while this project is over

I still think about it and decided to post on here interesting things relating to blogs and also use it to highlight any news or interesting sites I discover.

Digg.com is the techno-junkie haven. Check this site hourly to be kept up to date with all things tech. Stories are submitted by users and then everyone who reads a link has "dugg" it. So the more diggs a post receives, it moves up in popularity and you can see what the most popular stories are. Basically this site has created a place for thousands of geeks to converge and post interesting news stories. I use this site to be able to speak geek with my fiance and sometimes surprise him with a tech tidbit he hadn't heard yet.

Digg.com

On the other side of the spectrum is this site

Fugly is the New Pretty

this site is really funny, but don't look if you love celebrity fashion. ok look. it is horrible you can't stop yourself. these girls find photos of celebrities in fashion gone wrong and tell about it. I'm not one who is up to date on who's who or dating who or leaving who...my brain picks that up without any effort it seems so I do my best not to add more, but this site is riduculously funny. warning...you may feel a little guilty laughing, but...oh well.

larry king said blog

last night we were watching Larry King Live and Donald Trump and the Apprentice winner and runner up were on. As a final question Larry said, "Donald some bloggers have said that you offered the job to Rebecca as well " and then he says something about trying to take away from the fact that the winner was African American and race had something to do with it. Donald of course thought this was stupid and accused Larry of making the question up for ratings. Larry went on to say it was the bloggers and he didn't know much about them or how to do it or even email, but kept repeating it was the bloggers when Donald told him the question was inappropriate. Larry went on to say he didn't know how to touch a blogger and asked Donald if he knew how.

Weblogs: A History and Perspective

In a September 2000 essay, author and blogger Rebecca Blood posted an essay outlining weblogs.
"These weblogs provide a valuble filtering function for their readers. The web, has been in effect, pre-surfed for them."
Weblog editors pick the most compelling, mid boggling, and stupid sites to review. From this, a running conversation starts between readers and other bloggers. So then, traditional blogs have been links plus commentary. There is a misconception among those who have only read about blogs or heard about them that they are "right-wing responses to the media establishment." But as of the invention of Blogger by Pyra labs (Google later bought it), an explosion of short-form journaling occurred.

Features that identify a blog and make it a unique medium are:
...:::...time stamps- these record the publishing date and time and give readers a sense of more to come
...::::....the post--each individual update on the blog "the weblog's post unit liberates the writer from word count"
.....;;;....permalink---short for permanant link, each post has its own web address for cross-referencing between sites
...::...links--seen at first as distinguishing characteristic of blogs, these are items that the blogger feels are worth glossing

By far, the most important feature is the time stamp. This places a value on the concept of time in the world of blogging. Reader may feel a connection with the blogger when they sit down to read a new post and realized it was added minutes before they opened the site. The time stamp also establishes a chronological existence of the author's works. No matter what type of blog is being created, from the ultra-political to the classic web-filter, or even a journal-type, the time stamp and its sense of temporality is the required feature.

fun sites

Savage Chickens

Doug Savage offers a daily chicken cartoon, drawn on a post-it note

Blogging LA

This site is referred to as Metroblogging and is a group of people posting about all thing LA

Baghdad Burning

This is a blog from a girl living in Iraq. She has been posting on this site under the pseudonym Riverbend. Her first years worth of posts were transferred into book form.

when blogging gets ugly

There is an opinion of some that blogs are a dangerous outlet for political criticism. A book was published in this year by

Hugh Hewitt

entitled
Blog : Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World
Hewitt is a conservative radio host and author that claims in his book that blogs are are going to be the cause the disappearance of books. (one of the prizes for bloggies winners is to get their blog published in book form)

I definitely don't agree with that position. If there was a hint of truth in that belief I'd start campaigning against bloggers. I think that his other belief that blogs are a new source of information that no one has control over is true. That can be a scary thing to come to terms with for any country. With internet resources in general, it is imperative to look for valid and reputable sources before swallowing all the news and opinion provided.
He also comments on the positive associative power in the blogosphere that is reminiscent of the revolutionary printing press. He says that four key events are proof of the power of blogs:
---the removal of Trent Lott from his position as Senate Majority Leader
--the fall of Jayson Blair and Howell Raines at the New York Times
---the takedown of John Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth
--Dan Rather's stepping down as anchor following the 60 Minutes forged National Guard documents scandal
He says that bloggers kept the stories alive and then traditional press outlets had to acknowledge the stories.
I suppose in a sense, if blogs have that kind of power and this transfers in to a larger turnout of educated voters it isn't a bad thing. But, there is something scary about a group of people united under a cause that they may not fully understand.

but then a story like this breaks in the blogging community:

On Tuesday, Boing Boing: Blogger, the number one most popular site according to Technorati.com posted that reports were coming out of China about a protest crackdown that left twenty people dead and the government was shutting down internet leaks. Some Chinese bloggers got the word out, but also commented on something called "the domestic news blocking system."

Bloggers in China

how to start blogging

check out these places to start blogging...

Typepad

they offer multiple blog templates depending on your computer savvy-ness and charge varying monthly fees

Blogger powered by Google

this platform is free and was created by

Meg Hourihan

and

Evan Williams

to help sift through blogs, try these sites:

Technorati

they have a list of the top 100 blogs

google has a new search engine dedicated to blogs

Google Blog Search

I just typed in 'laser beams' and the site found 7,420 blogs
and 69,010 for 'poodle'

do I break rules????

When I was doing research for this paper, I started by trying to find the most popular blogs. One of the things I turned up was the annual Bloggies awards.

2005 Bloggies

one of the great sites I explored won in the catagory of "Best Article or Essay About Weblogs"

how to blog

here's some of Tony Pierce's award winning tips:

1. write every day.
2. if you think youre a good writer, write twice a day.
3. dont be afraid to do anything. infact if youre afraid of something, do it. then do it again. and again.
4. cuss like a sailor.
5. dont tell your mom, your work, your friends, the people you want to date, or the people you want to work for about your blog. if they find out and you'd rather they didnt read it, ask them nicely to grant you your privacy.

13. if you havent written about sex, religion, and politics in a week youre probably playing it too safe, which means you probably fucked up on #5, in which case start a second blog and keep your big mouth shut about it this time.

22. when in doubt review something. theres not enough reviews on blogs. review a movie you just saw, a tv show, a cd, a kiss you just got, a restaurant, a hike you just took, anything.

29. don't apologize about not blogging. nobody cares. just start blogging again.
30. read tons of blogs and leave nice comments.

I've definitely not followed rule number 13. I thought about it yesterday and wondered if I should start a new blog. I could complain, rant, rave, be brutal, but that's not how I feel most of the time. There are days that my job sucks. Sometimes I get really upset with my family. But I love that my family knows me better. I don't mind the pg-ish rating of my site.

little blogging family

For me, blogging has provided a quick way to keep my family up to date, record random thoughts, post photo albums, and have a record of my growing up. A lot has changed for me since I started blogging. I feel like I have an audience that I disappoint if I skip too many days between posts. I can imagine my dad’s sigh when he clicks a link to my site to see the same photo and text staring at him for days. One of the advantages of having an online journal is the comment section. At the bottom of each post is a link to add a comment. The comments are adding directly to each post and allow for a running dialogue between author and reader. I also have the option to have each new comment forwarded to my email.
My fiancé started my blog for me. He created his own and we have inspired other family members to do the same. Two of my cousins regularly update their blogs and we all have links to one another. We have never been closer, even though we live far apart. I can’t imagine how a bound paper journal could have ever accomplished that. Although my family got smaller this year by two, I am closer to many that wouldn’t have been possible through blogging. It is fitting that two very generous people gave us even that through their deaths.

At my uncle’s memorial service one of my

older cousins came to speak with me. She teaches at Cal State Northridge. She told me that she could see how tough the past few months had been and she thanked me for what I had done for our family. She asked my permission to use some entries from my blog for one of her classes on intergenerational relationships. I never considered that was I was going through could be helpful to other people. For me, it was just easier to post hospital updates than calling thirty people everyday.




He died Easter morning. It was so hard to watch him deteriorate. After that, my blog became a place to check on my Aunt Susie. I tried to post funny things that she did and the amazing things she taught me. She lived an incredible giving life and passed away quietly in early June of this summer. I would feel selfish in saying it was sad to have her go. She didn’t want to be alone. It was hard posting on my blog that she was gone, but I made phone calls first and didn’t post for a few days. I couldn’t imagine finding out that someone had died through a blog. It would seem I had become the messenger of death online. I really miss both of them so much, but they weren't meant to be apart.

why I write...it's like releasing a breath

To keep myself sane, I started using my blog to post daily updates of my uncle. It was a great way for the whole family to check up on his status and looking back, it really seemed to track my mental state as I reread it. I started my blog to babble and then something amazing happened. My dad lives in Oregon and I never really knew him. When my grandfather died, we slowly started e-mailing and chatting online. My blog became a place for my family in Oregon to check up on things and get to know me. I post photo albums and updates of my world. I started my blog on April 21st of last year. My grandparents in Oregon say they enjoying reading it but feel like they are invading my privacy. It’s funny because that is the point of my blog. I write for them and the rest of my family.
Now that the audience has widened from my fiancé to my Oregon family, to random people who search for things on Google and my boss and her family, I do feel a pressure to be respectful and hold back on some thoughts that I could have posted before. I almost want to start a secret blog to record the truth. But I think those thoughts may be better served in ink and paper because they can burn. Words in hyperspace can also burn, but in a painful, hurting way if someone read emotional gripes best left unpublished and private.

barely scratching the surface

When I was twenty-two I met the man I will marry next summer. I just realized that I’ve never written about him in a private journal. But then in 2001 my grandfather passed away and my life changed. He was like my father and my biggest supporter. I found copies of all my short stories in his file cabinet. I literally touched death the night he died for the first time, but not the last for me it seems. The shock and grief surrounded me for years. I did find a way to deal with the trauma. As my grandmother was busy cleaning out the house of his things and her pain, I claimed his art box. I was never serious about art before. But using his brushes helped maintain the link I thought I lost the morning my grandmother screamed for me to help her. He comes to me in my dreams now. I feel him when I am cooking his peanut brittle recipe each Christmas to give to the family like he did, or when I play video games. He was the master of all games. And then I discovered something else. I was the last one of his kids to see him. I ate the last meal he cooked. I played the last video game with him. But at the funeral I learned how much he affected so many people. The minister was one of his best friends and he spoke about how his retirement dreams died with my grandfather. He wanted to move near him so they could spend their days fishing. At that moment I realized that we had all shared our lives with a man that gave up his own to make everyone else happy. I set out to write what had made my experience with him unique.
It started on the computer. I entitled it, ‘Dear Grandad,’ and I wrote him a letter. It turned into a thank you letter that inspired me to thank other people. I now have over twenty letters written. I hope to have them published and packaged with blank notes to inspire others to say thanks. Sadly, two of the thank you letter recipients passed away this year. I did give them their letters before though. They were my grandfather’s oldest brother and sister-in-law. I grew up next door to them. They gave my grandparents a piece of property and helped them build a house. Because my aunt and uncle were older, they hoped my grandparents would be there to take care of them, as they had no children. When my grandfather died, my grandmother sold the house. I started doing the errands my grandfather has done for them. I took my aunt to the market, drove her to her doctors appointments, and picked up Super Lotto tickets on Wednesdays and Saturdays. My uncle got sick earlier this year. He was eighty-eight and spent the last eleven weeks of his life in the hospital. My family scattered after my grandfather died. Looking back I see that he was the glue and their house was the central gathering place. It was hard with Uncle Al in the hospital. My older cousin was in Kosovo running the peace-keeping mission and he was the closet person to Al. I became the hub of hospital news. There were some days I wanted to throw my phone onto the freeway. It never stopped ringing. My bill was over four hundred dollars one month.

discovery in the bookstore

About six years ago I was in the bookstore in the self-help section. There is an author out of Berkeley named SARK. She wrote inspirational books and journals with prompts. They were all about self-discovery and affirmation and provided a colorful place to record emotions. I noticed another book on the shelf that was by an author that seemed familiar. The book was called, Spilling Over: The Art of Becoming Yourself by Sabrina Harrison. I found the author page and was shocked to see a girl I went to high school with. She had taken her journal and published it. It was beautiful, full of photo collage and hand drawings and pencil writings. I think it even had a foreword by Hillary Swank. I of course bought a new journal, thoroughly inspired. But I was working full time at the YMCA and spent my free hours coming up with new games for the kids in daycare. I noticed a pattern to my journaling. When life was tough and I was hurting, I wrote. That became my way of dealing with pain.

my early journaling experience

My personal journaling experience started with a love of containers for the potential words. I had dozens of blank notebooks as a kid. They contained mostly drawings if anything at all. In high school I started to write. I would jot down notes and thoughts or fragments of dreams. Often I would try to add a line drawing to help with the details. By sixteen I was in love, as much as a sixteen year old can be, and frustrations filled my journal. After that, the pages remained blank for a long time. I became aware that I wrote mostly when I was sad or times of extreme conflict. I later threw out all those memories. A friend told me he burned each journal after a relationship ended. I didn’t want that to be my perception of journaling. I wanted to write something that would help people understand me. I turned to creative writing getting a couple short stories published and also got on with the school newspaper. My private journals remained blank for a while. I had found a public space to print my words.

newspaper snippet

One of my favorite weekly columns in the LA Times is published on Thursdays in the Home section. The author, Chris Erskine, lives in my town and I took care of his kids when they were younger. This clipping is from the last article which was a collection of some of his random musings...

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (online edition because my copies is from the 70's), a blog is:

"A frequently updated web site consisting of personal observations, excerpts from other sources, etc., typically run by a single person, and usually with hyperlinks to other sites; an online journal or diary."

This word was first added to the dictionary in 2003, but became part of the language in 1999, as a condensed version of the word weblog (web+log), which was came about in 1997.

So there are basically two types of blogs presented in quotes from the OED

2001 Q July 155/1 You find a trusty guide who'll..put in hours at the computer ‘pre-surfing’ for good stuff..arriving at a kind opersonalizeded, cherry-picked menu of quality items... These are webloggers.
AND
2000 Independent 23 Oct. II. 9/1 A weblog is simply a site where you post your thoughts whenever the muse strikes

so that means when looking at blogs, you'll find the personal diary, keep my family and friends informed in every detail from mundane to miraculous, or the websurfer's collection of filtered highlights from sites they found interesting and worth sharing for some reason which they'll explain.

(serioulsy funny sidenote::::::I just preformed spell check on this post and Bloggers own dictionary does not recognize the words 'blog' or 'weblog')

day two

I came up with the idea for this paper near the beginning of the class. The criteria was to study a subject that combined art and literature, or contained an image/text relationship. Many of the blogs I read contain pictures or links to support the text.

Tuesday I started my research. I first looked for the history of blogs and found a great site by Rebecca Blood called

Rebecca's Pocket

Then I started writing. Before I knew it, I had seven pages typed about my experience blogging. Then I realized that the purpose of my paper is research, not personal stories. But then again, how about a combination of the two.
I stopped my personal essay part and went back to work digging through websites, now for the definition of blogs. I went to the bookstore to look for Rebecca Blood's book on the subject, which I find really amusing that there are books about blogging when some people are poised to blame blogs for the downfall of the printed word (more on that later). I searched for the top 100 blogs andI came across an amazing blog called

PostSecret

I bought the accompanying book while I was at the bookstore. The creator is calling for anyone to mail a postcard containing an anonymous secret, which he then publishes on his website.


So today I finished up my grammar project and have returned to research mode for this paper...or blog...paper on blogs....blog on blogs...???!!!??

welcome

This blog is dedicated to my final paper for my Art and Literature class at Cal State University Northridge.