applied. I genuinely enjoyed the Friday afternoon, in being able to partake of the presentations given and insights shared. That appreciation stated, I nevertheless felt a strong discomfort about the conventionality and predictability of the formula. The formula lacked what is, in fact, the frequently stated component in the new media environment: participation and user-generated content. The conference reflected the way academics have organized such events for decades and the way most of us probably organize our seminars and classes. The personal and 'real' moments of engagement and exchange took place, predictably, during the coffee breaks and during the reception afterwards. The formula lacked creative innovation related to that core component of new media, user generation, because of which the concern about literacy in a new media age has gained prominence. In this respect, the organizers of this conference missed an opportunity to 'go beyond' the conventional formula of presentation and exchange in an effort to contribute to the overriding objective: generation of discourse among members of the academic community.

I know how difficult it is to 'go beyond' such conventionality; most events for which I have shared organizational responsibility have reflected the same features and formula. All too often we seem captives to the 'one to many' notion of communication and, when there are relatively large numbers involved, as in the case of this KNAW event involving some 150 persons, we close our minds to alternatives. I am involved in organizing an ICA pre-conference entitled the Long History of New Media, and we are facing the same organizational difficulty: how to construct a setting within which engagement, participation, can be optimalized? We've considered several alternatives, like a 'speed dating' variant of small group meetings where individuals rotate among groups at pre-determined time intervals and address topics of the event in groups of 10-15 persons. Until now we've come up with nothing better than a wide range of panels with time built into each for audience interventions. I feel this is a far cry from serious participation, but haven't yet come up with any organizational structures that would accomplish more than something as mundane as increasing the duration of the coffee breaks.

Here's the latest description of how the day is organized, sent this week to authors of papers for the event:

We also wish to mention again the particulars about the roundtables at the pre-conference.  In an effort to facilitate exchange, the roundtables will be organized as follows:

a)      First, each participant in the roundtable presents a 5-minute statement concerning their work.

b)      After each participant has presented, there will be a round of interactions between participants.

c)       After this, there will be time reserved for interventions from the floor.

 We are planning to video and audio record the sessions and hope to archive them and make them available to participants via the Web.

 

As I re-examine the procedures, I see little substantive difference with the KNAW approach and expect a blogger afterwards will express the same disappointment I now share in this post with the paucity of participation built into the KNAW new media literacy event… Before it is too late, within the next few weeks, I would welcome suggestions for facilitating engagement among a group of a hundred, using conventional large room university facilities.

 

 

 

Discussion lists and blogs for librarians

Once again, as we would expect, librarians score as ultra-organized professionals active in the domain of information storage and retrieval.

The Library and Information Science Wiki (LisWiki) is a treasure chest filled with the kinds of information professional librarians crave – and the rest of us would like to have access to in our respective fields. One of the treasures on this wiki is a long list of discussion groups devoted to library-type issues. Another is a list of blogs specialized on the profession; another is material, some now classic, on digitalization, which is one of my present interests (exploring ways to digitalize 30-year-old video tapes from one of the very first community television stations in Europe, the Lokale Omroep Bijlmermeer).

If anyone finds similar wikis for the various department labels of communication studies (e.g., media studies, cultural studies, communication science) and Internet studies (also: multimedia, digital studies, ICT, telematics), please let me know….

WorldCat addendum

WorldCat, I should have guessed, is an initiative of a parent organization of libraries that has been around a long time, since 1967, and encompasses research libraries around the world. Originally known as 'Ohio College Library Center', with globalization it transfigured itself into 'Online Computer Library Center'. Here is text from the OCLC page of history:

History of OCLC

In the beginning…

In 1967, the presidents of the colleges and universities in the state of Ohio founded the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC) to develop a computerized system in which the libraries of Ohio academic institutions could share resources and reduce costs.

OCLC's first offices were in the Main Library on the campus of The Ohio State University (OSU), and its first computer room was housed in the OSU Research Center. It was from these academic roots that Frederick G. Kilgour, OCLC's first president, oversaw the growth of OCLC from a regional computer system for 54 Ohio colleges into an international network.

Expanding beyond Ohio

In 1977, the Ohio members of OCLC adopted changes in the governance structure that enabled libraries outside Ohio to become members and participate in the election of the Board of Trustees; the Ohio College Library Center became OCLC, Inc. In 1981, the legal name of the corporation became OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. Today, OCLC serves more than 60,000 libraries of all types in the U.S. and 112 countries and territories around the world.

Sites for Sharing: WorldCat, a new one on the block….

Social networking sites devoted to sharing lists of things have been around for a long time, as have those specialized in sharing information related to books – bibliographies, reviews, cover images. A month ago a group of librarians initiated the beta version of their site for sharing literature. Called WorldCat for, I presume, World Catalogue, it is little more than a month old and momentum is merely starting. Below are snatches of text from the site and from the blog where the interested can trace WorldCat's development.

Highlighted below is text from the WorldCat homepage with a claim positioned in the future: there are many, many library networks that can be consulted, including those of the largest research libraries in the world; it will take some doing to match or exceed those accessible holdings. Access, by the way, does not include lending rights or even privilege to examine a document. One has access to the metadata prepared by a library and, in a sense, the search has only begun once that information is in hand….

" WorldCat is the world's largest network of library content and services. WorldCat libraries are dedicated to providing access to their resources on the Web, where most people start their search for information.

What am I searching?

WorldCat.org lets you search the collections of libraries in your community and thousands more around the world. WorldCat grows every day thanks to the efforts of librarians and other information professionals."

The several YouTube video on WorldCat are gems of performance. One of my favorites is of a senior law librarian elaborating on a project to be reported in July 2008 on developing a specialized legal reference list. Another video, possibly more prosaic but practical for the rest of us, is how a bibliography for a collaborative project can be created and then formatted into a large assortment of styles, and then exported to other referencing tools like EndNote. And another is how to install a Firefox plug-in tool making WorldCat all the easier.

Now, the WorldCat blog….

Welcome to the WorldCat Blog

By Laura on February 18, 2008 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Welcome to the WorldCat Blog! – a fun spot to read about what's happening on WorldCat.org and to share cool ways that people are using the site and their libraries.

What exactly is WorldCat you ask?
It is the world's largest network of library items. WorldCat lets you search many libraries at once to find books, articles, music, videos and more. And helps you locate items in a library near you.

The team here at WorldCat.org is working on new tools and new ways to allow you to make the most of all the resources WorldCat has to offer - to aid your interests, work, and library selections – and to collaborate and share with other WorldCat users. We will be sharing these things with you in this blog and hope that you will share your thoughts and ideas with us as well.

 

Scholarly-Facebook Apps

A librarian, Gerry McKiernan, posted on his blog some 43 scholarly-oriented applications available on Facebook and asked for suggestions of other applications. Many – most – of these 'apps' are in fact features often mentioned in relation to Web 2.0 and can be used independently of the social networking site Facebook. That minor qualification aside, the list is extensive but probably can be extended. For those in the Ljubljana seminar, I would welcome hearing of other 'apps' you use for scholarly-related purposes.

See the following post to view of the list of apps: What Are YOUR Favorite [Library-Related] Facebook Apps?

Wikipedia: venue for student papers

The day before, 18 March, two university instructors from the University of Washington at Bothell gave a presentation at the 2008 Educause Learning Initiative conference detailing their experiences in having students prepare term papers intended for publication in Wikipedia. The slides of the presentation and an audio accompaniment are available on the web; the 50-minute audio with slides can be consulted via Adobe Connect. As a pedagogical exercise, I think using Wikipedia in this manner has much value, and that aspect, as well as several difficulties encountered during two classes across a two-year period, is elaborated in clear detail in the slides and audio.

The presentation is important for us in Ljubljana for another reason: it is an illustration of a quality presentation and is, at the same time, an excellent application of Adobe Connect. The presentation inspired me to try this form of use of Adobe for a subsequent seminar presentation, and it may be a suitable way for seminar paper presentations to also be prepared and delivered. The presentation is long, but viewing the first ten is sufficient to get a 'feel' for the technique employed. And the slides can be viewed with the audio and skimmed in a matter of a few minutes.

Other material on the site of the Educause conference – see program – is also worth examining; most is accessible online. By the way, the manner in which this event has been organized and how material has been archived seems illustrative of excellent conference practice.

The initiative was also described in an article, 'When Wikipedia is the Assignment' in Inside Higher Ed, October 29, 2007; it has been discussed on several blogs, including eng516.

Science 2.0: An idea whose time has come….

In the Age of the Internet not all information travels at the speed of light. Two months ago Scientific American initiated an experiment in collaborative publishing on its site, SciAm, and only now am I 'catching up' with this innovation. Author Mitchell Waldrop posted an article-in-development on the site, entitled 'Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk? Wikis, blogs and other collaborative web technologies could usher in a new era of science. Or not'. As Waldrop suggests in the preface to the piece, many questions are related to what he calls 'Science 2.0' a variant of the more popular 'Web 2.0' buzzword:

• Will Web 2.0 tools really make science much more productive? Will wikis, blogs and the like be transformative, or will they be just a minor convenience?
  
• Science 2.0 is one aspect of a broader Open Science movement, which also includes Open-Access scientific publishing and Open Data practices. How do you think this bigger movement will evolve?
  
• Looking at your own scientific field, how real is the suspicion and mistrust mentioned in the article? How much do you and your colleagues worry about getting "scooped"? Do you have first-hand knowledge of a case in which that has actually happened?
  
• When young scientists speak out on an open blog or wiki, do they risk hurting their careers?
  
• Is "open notebook" science always a good idea? Are there certain aspects of a project that researchers should keep quite, at least until the paper is published?
  

The innovation, in terms of publishing, was inviting readers to post comments on the SciAm site, which would be considered when the author revises the article for publication some months down the road. As of today, some 121 comments have been posted (some by the article author as reactions). There is no way to assess this number properly, but based on my personal experience and on my observations of the reactions to other scholarly pieces allowing online responses, this is a very, very large input of commentary. I just finished reading all the comments and many reflect the kind of developments I would expect to be of interest to the author for incorporation in a subsequent version of the article. I think, in fact, Waldrop has struck a sensitive chord among certain subgroups of scientists who have been concerned for some time as to how various Web 2.0 functionalities could be incorporated into the scientific process. In some circles, these concerns are identified with the broader concerns of e-science, cyberinfrastructure, e-social science, and the more general label e-research (interestingly, only one of the postings made reference to e-science).

The article and postings provide a rich overview of developments and I have excerpted items from this material that seems to me particularly relevant to transformation of scholarly practice; see below:

• PLoS ONE: Public Library of Science On-Line Edition, a web-based journal; from the PLos ONE site: "An interactive open-access journal for the communication of all peer-reviewed scientific and medical research."
  
• OpenWetWare: collaborator at MIT involving biologists and engineers; from the site: "OpenWetWare is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering."
  
• UsefulChem: wiki for chemists; known as open notebook science; from site: "This is an open source science project in chemistry led by the Bradley Laboratory at Drexel University. Since all laboratory experimental results are made public, we refer to this work as Open Notebook Science as well.
  
• Nature Network: portal for open science exploration;
  
• Connotea: site for online management of research references;
  
• Nature experiment with open peer review: final report published in December 2006.
  

 

Excerpts from postings:

• Post 13: Open peer review: "...experiment in open peer review, with pre-publication manuscripts made available for public comment"….This phrase certainly is ambiguous. I read it as meaning the Open Peer review trial that Nature the journal ran over the summer of 2006 and which wasn't much of a success. I agree that Nature Preceedings isn't a trial but a fully fledged pre-print server for biological sciences. I guess it could be regarded as an experiment as all of the attempts at "Science 2.0" are experiments as they are far too young to know what will ultimately happen to them. Nature Preceedings may be more of an experiment as it is far from clear whether the biological sciences wants a pre-print server. ArXive was launched into a culture of wide sharing papers before publication to formal journals, thus facilitating existing behaviour. I think that a good test of success for Nature Preceedings when items presented there are reported on and cited in the same way that papers in ArXive are.
  

  
   

• Post 20: culture of science: "Everyone needs to understand that the people in charge of science, are people who never grew up playing nintendo or atari. While researching at Harvard, I encountered profs who recently learned how to email (2-3 yrs ago) and still write all their documents by hand, but perhaps worst question I've ever been asked is "how do viruses infect computers?" Thinking that viruses affect computers by coughing on them….Technology is not the problem for the adoption of "science 2.0." The problem is with the culture of science."
  

  
   

• Post 28: Science Blogging: "Just one correction: the Science Blogging Conference was in January, not April of 2007. And the 2nd conference is next week, January 18-19th, 2008."
  

  
   

• Post 32: Financing online journals: "The other obvious question not being asked here is how is this all going to be paid for? The last audit I saw of PLOS' finances was in Nature, and it showed them losing millions of dollars per year, with losses increasing in the future. While PLOS has claimed they're on pace to start breaking even at some point, I haven't seen any hard numbers to back this up. They stay in business because of huge grants that cover up their losses. What happens to any small society publisher that can't bring in huge grants? Has anyone been able to make a profit, or at least break even running an open access journal?"
  

  
   

• Post 40: Search engines: "This article gives a good overview of the state of Science 2.0. One aspect I do not find in the article is the increasing role of Google, Microsoft, Adobe and other Web 2.0 companies in science. Google Scholar, Windows Live Academic Search, Google Docs, Buzzword are just some of the tools that change the way scientific documents are created and shared."
  

  
   

• Post 45: blogs vs journals: "My instinct is that blogs and wikis are digital equivalents of the hallway conversation at a conference or the lab meeting, but are a long way from replacing journals. You don't get points for making the statement first about science unless you can prove that statement (otherwise we'd all set up random statement generators about signal transduction and wait for the nobels to flow)….Wikis and blogs are great for teaching technique and method. They are not yet the place to make the statements on which one's career rests, unless of course one's career is as a blogger."
  

  
   

• Post 46: copyright: "Any article about web 2.0 and science should deal with intellectual property. The publisher use of copyright is a real problem here - see Shelly Batts getting a takedown notice for blogging a figure from a Wiley journal over the summer of 2007. And the publishers are attacking the NIH public access policy on copyright terms now as well."
  

  
   

• Post 48: Core of science: "I would say however that the traditional process of asking a question, designing an experiment, interpreting the results, and distilling this into a (more or less) compact research report will never find itself obsolete. However, the data that informs the conclusions must be freely available."
  

  
   

• Post 55: dynamic science: "Science 2.0, particularly the use of wikis, transforms the reporting of scientific discover from a static (snapshot) process to a dynamic one. When dealing with scientific discovery a wiki is superior at capturing the process of investigation than traditional methods of information dissemination. In short, wikis provide an inclusive, ever expanding source of scientific knowledge which will have a dramatic effect on the publication of scientific findings."
  

  
   

• Post 56: accolades via open access: "1) In your discussion of pre-print and other open repositories facilitating peer review, it might be worth mentioning the story of mathematician Grigori Perelman. He solved a famous problem, and only posted the proof to arXiv, an open repository for physics and mathematics. Other mathematicians were able to check his work, and he ended up winning a Fields medal. The story is here:
  http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Sept06/library_arXiv.html"
  

  
   

• Post 73: buzz words: "As a web professional I would like to correct your usage of the term "web 2.0". This is a stupid buzz term invented by media hacks that didn't bother to do their research. The web has undergone a large number of major changes in use and functionality and version 2 was way back when text pages were allowed to use *gasp* pictures. If you want to eliminate purely technical issues then "web 2.0" was when web pages began to be used for entertainment, which was followed by the use for business. The web has been evolving for years and is well beyond version 2. Science has been evolving for millennia and I have no clue what version we would be on. Please stop using moronic buzz words in a publication that is supposed to be accurate and, well, scientific in nature….Aside from that I think that security at both the national and corporate levels will greatly hamper this "open" science. The naive idea that a date/time stamp would actually hold up in a court of law is pretty funny. It is so easy to alter the date/time stamp on files or database fields that that is one of the first things a hacker learns. Unless the entire set of records/data is backed up to a "hard" media like paper, it is vulnerable to destruction or alteration. These tools will likely be adopted in a closed environment but wide open sharing isn't viable with politics and technology as they currently exist."
  
• Post 86: archiving web 2.0: "Openess and collaboration in the age of Web 2.0 has many implications, but among the most important issues I see are 1) digital preservation and "citability" of Internet material, and 2) proper attribution…. On archiving issues I have written in my blog (Eysenbach, Gunther. The paradox of the current state of scholarly communication in the age of Web 2.0 Posted at http://gunther-eysenbach.blogspot.com/ Jan 18, 2008. Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Ux2jEb70) about the paradox that 1) blogs (and other Internet venues such as wikis) are - at least in theory - important venues for scholarship to publish hypotheses, opinions, analyses etc. outside of the traditional journal publishing system 2) yet, they are not considered "citable" or "publications" - which in turn affects their use, usefulness, and acceptance among researchers as tools for scholalry communication. Luckily, a solution to this exists, called WebCite (http://www.webcitation.org), a system which is live since 2005. It is part of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (consisting of libraries and Internet archives), and is used by publishers like BiomedCentral and over 200 journals to routinely archive and digitally preserve cited non-journal Internet material. Simply put, WebCite aims to make Internet material (any sort of digital objects such as blog posts, wikis, etc., except traditional journal articles, for which various archiving mechanisms already exist) more "citable", long-term accessible, and hence more acceptable for scholarly purposes. "
  
• Post 98: science & publishing: "Let me first note that you are not really talking about "Science" but about a subset of scientific publishing and communication.  That is of course very important, but there is a lot more to the overal practice of science, as enabled by computation and information technology.  A small, but growing subset of the academic community has been thinking about this and doing a lot of work for some years now, but really, the revolution (sigh...) is just starting.  Google "e-science" or visit the NSF OCI and CISE websites and look at the reports linked there….Web 2.0 (and the future cliches to follow) technologies can certainly be very useful in enhancing and transforming the way we preserve and communicate (and perhaps even create) knowledge."
  
• Post 101: software for collaboration: "I'd like to emphasize that Science 2.0 should (indeed, must) be about more than sharing --it should also address sharing software, and making it easy for people to write software that analyzes other people's data. I discussed this idea in an article in Science: http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/~foster/science-2005.htm a couple of years ago….Here, by the way, is a talk that discusses Science 2.0: http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/~foster/Talks/060512%20Geoinformatics%20Foster.ppt."
  

Research ethics

For those of you that monitor the AoIR discussion list, air-list, you will know that a dispute has been raging during the past week about ethical issues related to online studies. As in past debates about ethics on this list, the positions taken are often emotionally charged and can be distilled into two extreme camps: (1) those persons who feel every study (remotely) involving human subjects should and must be cleared by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the university involved and (2) those persons who feel much of the work of IRBs is detrimental to quality research and should be circumvented whenever possible. There are, of course, many positions between these extremes. One of the sub-threads of this discussion has revolved around whether and under what conditions it would be necessary to seek IRB approval to conduct research around avatars in virtual worlds like Second Life. Again, the positions ranged from 'yes, of course' to 'no, how silly'.

In the most recent post, a blog on IRBs was mentioned about which I was unfamiliar. The latest posting suggests that serious scholarly study is being conducted on this scientific practice, ethical review boards. Some of the most recent publications from this center are also illustrative of well-composed literature reviews…have a look….

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Maureen Fitzgerald's Ethics Project

Anthropologist and George Mason University alumna Maureen Fitzgerald, now affiliated with the University of Sydney, is the director of "An Analysis of Research Ethics and the Ethical Review Process as Culture and Cultural Process," an ongoing investigation more succinctly named "The Ethics Project."

Between 2001 and 2005 she and her associates observed the workings of 29 ethics committees in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States--not finding significant differences across national boundaries. They have published several papers based on this work, most of which are available on the project's website.

Internet Future…in Bled

In a few weeks there will be yet another conference on the future of the Internet, but this one is just a short distance from Ljubljana, and for seminar students does not impose travel restrictions, Further, the entry fee for the first day, 30 March, is free, which is also hard to beat.

The emphasis seems to be on the corporate sector, but research in Europe is also accentuated. Some of the speakers, like Bill Dutton and Geert Lovink, provide scholarly input.

Dates: 30 March – 2 June, place: Bled, Slovenia

The Future Of The Internet
Perspectives emerging from R&D in Europe

This Conference is hosted by the Slovenian Government, with an objective to offer a first opportunity to understand what is being researched in EU and worldwide in the area of Future Internet, to identify common problems and propose solutions to overcome barriers and to present the key elements of a roadmap of action. The Conference and the associated technical workshop through exchange of ideas and emerging solution plan to offer a coherent approach to the Future of the Internet as a vehicle for excellence and innovation enabling the European actors of the Internet an opportunity to master and shape the future. The Conference is also an open a floor for a discussion of the conditions that must be created in order to help European enterprises to become global leaders in tomorrow's networking and service infrastructures and ensure that the markets are ready for emerging technologies and business models.

Tracing the thread; Ames Chat

My hunch about Ames Chat seems correct: university library staff interested in sharing material. Going back to the start of that blog, last June, I found what I think to be the initiator of the blog, Stephanie Davis-Kahl, a librarian who is also involved in other collective blog enterprises at Wesleyan University in Illinois, one of which is called IWU Teaching Blog. This one involves a score of participants who seem to be interested in adapting various Web 2.0 technologies to the instructional setting, discussing for example, the pros and cons of blogging in a learning setting and the differences between blogging and maintaining a wiki. This blog seems to still be active; the most recent post is from last month. Another blog initiative, the IWU Summer Reading Program, is now defunct, but the posts remain valuable to consult.

Open Library initiative

While enjoying my Sunday morning surfing exercise, I came across Ames Chat, what appears to be a team blog of library specialists who were active during the second half of 2007. There have been no posts in 2008, so I suspect the group is either dormant or disbanded. That is unfortunate because many of the 'discovery' posts on the site reflect the kind of queries we, the Ljubljana seminar group, have – or at least queries that I have….

I'll repost and update several of the items in the coming days from this blog, but here I just want to focus on a single contribution about an initiative called Open Library. In addition to the standard (and beautiful) website describing the objectives and activities of the initiative, there is a book-like version that is particularly informative and attractive:

 

 

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Open Library

Story from InsideHigherEd.com:

"Open Library is a new online tool for finding information about books – even (perhaps especially) for titles that are out-of-print, scarce, or likely to find one reader per decade, if even that. It is, so to speak, a catalog with benefits. If a text is available in digital format, there is a link. you to it. Citations and excerpts from reviews will be available. Likewise, cross-references to other works on related topics. A user of Open Library can see the cover of the book and, in some cases, search the contents."

Hello Zoho, Goodbye Bill

Colleague Maurice Vergeer pointed me in the direction of Zoho during the recent Etmaal conference in Amsterdam and our conversation on collaborative software. A week later I got around to scanning the Zoho site and my first impression is summed up in the title of this posting. I do think the range of items in the package – from simple note taking to team calendars, to spreadsheets to wikis, to chat, to planning, to (of course) word processing – provides a kind of online environment that can be shared is little less than astounding.

I'll be going through the individual packages in the coming couple of weeks to test my first impression further and to compare with what Google Docs offers. For now, let me just cite the following text from the FAQs on the Zoho site:

10. Do I still need Microsoft Office?
We like to tell people that it is entirely up to you. While we encourage everyone to work online; sometimes you need offline access or simply cannot work without your usual office tools. Zoho enables the best of both worlds since Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show support all the office formats including .doc, .xls and .ppt you can use both. While working with Zoho online you can take advantage of online collaboration with others and the mobility Zoho provides; while working offline, you can still us your MS Office tools. The good news is, we also have a plug-in (a small application you download from our site), that lets you create, edit and save your documents & spreadsheets directly to Zoho Writer/Sheet from within Microsoft Word/Excel. We also support "offline" mode in Zoho Writer so that you can work in your browser even when you are not connected to the Internet and later synch up with your online version when you are back online.

Scholarly Publishing in a Digital Age

The recent announcement, 12 February 2008, by Harvard University to require faculty to make copies of their publications available for placement on a server of the University in order to facilitate access has generated a large wave of interest in academia – not a tsunami but much more than a ripple in the pond. A range of comments have been posted on the announcement, some ecstatic (e.g., open access to scholarship 'just around the corner') and others emphasizing the limitations of the announcement ('only' involves the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and many options for faculty to circumvent the intent of the announcement). For reactions from a proponent of open access, see Michael Carroll's series of posts; see further article in Inside Higher Education.

The issue of open access to scholarship is part of a wider concern, publishing in the digital age, and last July a major report was released on a subdivision of this topic: University Publishing in a Digital Age. This well-documented and researched report suggests that the way scholars – and students – perform their work has changed radically during the past years: they "have increasingly begun to rely on electronic resources" for both teaching and research, and the authors of the report predict that the trends in place will solidify: "We believe the next stage will be the creation of new formats made possible by digital technologies, ultimately allowing scholars to work in deeply integrated electronic research and publishing environments that will enable real-time dissemination, collaboration, dynamically-updated content, and usage of new media" (p. 4). Basically, the report argues that universities should become proactive and experiment with a range of electronic publishing alternatives, that publishing in the widest sense of the word should remain an integrated component of the 'core business' of universities, together with teaching and research.

The report builds on a wealth of recent literature including:

• John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age (2005);
  
• Richard Abel & Lyman Newman, Scholarly Publishing (2002); (consult this bibliography of resources on publishing for details of this and many other materials);
  
• Clifford Lynch, "The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World," First Monday, Vol. 6, No. 6, 4 June 2001.
  
• Paul N. Courant, "Scholarship and Academic Libraries (and their Kin) in a World of Google," First Monday, Vol. 11, No. 8, 7 August 2006.
  

Particularly interesting in the report are the illustrations of innovation regarding open access that have been initiated in some fields, like those for economics (RePec) and anthropology (AnthroSource). Some of these innovations involve arrangements with (commercial) publishers to create portals of material available, usually on a subscription basis (e.g. AnthroSource), but sometimes with no restrictions (e.g. working papers in the RePec database). Some of the initiatives involve creation of electronic texts of books, like undertaken by the Humanities E-Book project of the ACLS. The material on this site is only available on an institutional subscription basis and, for all of its value, is of a much different magnitude (smaller) and quality (extensive metadata on entries) than initiatives like the intent of Google to create an electronic library with millions of volumes during the course the next decade. This Google project, Google Books Library Project, called by the New Yorker Google's Moon Shot in an article published in February 2007, involves collaboration with many of the major research libraries in the United States and Europe to scan their collections, page by page, book by book; see further http://books.google.com/googlebooks/library.html.

Google isn't the only actor in this arena: Amazon has digitized "hundreds of thousands of the books it sells (quote from above-mentioned New Yorker article); another project is called Universal Library, spearheaded by Carnegie Mellon; and, as would be expected, Microsoft is collaborating with a range of partners in the Open Content Alliance. This legion of initiatives does not reflect easy sailing for open access and no one should expect scholarship and the depositories of knowledge to become freely available anytime soon. Perhaps the central problem with this objective is called copyright, and the 'battle lines' between those promoting such initiatives and the protectors of copyright. These battle lines are anything but clearly drawn, however; libraries are sometimes siding with publishers, arguing against the conditions and procedures being applied by Google, and libraries outside the Anglo-Saxon world point to an English / American bias in the Google approach and, initiated by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a counterweight was launched last year, called The European Library.

It is, of course, premature – if not foolhardy – to predict what will develop next in this long saga of open access to scholarship. A safe observation, however, is that the business of scholarly publishing is hardly standing still and some of the recent innovations (e.g., in the world of academic journals, the International Journal of Communication (IJOC) is particularly innovative and interesting) may pave the way for a shift in arrangements between author, reader, scholarly institution, and (commercial) publisher – in the direction of open access.

Internet searching: tools & skills

Questa distributed one of their periodic email newsletters this morning that included a link to a professional data mining company BrightPlanet. One of the documents on this site is a 67-page Guide to Effective Searching on the Internet. And one of the links in this document led me to the library of my alma mater, UC Berkeley, and a large assortment of materials prepared by the Berkeley library staff: Finding Information on the Internet: A Tutorial. This material contains overviews of search engine features, elaboration of Boolean functions, and suggestions on how and when to use meta search engines. Scanning the material, I felt it would be valuable for all of us in the seminar to examine it carefully and complete some of the tutorial exercises. I'll construct a homework assignment based on the material and distribute it before next Wednesday, with the intent to improve Internet searching strategies and, at the same time, help gather documentation for your seminar papers.

danah boyd: live

Journalists are notorious for reducing complexity to a misleading lead sentence or sound bite, and for that reason many persons with anything to say avoid such 'communicators' like the plague. Occasionally more space is provided and the interviewee has opportunity to express with subtlety and nuance the topic of concern. Discover magazine recently provided danah boyd with a full 14 minutes to talk about young people and social networking sites. The setting was a bar in Brooklyn and the format was conversational, except that there was only one person conversing – boyd; the interviewer's interventions were limited to a few introductory queries and nods of his head at strategic moments. In that span of time, though, boyd provides a panorama of the development of social networking sites in the U.S. and the place they seem to have in the lives of young people, integrated seamlessly into a style of communicating and networking that is forever in flux. The interview is a good 'trailer' for the extensive research she has done on Friendster and other SNSs; see her list of publications. After the Brooklyn bar introduction, perhaps a good place to continue the conversation in a more scholarly venue is at the site of JCMC, starting with her co-authored introduction to a theme issue on SNSs published last year. We'll be attending to some of this literature later in the semester, but for now there is no better entry point than this conversational bar-setting interview with danah boyd.

CIVICWEB III: Reflections on an exercise in blogging

This is the third of the planned trilogy of postings on a recent CIVICWEB conference and provides opportunity for reflection on both the event and the exercise in conferencing blogging. That the second posting has yet to be composed signals one of the core difficulties experienced: lack of time to properly prepare commentary on events. My first post was mainly a descriptive text of Coleman's keynote, based on his slides and my copious notes; the post lacks reflection, let alone criticism, of the presentation. The post also fails to provide information on the presentations by the two respondents and interventions from the floor, which immediately followed Coleman's talk. The post, as it now stands, provides an incomplete picture of that which transpired in what was, in fact, an intellectually stimulating session. The second post may surface in a few days, but the present material does injustice to the CIVICWEB event.

As it was, three of us involved in or related to the Ljubljana seminar were attending the event, and all three of us have posted material on the CIVICWEB conference: Maja Turnsek, Saso Slacek, and myself. We failed, however, to coordinate our contributions, leaving it to chance as to what we would cover and how. The result is that both Saso and I summarized Coleman's talk and neither of us addressed the contributions from the two respondents to the keynote. We made no arrangements regarding reporting on the afternoon parallel sessions or the plenary windup, meaning that nothing has been shared on those parts of the day. Furthermore, the entire CIVICWEB conference lasted three days; only Maja shared some material from Day 1. Nothing was posted about Day 3.

All of our postings are texts without any illustrative material: no videos, no photos, no slides, very few links. In these respects, our coverage is a far cry from the many conference blogs which are very much multimedia compositions. I did take a score of photos, particularly during the morning session, and may upload some of them at a convenient time. A good conference blog, however, integrates the material immediately and not over a period of weeks. There was a professional cameraman at work during the morning session, and he video-taped the keynote and respondents and took still shots of many persons then contributing to the discussion. This material has not (yet) been placed on the CIVICWEB site. I failed to ask how the material will be made available; I do hope it becomes accessible because the sessions merit a longer 'shelf life' than the event itself.

Much of the time at any conference involves informal exchange, mainly with persons one already knows. I did a reasonable amount of such exchange, including:

• Brian Loader and I talked shop about the journals that we respectively edit and I queried him about the recent decision taken by the publisher of iCS to increase the frequency of issues from 6 to 8 per year (which is a giant leap in editorial energy required).
  
• Peter Dalghren and I talked about our respective projects and mutual concerns about a new variant on an old theme, European public sphere.
  
• Victor Bohm (Central European University) and I considered the upcoming COST A30 event planned for Sarajevo and how organizational foibles could be addressed.
  
• Maja Turnsek and I spent time chatting about the virtues of Ljubljana, along with a revised draft of her PhD proposal.
  
• Tobias Olsson shared his impressions of the differences between Information, Communication and Society (iCS) and New Media & Society (NM&S) (the former publishing more technically-oriented articles) and I admitted, after examining the last five years of articles published by both journals, not being able to discern difference in authors or subject matter (this was an informal exercise; the serious, systematic content analysis has yet to be performed).
  

Sometimes, as Stephen Coleman recommended at the end of his keynote, conference-goers meet and talk with persons outside their established circles, and this time during the CIVICWEB event I followed Coleman's advice and spent lunchtime conversing with Marion Duimel who is also from the Netherlands. As I then learned, she is a colleague of persons I know at the Social and Cultural Planning Office, and published two books last year, one in Dutch on the Internet and teenagers (with an English summary), and another on the Internet and senior citizens. I also learned that Marion has a workshop certificate in carpentry and is presently rebuilding her house, walls and all.

Bringing this effort at reflection to a close, I want to stress that the richness of the CIVICWEB event far outstrips this very modest effort at conference blogging. The experience convinces me how difficult – impossible – it is to provide documentation that matches quality events like this one. Conference blogging when done well may provide a window into the event, but will never replace actually attending and engaging in a good face-to-face encounter.

 

 

 

    All

Online resources at Poynter

On its masthead, the Poynter Institute claims to provide 'everything you need to become a better journalist'. Discounting the self-aggrandizement in the claim, Poynter Online does offer a wealth of resources, some of which have been mentioned in previous blog postings from seminar participants. One resource, deep in the site, is a list of bibliographies on a large range of topics, some of which relate to the seminar paper topics being prepared. See, for example, the bibliographies on:

• Citizen / public journalism
  
• New media
  
• Youth and the media

Deuze, Liquid Life and Media Work

Mark Deuze's book Media Work has been the focus of furor in the field since publication in October 2007. Deuze has been speaking to standing-room-only audiences across Europe and the first printing of the book was sold out in 6 weeks, which is exceeding unusual for an academic title; check Deuze's blog for details. The book and the author seem to have touched a sensitive chord, particularly among journalists and media students, and merits, if for no other reason, careful consideration.

In this posting I note a few 'first impressions' of the book and signal what I consider its Achilles Heel. To begin, Deuze grounds the work on a notion he borrows and elaborates from Zygmunt Bauman, liquid modernity, which Deuze rephrases as 'liquid life', described as "the increasingly fluid and unstable character of everyday lived experience" (2007: xi). Although this notion has an appealing ring, it would be erroneous to assume any particular newness or recency to the idea: it was the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who, several hundred years B.C., suggested that all was in flux, in some form of constant movement and change, which seems strikingly similar to Deuze's formulation of liquid life. Deuze does not provide further historical elaboration of the term, resting instead on Bauman's thesis stemming from a work published in 2000. There is also no critical contest of the concept; instead, it is presented as the theoretical light for understanding contemporary media developments. This perspective may be valuable, but I would have preferred more elaboration and, especially, critical distance during its presentation.

The aim of the book is to "deconstruct what media work means in the four key media professions: advertising…, journalism, film and television production, and computer and video game development" (p. xii). Interestingly, other 'key' media professions are passed over: radio, the music industry, print publishing (magazines, books), media delivery industries like cable and satellite. I have no difficulty with selection from a wide array of candidate professions, but I would have welcomed clarification as to the reasons for this selection of four, which are in themselves heterogeneous conglomerates of media.

Immediately after announcing this focus Deuze indicates that "interviews were conducted by students in my classes, and in the classes of my colleagues and friends" (p. xii) in the following five countries: The Netherlands, Finland, New Zealand, South Africa. This is as close as Deuze comes to suggesting the sources of information for the task established, deconstructing what media work means; no research questions are formulated, no interview instruments (e.g., questionnaires, protocols) are included, no schema for analysis of the interviews is evident, and, most telling, no extracts from the interviews are integrated into the text – at least in an identifiable manner.

It is very difficult to discern, in other words, how information from the interviews informed the presentation in the central chapters devoted to the four media professions: advertising, journalism, film / television production, and computer /video games. Instead, throughout these and the other chapters in the book a wide range of literature is presented and discussed, providing what might be considered an extended review of the literature but without leading toward or informing an empirical study of the four professions and without exploring how these professions might differ along dimensions or between cultural settings. In these respects, the presentation is disappointing; there is a lack of differentiation and lack of comparison, there is limited concern with historical transformations in the four clusters of media professions.

Perhaps most disappointing from a research perspective, and what I consider the Achilles Heel of the book, is the lack of discussion about and suggestions for further empirical study. The conclusion chapter comes to a halt after enumeration of ten concepts based on Deuze's point of departure, suggesting that "a structural sense of constant change and permanent revolution is the strongest guide or predictor of the human condition in the digital age" (pp. 234-235). That starting point merits, it seems to me, empirical exploration rather than unquestioned acceptance. Through formulation and systematic exploration of a research agenda related to this point and the ten related concepts I would think assessment might be possible regarding the relevance of 'liquid life' as a viable theoretical notion for understanding contemporary media.

Blogging literature ad nauseam

With some reservation I share this long list of literature on blogging, participatory journalism, citizen journalism, online community, and God knows what, found on what seems like a site mainly in Chinese: http://mbbs.techcn.com.cn/287645.html. Most of the first score of entries go directly to Amazon.com, but some of the entries at the end are to individual sites and blogs maintained by authors. There may be pickings here, particularly near the end….

 

 

 

http://www.hypergene.net/

We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People
by Dan Gillmor
More: Book web site, Online version of book, Author's weblog

The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect
by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosensteil

Warp Speed: America in the Age of the Mixed Media Culture
by Bill Kovach, Tom Rosenstiel

The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age
by Philip Meyer

Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers
by Pablo J. Boczkowski

The Creation of the Media
by Paul Starr

The Future of Media: Resistance and Reform in the 21st Century
by Robert McChesney (Editor)

What Are Journalists For?
by Jay Rosen
Author's webblog: PressThink

Beyond Spin: The Power of Strategic Corporate Journalism
by Markos Kounalakis, et al

Web Journalism: Promise and Practice of a New Medium
by James Glen Stovall

Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News
by David T. Z. Mindich

All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News
by James T. Hamilton

Arrogance: Rescuing America From the Media Elite
by Bernard Goldberg

News Values: Ideas for an Information Age
by Jack Fuller

The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril
by Leonard Downie Jr., Robert G. Kaiser

The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists, and the Stories That Shape the Political World
by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Paul Waldman

The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft
by Robert S. Boynton

Knightfall: Knight Ridder and How the Erosion of Newspaper Journalism is Putting Democracy at Risk
by Davis Merritt

Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All
by Tom Fenton

Design for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places
by Derek M. Powazek
Author's Web site: Design for Community

Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities
by Amy Jo Kim

The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (revised edition)
by Howard Rheingold

Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Sociability
by Jennifer Preece

Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety
by Steve Jones

Collaborating Online: Learning Together in Community
by Rena M. Palloff, Keith Pratt

Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
by Sherry Turkle

Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
by Robert Scoble, Shel Israel
More: Book weblog, Scoble's weblog, Israel's weblog

Blog!: How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture
by David Kline, Dan Burstein, Arne J. De Keijzer (Editor), Paul Berger (Editor)
More: Kline's weblog, Book web site

The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog
by Rebecca Blood
Author weblog: http://www.rebeccablood.net/

We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture
by Editors of Perseus Publishing, Rebecca Blood

We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs
by Paul Bausch, Meg Hourihan, Matt Haughey
Book weblog: http://www.blogroots.com/

Who Let the Blogs Out?: A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs
by Biz Stone

Blogging America: Political Discourse in a Digital Nation
by Barbara O'Brien

Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World
by Hugh Hewitt
Author's weblog: http://www.hughhewitt.com/

Blog Marketing
by Jeremy Wright

Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
by Robert Scoble, Shel Israel

Publishing a Blog with Blogger
by Elizabeth Castro

I Blog, Therefore I Am
by Book of Blogs Inc

Essential Blogging
by Shelley Powers (Editor), et al
Author weblog: Burningbird

Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content
by Biz Stone

Blog On: Building Online Communities With Weblogs
by Todd Stauffer

Running Weblogs With Slash
by Chromatic, et al

Buzz Marketing with Blogs For Dummies
by Susannah Gardner
Author's weblog: http://www.buzzmarketingwithblogs.com/

Money For Content and Your Clicks For Free : Turning Web Sites, Blogs, and Podcasts Into Cash
by J. D. Frazer

Podcast Solutions: The Complete Guide to Podcasting
by Michael Geoghegan, Dan Klass
Authors weblog: Geoghegan, Klass

Secrets of Podcasting: Audio Blogging for the Masses
by Bart G. Farkas

Podcasting: Do It Yourself Guide
by Todd Cochrane
Author weblog: Todd's Spin on Life

Absolute Beginner's Guide to Podcasting
by George Colombo, Curtis Franklin

Podcasting For Dummies
by Tee Morris, Evo Terra

Podcasting Hacks
by Jack Herrington
More: Author's web site

How to Use Flickr: The Digital Photography Revolution
by Richard Giles
More: Author weblog, Author' Flickr photostream, Flickr Group dedicated to the Book

Whole Internet Guide to Podcasts And Internet Audio
By Kirk McElhearn, Richard Giles
More: Kirk's weblog, Richard's weblog, Jack's web site

Podcasting Pocket Guide
by Kirk McElhearn, Richard Giles, Jack Herrington
More: Kirk's weblog, Richard's weblog

Money For Content and Your Clicks For Free : Turning Web Sites, Blogs, and Podcasts Into Cash
by J. D. Frazer

Content Syndication with RSS
by Ben Hammersley
Author weblog: Dangerous Precedent

Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom
by Ben Hammersley
Author weblog: Dangerous Precedent

Syndicating Web Sites with RSS Feeds For Dummies
by Ellen Finkelstein

Practical RDF
by Shelley Powers
Author weblog: Burningbird

Beginning RSS and Atom Programming
by Danny Ayers, Andrew Watt

Hacking RSS and Atom
by Leslie M. Orchard

RSS and Atom in Action: Building Applications with Blog Technologies
by Dave Johnson

博客与相关网站

Participatory Journalism

Adrian Holovaty
Weblog by the editor of editorial innovations at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive.

Audio Activism
Weblog and podcast by Brian Russell of Chapel Hill, NC.

Audioblogging 2.0
Communities of new audioblog posts and podcasts, by Harold Gilchrist.

BloggerCorps
"Connecting Bloggers and Activists."

Bloggerheads
On viral and weblog marketing by Tim Ireland.

Blogging, Journalism & Credibility
Weblog archive from a 2005 Harvard conference of the same name.

blogher
A network for women bloggers to draw on for exposure, education, and community.

Blogosphere
Weblog by Nicholas Jon on weblogging, new media.

BlogSavvy
By Australian blog consultant James Farmer.

The Blog Herald
Duncan Riley covers news, research and events of weblogging.

Blog Maverick
A weblog by digital maven and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.

BuzzMachine by Jeff Jarvis
Weblog by the former president of Advance.net; now a new media consultant and critic.

Chapman Logic
By Eli Chapman: "Helping audiences entertain, inform and educate themselves since 1997."

Citizen Paine
Ari Soglin's insider view on citizen journalism.

Citizen Spin
By Matt Foster, a BBC journalist and broadcaster working mainly in radio

CJR Daily
Real-time media analysis from the Columbia Journalism Review.

CMS Wire
A web magazine dedicated to all things content management.

Common Sense Journalism
By Douglas Fisher: "From new media to old, much of journalism is just plain common sense."

CommonCraft
Weblog by social design consultant Lee LeFever.

The Community Engine
"Creating Effective Information Communities" by Bud Gibson.

Complete Tosh
By Neil McIntosh, assistant editor of Guardian Unlimited (UK).

Contentious
By Amy Gahran: "News and musings on how we communicate in the online age."

Corante: Rebuilding Media
Collaborative weblog by Vin Crosbie, Dorian Benkoil, Bob Cauthorn and Ben Compaine.

Corante: Podcasting
Collaborative weblog by Alex Williams, Jeff De Cagna, Matt May, Phil Yanov.

Creative Commons
Free to use copyright licenses.

Cyberjournalist.net
By MSNBC.com technology editor Jonathan Dube, sponsored by the Online News Association.

The Daily Peg
Weblog by Mike Orren, founder of Pegasus News, the citizen journalism project in Dallas, TX.

Dan Bricklin
Weblog by the co-creator of VisiCalc.

Dan Gillmor
By former San Jose Mercury News technology columnist and author of We The Media.

Dangerous Precedent
By journalist and technology book author Ben Hammersly.

Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation
Weblog by J.D. Lasica, author of a book by the same name.

Dave Winer's Scripting News
By the creator of UserLand Software.

davenetics
Dave Pell on politics, media and pop culture.

David Weinberger: Joho The Blog
By author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined; co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Debbie Weil
Business blog expert: speaker, marketing consultant & publisher.

Design for Community
Essays from Derek Powazek, author of book by same name.

Designing for Civil Society
David Wilcox on social software, technology, engagement, governance.

Digital Deliverance
Weblog by new media consultant and analyst Vin Crosbie.

Doc Searls
By co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto; senior editor of Linux Journal.

E-Media Tidbits
Collaborative weblog by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies about online media and journalism.

Evan Williams
By CEO of Pyra, the company behind Blogger.

First Draft
Weblog by Tim Porter, an editor, writer and journalism researcher.

Forrester Research: Charlene Li
Insights on technology developments in media & marketing

Hypergene MediaBlog
Weblog about participatory journalism by the authors of this paper, Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis.

I Want Media
Media news, interviews and resources by Patrick Phillips.

I, Reporter
By Amy Gahran and Adam Glenn: "Inspiring, guiding, and educating citizen journalists and the news organizations that work with them."

Instant Messaging Planet
News and research on instant messaging.

Jason Kottke
Weblog about Web technology, media and network science.

J-Log
Journalism news and views from K. Paul Mallasch.

Joichi Ito
Weblog by the CEO of Neoteny, a VC firm.

Jupiter Research: David Card
Analyst covers the media and music industries.

Knowledge-at-work
Denham Grey on learning, community and social affordances for knowledge creation

Kuro5hin
Technology and culture, from the trenches.

Lloyd@work
"Trying to put theory into practice," by Lloyd Shepherd, Deputy Director of Digital Publishing at Guardian Unlimited.

The Long Tail
"Thoughts on a book in progress" by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine

Lost Remote: Where TV Finds the Future
Weblog by Cory Bergman, Director of Digital Media, KING/NWCN and Steve Safran, Director of Digital Media, NECN.

Marc Canter
Weblog by the founder of MacroMind and OurMedia.org.

Mark Deuze
Klog by journalism researcher at the Indiana University School of Journalism.

Martin Belam
Musings by "a new media geek at the BBC."

Master New Media
By Robin Good, an online publisher and new media communication expert.

Matt Haughey
Weblog by the co-author of We Blog and creator of the community weblog MetaFilter.

Media Bloggers Association
"A non-partisan organization dedicated to promoting MBA members and their blogs, educating bloggers, and promoting the explosion of citizen's media."

The Media Drop
Tom Biro on the evolution of media.

MediaSavvy
Barry Parr's analysis of media news and research.

MediaShift on PBS
By Mark Glaser. "MediaShift is a weblog that will track how new media—from weblogs to podcasts to citizen journalism—are changing society and culture."

Meg Hourihan
By the co-founder of Pyra, the company behind Blogger, and co-author of We Blog.

MetaFilter
Community weblog, with topics that run the gamut.

Mitch Ratcliffe
Journalist whose blog covers business, technology and investing.

Morph
"A forum for new ideas and events related to digital media" by The Media Center @ The American Press Institute.

New Media Musings
By J.D. Lasica, senior editor for OJR.

Nick Denton
Weblog by the founder of Gawker and Gizmodo and former chief executive of Moreover Technologies.

Notes from a Teacher: Mark on Media
A blog by Mark Hamilton, former journalist and currently a journalism instructor in Vancouver, BC.

OLDaily
Short for Online Learning Daily, a research newsletter by Stephen Downes.

Om Malik's Broadband Blog
A senior writer for Business 2.0 magazine on digital lifestyles, voip and broadband.

The Online Collaboration Authority
An independent forum about online collaboration, Web conferencing and real-time live presentation technologies.

Online Community Report
Free e-mail newsletter about online group collaboration.

Our Media
Provider of free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software.

P2P Net
"The original daily p2p and digital media news site."

Paid Content
"The economics of content" by Rafat Ali.

PJNet
Public Journalism Network weblog by Leonard Witt, Kennesaw State University.

The Power of Many
Weblog by Christian Crumlish, author of a book by the same name.

PressThink
By Jay Rosen, Associate Professor at New York University's Department of Journalism.

RConversation
Musings and occasional rants by Rebecca MacKinnon, a recovering TV reporter-turned-blogger.

Robert Andrews
Journalist and Content Producer, fomerly with the BBC.

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends
"How new technologies are modifying our way of life."

Romenesko
Poynter Institute weblog on media industry news, commentary and internal memos.

Sam Whitmore's Media Survey
"Decision-making tools for Media Pros"

Scobleizer
Weblog by Microsoft technical evangelist, Robert Scoble.

Scott Rosenberg
Weblog by Salon's managing editor.

ScreenCasts Online
"A hints and tips weblog which produces streaming or downloadable video tutorials."

Search Engine Watch
"Tips and information about searching the web, analysis of the search engine industry and help to site owners trying to improve their ability to be found in search engines."

The Shifted Librarian
Jenny Levine on "how the change from pursuing information to receiving information is and will be affecting libraries."

Sifry's Alerts
Musings by David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati.

Simon Waldman
By the Director of Digital Publishing for Guardian Newspapers, London (UK).

SJ's Longest Now
Weblog by Samuel Klein, an enthusiastic Wikipedian and one of the organizers of Wikimania.

Slashdot
News for nerds, stuff that matters.

Social Media
Weblog by consultants J.D. Lasica, Steve Rubel, Susan Mernit and B.L. Ochman.

SoulSoup
A weblog by Anol Bhattacharya about e-learning, usability, knowledge management and new media.

Steve Yelvington
Weblog by internet strategist for Morris Digital Works, the Internet division of Morris Communications.

Steven Berlin Johnson
Weblog by the author of Emergence.

Surfette
Weblog by Lisa Stone, journalist and orginator of BlogHer.

Susan Mernit
Writing and news about participatory journalism by digital media consultant, entrepeneur and writer.

Syndicator Blog
"The Syndicator follows trends and dollars in the shifting world of content syndication."

theory.isthereason
Kevin Lim on social technology.

Unmediated
A group reblog: "Tracking the tools that decentralize the media."

User Generated Content
By Derrick Oien, President and co-founder of Intercasting Corp. - a wireless startup.

We Are The Media
Collaborative weblog: The news source for video bloggers and grassroots media makers.

Weblogg-ed
"The Read/Write Web in the Classroom" by Will Richardson.

Research, Organizations, Publications

American Journalism Review
Published by the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at The University of Maryland.

Center for the Digital Future
From The University of Southern California Annenberg School.

Columbia Journalism Review
Published by Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

First Monday
Peer-reviewed journal on the Internet.

Journalism.org
Research, resources and ideas to improve journalism.

The Media Center @ API
"A nonprofit think tank committed to building a better-informed society in a connected world."

Online Journalism Review
Articles on new media by a staff at USC Annenberg.

Online News Association
Organization devoted to enhancing online news.

Pew Internet & American Life
Research and reports on the impact of the Internet.

PR, Marketing, Corporate Blogging

BlogWrite for CEOs
Debbie Weil on CEO Blogs, writing a thought leadership blog and the corporate blogging phenomenon

Church of the Customer
All about word of mouth, customer evangelism and citizen marketers, by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba

Marketing Technology
A blog on marketing technology and blogging communities from Niall Cook

Media Culpa
A blog about media and public relations by Swedish PR practitioner Hans Kullin.

Media Insider: The Blog
By PR Newswire

Micro Persuasion
Steve Rubel, a PR strategist at CooperKatz & Company: "How weblogs and citizen journalism are impacting public relations."

Musings from POP! Public Relations
Jeremy Pepper's opinions and views on public relations, weblogs, the Internet and more.

PR Communications
John Cass writes about PR, marketing and the Internet

PR Opinions
Tom Murphy's thoughts and opinions on the Public Relations profession and industry

Seth Godin
Weblog by PR, marketing guru and author of Permission Marketing and Unleashing the Ideavirus.

Social Customer Manifesto
By Christopher Carfi : "There are no spectators anymore. Participate."

Strategic Public Relations
Focused on public relations strategy within integrated marketing communications.

Your Guide to Corporate Blogging
By Fredrik Wackå, a web communication advisor based in Malmö, Sweden.

Social Software, Knowledge Management

Clay Shirky
Essays about media, community, open source and more.

Corante: Many-to-Many
Collaborative weblog on social software.

Ross Mayfield
Weblog on wikis and weblogs for enterprise use by the CEO and co-founder of Socialtext.

Seb's Open Research
Weblog on the evolution of knowledge sharing by Sébastien Paquet.

总目录：

Weblogs and related web sites

• • Participatory Journalism
  
• • Research, Organizations, Publications
  
• • PR, Marketing, Corporate Blogging
  
• • Social Software, Knowledge Management
  
• • Podcasts
  

Books

• • Journalism
  
• • Online Community
  
• • Weblogs
  
• • Podcasting
  
• • RSS, ATOM, XML Syndication
  
• • Wiki
  
• • Knowledge Management
  
• • Network Theory
  
• • Copyright, Digital Rights
  
• • Other
  

Tools

• • Weblogging
  
• • Forums, Discussion Groups
  
• • Podcasting
  
• • Video Blogging
  
• • Photo Sharing and Photo Blogging
  
• • Screencasting and Sharing
  
• • RSS, Atom, XML Syndication
  
• • Social Bookmarking
  
• • P2P, File Sharing
  
• • Collaborative Publishing
  
• • Collaborative Writing and Editing
  
• • Print on Demand, Self-publishing