Category change - removal of "Genre - All Mixed Up"

When I originally designed the layout of this blog I added three categories: Totally Academic, Personal...if You are Interested, and Genre - All Mixed Up. The "Travel...on the road again" and "Meta discussion of the blog itself" categories was subsequently added, click on the titles to see the post where the addition was announced. The first two categories have worked well but the last one has never made much sense. Now that I know more about using Movable Type I have decided to reassign the entries under "Genre - All Mixed Up" to other categories and to remove that selection from the blog. Since Movable Type allows me to assign posts to more then one category why do I need an all mixed up grouping?

Posted by prolurkr at 09:05 PM | TrackBack

The latest BROG paper is available online

Shamelessly stolen from BROG: Blog Research on Genre original post available here.

The members of the BROG project are pleased to announce preprint availability of our paper, Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis "From the Bottom Up".

The final paper will be published in the Proceedings of the Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences, January 2005. The correct citation for the final paper should be as follows:

Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, John C. Paolillo, Lois Ann Scheidt, Michael Tyworth, Peter Welsch, Elijah Wright, and Ning Yu. (2005). Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis "From the Bottom Up". Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-38). Los Alamitos: IEEE Press.

Abstract

The "blogosphere" has been claimed to be a densely interconnectedconversation, with bloggers linking to otherbloggers, referring to them in their entries, and postingcomments on each other's blogs. Most such characterizationshave privileged a subset of popular blogs, known asthe 'A-list.' This study empirically investigates the extentto which, and in what patterns, blogs are interconnected,taking as its point of departure randomly-selected blogs.Quantitative social network analysis, visualization of linkpatterns, and qualitative analysis of references andcomments in pairs of reciprocally-linked blogs show thatA-list blogs are overrepresented and central in thenetwork, although other groupings of blogs are moredensely interconnected. At the same time, a majority ofblogs link sparsely or not at all to other blogs in the sample,suggesting that the blogosphere is partially interconnectedand sporadically conversational.

Posted by prolurkr at 01:25 AM | TrackBack

Back from the UK

I have returned to Indiana after 10 days in the UK. I took over 150 pictures, surely some of them are useable and interesting, and will be posting over the next few days as time permits. I am planning on back dating the entries to the date on which they happened, September 17 - 27, 2004 inclusive. So if you find this entry scroll backwards on the main page to find the entries that talk about the trip, or after September 30th check the entries out in the September 2004 archive or in the Travel...on the road again category.

Posted by prolurkr at 09:45 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Return travel from the UK

Travel back from the U.K. this time was a very frustrating process. I feel sorry for hubby, when he met me at the airport I was angry enough to chew off my own limbs. Not angry at him of course and in those situations I work to keep as much of my frustration to myself but it seeps out none-the-less.

It started simply enough when Hotelink was late picking me up from the Comfort Inn Notting Hill. They called to let the staff at the hotel know so they could pass the information on to me, which they did. When they arrived, 15 minutes or so late, the driver explained that he had been caught in traffic congestion, not unusual in London, and had been delayed. Now on a normal trip this was a glitch, a pebble in the road, something you take note of but overcome quite quickly; on this trip it was a harbinger of what was to come.

The flight back was again full so no really resting, which I badly needed having slept very little the night before due to traffic noises from Notting Hill Gate and the subsequent ramblings of my own thoughts.

When we landed at O'Hare I was, as usual, one of the last people off the plane. Having ordered a wheelchair to take me through Customs it usually works best to wait till others have deplaned. (My moderate arthritis of the knees has a particular dislike for standing in long lines that move at a slow and random speed, and I like being able to walk without discomfort the 24-hours after I get off a long flight so I suck up my self-image and my mid-western "I can do anything" attitude and ride through Customs.) But this time there was no wheelchair waiting at the gate, and as I had only 1.5 hours between my flights I had no time to wait so I sat off on foot to Customs.

First stop is entry control and the gentleman there was thorough and polite. I even complemented him as the polite part is not often something I experience from US Customs officials.

Next stop baggage issues - I arrived and stood in a long and totally disorganized series of lines. There were more lines then stations to feed them, and the staff's practice of drawing seemingly randomly from the lines - even those across the terminal from them - made the whole operation seem fairly chaotic.

A young blond women called me forward with a brisk nod and a loud "Next." I handed her my papers, she looked at them and walked away to use the phone two stations down the line from where I stood. After her call she returned to where I was and continued to look at my paperwork but said nothing to me. Finally she looked up and said "Eight o'clock on United" nothing more. I stopped for a moment, total non sequiturs take a bit to process, and then relayed to her that I needed the information in full sentences. She replied briskly, "You are not going to make this flight it takes 45 minutes minimum for luggage." Interesting since the flights were scheduled with her airline directly one would think, especially if one works with computers and databases, that the system would be programmed to never allow scheduling that does not account for that time requirement. While I was thinking about database structures she stamped my tickets repeatedly and pointed me to the United Airlines desk all the way across the area from where I stood, I think it was an alphabetical thing.

I arrived at United tired and achy which along with the accumulating frustration leads me to be rather cranky. I explained to the staff member that I was being bounced to their airline. Then I made a wrong-headed comment in reply to something she said, that currently evades my memory; I said "I doubt it can get worse." *goes to the corner and pounds her head against the wall* What was I thinking.

Next it's a train to the proper terminal and then the whole security scanning mess again. But no not this time, this time I was informed by the highly common rude TSA official that I was "selected by the airlines for a Special Search." In this case the word "special" is not a good thing. Luckily the staff member who searched me was very nice and understood, that while I was becoming progressively more cranky, I was trying to be cooperative as I told her I would be. All-in-all, the process was more irritating the troublesome. I got to watch the staff disassemble my cane then hand the whole thing back to me unassembled as they could not figure out how to reassemble it. *sigh* Thankfully I remembered the clerk, from whom I bought it in New Orleans, giving me advise on reassembly and had the whole thing back together with a few quick turns of the shaft.

Then off to the waiting area and after alerting hubby to the time changes it was a matter of sitting and waiting to board. I can only assume the flight was a good one as I slept through most of it. And then we were quickly in Indianapolis.

Again I was the last one off the plane and by the time I arrived at the baggage retrieval area most of the other passengers had gathered their things and left the building. After surveying the area and seeing neither of my bags my somewhat lowered frustration-level began to again rise. The baggage manager looked at my stubs and said "Oh you have the bags they warned us about." Not a good sign. Seems my bags didn't make the flight, the flight I personally waited two hours to board. *sigh* Kindly the O'Hare folks had alerted the Indianapolis staff that my bags would be on the next flight, arriving at roughly 11pm. Of course at this point all I wanted was a bath and a warm bed, it's a theme what can I say. So we didn't wait for the luggage to arrive and asked for the company to have it delivered the next day. Funny when your bags get better treatment then you do.

The bags were delivered and placed as instructed. I pulled them inside after I got home from work. Now if only someone would do the laundry for me.

Oh and it's a good thing I had a chiropractor's appointment scheduled before I left. Hopefully he can work out the stress crink in my neck. LOL No more plane trips until January, well at least no long flights that is...YES.

Posted by prolurkr at 11:53 PM | TrackBack

Return trip to Brighton UK - Post 4

I caught a return train from Brighton into Victoria Station. On the trip I saw three scenes I wish I could have captured with a picture.

First, I saw a group of school boys playing cricket. Now this may not be an unusual sight in the UK, though it is the only such game I saw while I was there. For a Yank cricket is just one of those terribly English things that we can't quite wrap our brains around. I still don't understand the game but at least I can now say I have witnessed a game...well not an entire game but rather the flavor of a game.

Second, as we entered the outskirts of London we passed a storage area, one of those rental building compounds like we have in the States as well. Parked right next to the boats and recreational vehicles were two gypsy wagons. These looked like the ones I have seen in movies and certainly looked like the ones my grandmother told stories about from her youth. When my grandmother was a girl, 1910's U.S.A., a common parental threat was that a bad child would be stolen by the gypsies. She did say that on occasion gypsy wagons, probably tinkers, would pull into their farm. Though she herself had never actually seen a gypsy personally. It seems that every time the wagons appeared she ran and hide lest she be stolen away from her family. I have no doubt that these stories, urban legends that they were, can be traced to parental threats in the Black Forest regions of Germany from whence my family emigrated more then a century before my grandmother's birth.

Third, as we pulled into Victoria Station an engine pulling two or three refurbished Pullman cars passed along side of us on it's way south. These were beautifully redone cars with Tiffany lamps on each table and lines under the lamps. I shudder to think what it must cost to refurbish and operate these beauties. I do appreciate that someone has the time and money to preserve that little part of our train going past and someday I would love to catch a ride along on their travels.

Posted by prolurkr at 11:53 PM | TrackBack

Return trip to Brighton UK - Post 3

Finally I wandered out to the Entertainment Pier. This structure is deceptively long, I tired out and didn't make it the full length. Had to leave something for another trip.
I bought myself some "Candy Floss" or as we call it Cotton Candy, and munched myself totally sticky on the stuff. As my fingers built up that characteristic sugar covering I decided to sit down and eat before wandering further. As I stepped over toward a bank of park benches the lady behind me was very surprised when I suddenly jumped backward. You see it was at that moment I had discovered that the pier is really a pier and is open to the water below between the slated flooring. The picture doesn't really give you the full effect though you can see slivers of blue water between some of the upper slats. Seems that prior to that moment I had been walking on plywood placed on top of the slating. You see I have a terrible fear of heights, or of falling, I've never sorted out which it was...just know that this finding was a very uncomfortable one. I finally did muster up my courage and walked gingerly over to the park benches where I finished my candy and tried to not look down.
As I walked back to shore I took this shot looking back at the coast, consider it the reverse of the shots of the pier in post 2.
Couples sat along the railing resting in their summer striped chairs.
Another nice shot of the railing, the water, and the dilapidated pier.
I had been trying all day to get an up close and personal shot of the seagulls. I still can't believe how big they are, roughly the size of mallard ducks. As I was walking back a large group of seagulls took flight and hovered as they will. The couple in front of me, apparently having more real world experience with seagulls then I do, quickly screamed and ran for cover. Just as they did the bombs started dropping...bird bombs that is. I was laughing pretty hard by the time I found shelter under a slight awning alongside one of the pavilions. Luckily I was unscathed. Especially lucky since I still had a train ride back into London.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:00 PM | TrackBack

Return trip to Brighton UK - Post 2

While I was snapping pictures of the water front a march against the World Bank was taking place behind me. I grabbed a lot of pictures, far more then I can use here or would be of interest. So here is a general overview of the march. All toll it was at least 1.5 miles long.
I found these dancers particularly interesting as this was my second encounter with Native American culture in the UK. The co-opting of indigenous dress from one culture to protest third-party interaction in other indigenous cultures makes for many interesting thoughts on intertextuality and its many forms.
Likewise the use of a Chinese dragon morphed into a death mask was also an interesting use of cross cultural visual references.

Posted by prolurkr at 09:08 PM | TrackBack

Return trip to Brighton UK - Post 1

I caught the train out of Victoria Station and headed back to Brighton to gets some pictures. I had not been able to get good daylight pictures during the conference since I spent most of the days in panels.
I took this picture as soon as I headed out of the station in Brighton.
I wasn't exactly sure where I was in relationship to The Lanes but I knew the waterfront had to be downhill from where I was. So I started off walking, figuring as long as I was headed downhill I would eventually end up where I wanted to be.
I had seen on the morning news that the Labor Party Congress was meeting in Brighton. I guess I hadn't quite put together that would be equivalent to walking into the Democratic or Republican Convention state-side. I certainly figured it out quickly when I saw all the route markers and police officers in flack jackets. Sorry no pictures of any of that...I was afraid they would drag this foreign girl away for doing anything out of the ordinary. I did grab the picture on the right once I hit the beachfront. This is looking back toward where the meeting was taking place.
This picture is look back at the old pier that has fallen into disrepair and hence partially fallen into the water. I understand that fundraising is underway to refurbish it and reopen it to the public. I hope that happens, though as a connoisseur of dilapidated structures this one has a special beauty.
This shot, taken from the same point as the previous one, looks toward the current amusement pier.
This shot focuses along the same lines as the previous one but rather then out to sea it captures the waterfront including the shops and restaurants.
I grabbed this shot of the carousel with the pier in the background. I've seen some lovely shots of this same scene at night with all the lights on, very nice.
These pictures looks down the the deck at a sculpture of the earth, though you would know it was the earth if you weren't standing right next to it. There are small cut outs of the continents around the outside rim of the sculpture. Personally I'm glad the real planet doesn't have a donut hole in the middle. During the conference our little wandering band of academics dubbed this thing for a part of the human anatomy, I'll leave it to your evil minds to guess which one.

Posted by prolurkr at 08:00 PM | TrackBack

Trip to Oxford UK - Post 5

I was more than surprised to see a company of Native American performers busking on the streets of Oxford. It seemed so...well so...out of place. A narrow viewpoint on my part to be sure. Sadly I didn't get to hear them play as they were between sets as I wondered up and I needed to find the bus since I was very tired at that point. I hope they do well busking in the U.K.

Posted by prolurkr at 11:50 PM | TrackBack

Trip to Oxford U.K. - Post 4

After my visit to the Saxon Tower at St. Michael's I walked down to the entrance to Christ Church. My main goal was to wonder the cathedral and take in as much of the beauty as I could. Sadly I was thwarted in that goal as the Cathedral was closed for an invitation only Ordination Service. In other words the Cathedral was performing it's intended purpose as a church rather then a tourist stop. You can view a tour of the cathedral here. So instead of spending time in the cathedral I wondered the grounds, taking pictures and in general enjoying the time alone in this space.
When you first enter the grounds through the "Visitors" entrance you encounter the War Memorial Garden. This is a lovely garden that brings you into the cathedral parking area. This shots are so cool I almost wish I used a personalized desktop on my computers.
This smaller garden is further down the walkway toward the cathedral.
In the very back left center of this shot is the only thatched roof building I saw on the trip.
Old mill stones...the stories they could tell.
The two pictures below are of the cathedral from the car park. This appears to be the main entrance as the guests for the ordination were entering from this side.
Across from the entrance is a cattle pasture. There are white faced angus in the background of the shot though they are hard to see since the picture was reduced. Either way a lovely pastoral shot of the English countryside.
Behind the cathedral is a large playing field that is ringed with buildings. The next two shots give you a view of that area.
Directly behind the cathedral is a walled garden. I snapped the picture of the wall itself and then took the next shot over the wall. The third picture is also of the garden, I was trying to catch a good shot of the magpie who was popping around on the ground near the tree.
My architectural interest shot. They even found a way to make downspouts attractive.
This shot is along the edge of the playing field next to the buildings. This area had a very nice feel to it.

Posted by prolurkr at 11:00 PM | TrackBack

Trip to Oxford UK - Post 3

The real beauty of the Saxon Tower is inside. This 11-th century building has been used and altered and lived in for roughly 1000 years. I like bells so there are many pictures of them to follow. Look at the stone work and windows that make up the original space, very very cool too see in person.
The St. Michael's church was added much later. The building I photographed apparently has components from as early as 13th century with newer sections dating to 1953. More information on the history of the church can be found here.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:46 PM | TrackBack

Trip to Oxford UK - Post 2

I took the tour bus into Central Oxford, listening to the taped guide as we traveled. I jumped off at stop 8 close to Christ Church and decided to find lunch before I wandered onto campus. I found an Italian restaurant in or near the The Covered Market and sadly as I write this entry on October 14, 2004 I can neither remember nor find the name of the place. All I can say it the food was good, the ambience was alright, and the service was less than desirable - the waiter took my charge card and scanned it, then left it laying on a counter where all the staff and guests had to pass by while he went to wait on another table. After food, and looking over the tour map I had been provided, I wondered down the to visit "The Saxon Tower of St. Michael" listed as the oldest structure in the city.
The Saxon Tower, constructed around 1040 AD, is Oxford's oldest standing building. The connecting St. Michael's Chapel dates from the 13th century and is now the city church of Oxford. The designer William Morris was married here and John Wesley preached here. Because of the crowds I could not get a good exterior shot of the building so this one is shamelessly linked from another site. I assume the clock and guttering are not "original" to the building. For another nice shot of the exterior without the modern additions, well fewer of them to be sure, click here.
It was a rainy overcast day and that did not improve by climbing to the roof of the tower. I have lots of pictures but sadly they are very dark and the structures are difficult to identify. So here is a general selection of what I took from the top of the tower. If you decide to climb the tower at somepoint you will find there are really nice plexiglass markers to tell you which spires can be viewed from each side of the square tower, sadly they photograph very poorly in the rain.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:29 PM | TrackBack

Trip to Oxford UK - Post 1

Today I got fairly wild and crazy. After a full English breakfast, minus baked beans can't do baked beans for breakfast, I screwed up my courage and headed out for a trip to Oxford.

First I took the London Underground to Victoria Station. Now this is no small feat. You see I hate subways they are in equal parts to cramped, to busy, and to far underground - we won't even talk about the whole terrorist thing. So it was no small thing to suck it up and figure out how to get around via the Tube. If you are interested in the goings-ons of the London Tube system check out this group blog Going Underground's Blog. You can follow my underground travels by looking at this map of the Tube system (link opens a new window).

At Victoria I tried to find the Coach Station to get National Express to Oxford City, I had a student pass that would have made travel moderately less expensive. Having wandered all through Victoria and following the Coach Station signs outside and then circling the building without finding markings for the Coaches, I concluded that markings outside Victoria bore no comparison to either those found in the Tube or in Victoria Station itself which are excellent. So I changed plans and took a place in line for "Same Day Travel" on the rails.

After standing in line I was informed by the staff member behind the glass that trains to Oxford depart from Paddington NOT Victoria Station. I think I needed my "Be kind to the stupid American" t-shirt, but then again my experience is the UK has been that everyone is very helpful, UNLESS they are people you expect to be paid to be helpful. *shrug* Not that different from the states when you think about it. After a time of wandering in Victoria to just take it in and thinking about if I really wanted to go to Oxford, I donned my "What the Heck" cap and set off for Paddington Station via the Tube.

At Paddington I was informed, after again standing in the "Same Day Travel" line, that there was work being done on the lines so there would be a coach taking us for the final leg of the trip into Oxford. Kinda funny I ended up on a coach anyway and had to pay more for it.

Once in Oxford I grabbed the local open-top bus for a tour. I had not planned on staying in the city long and know fairly exactly what I wanted to see, though I was open to detours which is always advisable. I wanted to visit Christ Church and possibly Magdalen College if I had time. I made part of that goal and along the way found an interesting side path which made me leave Magdalen College for another visit.

I've divided my day in Oxford up into several posts since I have so many pictures.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:28 PM | TrackBack

Comfort Inn Notting Hill room

My hotel room in the Comfort Inn Notting Hill was very small, amazingly small actually. When I entered it the head of the bed was under the TV, so one would have had four choices - 1) stand in the hall and watch the tube, 2) pull the desk chair into the hall to sit and watch, 3) perch on the end of the bed with no back support and watch from there, or 4) lay on the bed and listen to the tube while watching the coffee maker that stood on the shelf opposite the TV. I made a fifth choice, always like me to buck the system, and moved the bed so the head was on the opposite wall. Probably freaked the maids out when they saw I rearranged a microscopic room.
I took this picture with my bottom pressed against the door to the hall so you could get as realistic a picture as possible of just how small this space was. As you can see I snapped the picture after I rearranged the bed moving it to the opposite wall, if you can even say this room had an opposite wall. LOL
This picture is pretty dark sorry. It does give you a view of the tube and the end of the bed - formerly the head of the bed - where I put the luggage.
This shows the fourth wall, and reflects the bed and window in the mirror.
The bathroom was equally small although the show was full phone booth size rather then the half size one we had in Brighton. The interesting part of the bathroom was the sink. It was very small with a glass shelf directly above. So as a tall person I had a 33.33% chance of hitting the sink, shelf or floor when I rinsed while brushing my teeth. Sadly I can truthfully say I did all three though I didn't keep probability counts. LOL

Posted by prolurkr at 09:30 PM | TrackBack

Day Two on Portobello Road

	I slept in most of the morning. I think all the traveling and walking caught up with me. After watching the clouds outside my hotel room window (the picture is taken from the bed), it was time to arise and head for Portobello Road.
	Yesterday I had looked through many of the shops and scoped out what I wanted to consider taking home with me. Today there were many more stalls setup all along they way. I saw some very cool clothing particularly around the Westway area, but most were just to expensive for me to take home for the kids or were to small for me, funky clothes rarely come in the "giant economy size" required for tall women. So I bought tee shirts for the kids and decided to hold off finding something for myself until later in the trip.
	I lunched at First Floor on Portobello Road, very good Italian food. The view over the market was outstanding. As was the steel drum playing wafting up from the street below.
After all the walking I wandered back to the hotel to take a load off my feet and back. I napped a bit as well. Then after talking to hubby on the phone I set off down Notting Hill Gate to find some sit down dinning place I had yet to discover. I found Mahal Indian Restaurant. Orders of salmon kheera, matar paneer, papadum, and a mango lassi hit the spots. After dinner it is back to the hotel to sleep, and rest for tomorrow.

Posted by prolurkr at 07:58 PM | TrackBack

Notting Hill Here I Come

I started out midmorning wandering along Notting Hill Gate getting my bearings. I picked up a Portobello Market map and with it in hand stopped at Notting Hill Café for lunch: Fish & Chips, and a delicious Fruit Beurll (I think that is how it is spelled though I can't find the term on the net with is not a good sign).
The walking tour starts at Westbourne Grove where the famous antiques market started in 1948. From there you wander along Westbourne Grove to Lansdowne Crescent where Jimi Hendrix died in 1970.
I didn't follow the map exclusively, which would be a bit more formulaic then I like to be. Rather I wandered where something caught my eye, like this gated garden.
Following are some nice architectural pictures that I have no idea where they are exactly, roughly somewhere along Kensington Park Road.
I crossed over from Kensington Park Road to Portobello Road on Blenheim Crescent. In so doing I passed The Travel Bookshop. Nice shop with lots of interesting title. I wondered my way up Portobello Road and under the Westway stopping into shops that caught my eye. I bought very little, actually as memory serves I bought nothing at all just looked.
Then I crossed over to Travistock Green and took a break sitting on a bench outside this highrise. After snapping this picture I headed down Basing Street then cut back over to Portobello Road on Westbourne Park Road. I visited more shops along Portobello and followed it back to Pembridge Villas. Then made my way back to the hotel.
Along the way down Portobello Road I stopped for a fruit smoothy at a little café next to the internationalschool. As I sat in their garden and took a break I could hear the children next door singing in what sounded like French.

I decided that I was hungry for sushi again so I checked out Feng Sushi on Notting Hill Gate. Good food lovely presentation and great service. The restaurant is well above what we have to offer in Indiana but not nearly as good as Moshi Moshi.

Posted by prolurkr at 06:56 PM | TrackBack

Travel to Notting Hill

Then it was packing up and getting into my hotel in London. I wish the trip into the city was a simple as that one sentence makes it sound, but it was not. The trip from Brighton to Notting Hill took almost six hours door-to-door. First I caught a taxi to the bus station, then a bus back to Heathrow, then I waited for the Hotelink bus to take me to the hotel which it did - after a time.

During my wait at Hearthrow I sat and admired the amazing confluence of people who pass through that gateway to the world. The colors and sounds simply swirl around you. I saw Indian women in brightly colored silk saris, Middle Eastern women in full cover, and African women in gold stripped head wraps. Throughout the throng there were men; men in Indian pajamas, tweed business suits, and hip Japanese bell bottoms. Overall the colorful and diverse picture there played a variegated loop of languages as people ran for gates, pushed luggage, played with children, and assisted their elderly family members. Sitting and watching, for 40 minutes or so, was a visual and auditory treat for the soul, so many different cultures in one place co-existing for a time - simply beautiful.

By the time I checked into the Comfort Inn Notting Hill I was tired and hungry. First I called hubby, who I had not spoken with since I left Indy on Friday due to some strange problem with my MCI prepaid phone card. On a side note in our 15 plus years together this was by far the longest we have gone without talking to each other. LOL On a daily basis we probably talk on the phone at least twice during the day, usually far more often. Then after we talked it was off to find dinner.

I am a lover of the night but not the city at night, not usually that is. I do, however love London at night there is vibrancy and rhythm that is different then any other city I have visited. I do not by nature feel safe in the city period, especially at night. But in London I do not feel deeply unsafe. Of course that feeling only came after getting lost at night on my last trip and making it back to my hotel alive. LOL So I went wandering down Notting Hill Gate, which - by the way - is a street not a 3-D object, looking for food.

I settled on Caffe' Uno an Italian restaurant and café. I found out in the establishment that they had won the Italian Restaurant of the Year 2003. Food was excellent, service likewise, and the ambiance was outstanding. After dinner I wondered back to the hotel to wait for hubby to call from home then off to sleep.

Posted by prolurkr at 11:26 PM | TrackBack

The last day of AoIR 2004

The last day of the conference was a short one with just two sessions. I attended the first session "Online News and Journalism/Internet vs. Traditional Media" to hear David Park's presentation - Webcasting’s Importance to the Radio Underdogs: Noncommercial Radio, Local Scenes, & the Absorption of the Internet-accessible Audience.

Abstract: This paper addresses webcasting as an emergent practice in small non-commercial radio stations in the U.S. and elsewhere. Though webcasting has been the subject of intense scrutiny in the broadcasting trade press, this attention has focused almost entirely on the phenomenon of webcasting as it relates to large commercial stations. Meanwhile, college radio stations and other non-commercial outlets have begun to adopt live online webcasts as a tool for extending their audiences. By consulting those who program and organize these stations, and by analyzing their descriptions of their own programming and their on-air playlists, we can better understand how this situation has developed. Like many other features of the internet, webcasting has often been imagined as a way to remove the pre-existing gate-keeping restraints that are familiar to the mass media. This paper begins with a brief review of these utopian expectations, matching them with a description of the technical limitations for webcasting, and an outline of the music industry’s attempts to establish constraints on webcasting. This clash between (high) expectations and the continuing attempts to rein in some of the potential of webcasting provides a good background for understanding why webcasting looks like it does today.

With this clash of expectations and constraints in mind, the paper moves on to a discussion of how the introduction of webcasting has both changed and stabilized the practice of running small noncommercial stations. Here, the focus on noncommercial radio stations is particularly important. Because noncommercial radio stations are usually smaller in terms of their allotted broadcasting power, and more inclusive in terms of their programming philosophies, webcasting offers the promise of large and diverse new audiences without any need for adjusting to commercial audience-building techniques. Drawing on interviews with managers of numerous noncommercial stations in the U.S., the paper shows how webcasting has in some cases adjusted the process of imagining the audience so that geography does indeed play a less direct role in reaching audiences. In other words, the idea of webcasting has fed back into the programming philosophies of small noncommercial stations.

This may seem like a positive development for the oft-struggling radio underground; it offers the chance for larger audiences, and for greater prestige. However, this potential also represents a possibility that these smaller radio stations may lose some motivation for staying connected with the local music, public affairs, and sports scenes that have defined their appeal in the past. In particular, the college radio station’s connection to independent music scenes—traditionally established by the mere fact of radio towers’ programming ranges—may be eroded if programming philosophies are being adjusted to serve the ostensibly global audience made possible by webcasting. The result may be the kind of dispersal and standardization long-ago made familiar through Harold Innis’s notion of space-biased media.

This plot thickens when we see that small noncommercial stations have frequently not adjusted their locally-based programming and have simply found ways to make that kind of programming available through webcasts. Interviews with program directors and general managers of small noncommercial stations show that many of them maintain their concern for the local, though they frequently do make some adjustments to their programming philosophies. One pattern that emerges from this is the phenomenon of locally-oriented programming that is targeted to audiences formerly well out of broadcasting range. In this sense, locally-minded programming can be matched with a global audience. Data drawn from the playlists and stated programming philosophies of these radio stations support the hypothesis that webcasting has not (or at least not yet) wiped out the concern for the local. At the same time, global audiences may represent a valuable resource for local scenes.

The stubbornness with which noncommercial stations maintain their pre-existing broadcasting philosophies demonstrates that there are cultural factors that complicate what might otherwise be a clear narrative of technological effects on programming policy. Old habits of community-mindedness continue to die hard, even in the face of the new webcasting possibilities. Concluding notes discuss the importance of all this to international and global ideals of culture, with an emphasis on the variety of media systems into which webcasting has been introduced.

During the second session on "Internet Research Ethics" I listened to valuable exchanges between and among the audience and the presenters - Mark Johns, Caroline Haythornthwaite, and Charles Ess. After the conference officially ended I enjoyed talking to a Charles Ess at lunch, I always do enjoy talking to Charles.

Then it was all over.

Posted by prolurkr at 11:12 PM | TrackBack

Day Three - Blog Day

Tuesday was blog day with full panels in all four time slots. I attended three of the four panels skipping the third one to attend a panel on "Teens and Youth Online." The presentations I saw went well; as did the presentation I gave. By far the best thing about blog day was the gathering of scholars who are thinking about this form into one room and giving them a catalyst to talk about what they see and think about blogs. I'm sure the conversations will continue into the future. Following is the program information for everyone that presented that day, including my own. I think I got everyone.

Author(s): Sarah Michele Ford

Title: Public and Private on LiveJournal: An Investigation of Bloggers' Opinions and Practices

Abstract: Background
The distinction between the public sphere and the private sphere is fundamental to liberal societies. Defenses, critiques, and reformulations of this dichotomy run from the disciplinary foundations of sociology through authors such as Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, and many others. Public and private are not, of course, fixed categories, and recently the gulf that had historically existed between the public sphere of the workplace and politics and the private sphere of domestic life seems to have narrowed, if not disappeared completely. Much of this breakdown is related to new trends in technology and media, marked by the prevalence (if not ubiquity) of mobile phones, telecommuting, reality television, and certain aspects of Internet use. Information and communications technologies in particular seem to be critical to this process, as noted by Salaff, Rule, Hull, Sheller and Urry, Ford, and Wellman.

Public, Private, and the 'Blog

The blogosphere is one segment of the Internet in which the collapse of the distinction between the public and the private is very apparent. 'Blogs, especially ones that take on the character of personal "journals" (as opposed to news logs, opinion columns, etc.), make it possible, even common, for elements of the blogger's life that at one time would have been kept in the "private" world to be launched into the "public" space of the Internet, visible to Internet users the world over. The media attention that 'blogs have received over the past year and a half only serves to increase the publicity of the world in which these journals are kept. As such, 'blogs and 'bloggers have much to tell us both about the collapse of the public/private dichotomy and about the effect of Internet use on everyday life. LiveJournal, a popular 'blog hosting service, provides its users with more privacy controls than do other services. With its "friends lock" feature, LJ enables its users to control who can view their posts. These privacy settings range from public (available for the whole world to see) to private (viewable only to the LiveJournal user who posted it). Thus, LiveJournal has blurred the distinction between public and private on the Internet.

The Project

In this project, I examine the ways in which LiveJournal users think about the distinction between the public and the private. I plan to generate a snowball sample of LiveJournal users, starting with a number of randomly selected journals and expanding outward using LiveJournal's "Friends List" feature. I will read the selected journals, and ultimately interview the 'bloggers about issues of public and private in their Internet use generally and on LiveJournal specifically. The bulk of this investigation will center on the ways in which LiveJournal users think about and utilize the system's "friends lock" feature, as this is the unique contribution that LiveJournal makes to the realm of public and private online.

The Larger Context

The project described above is part of a larger undertaking in which I will examine the ways in which information and communications technologies (especially the Internet) are implicated in and perhaps contributing to the collapse of the distinction between public and private. In addition to the study of public and private (and friends lock) on LiveJournal, I will carry out a similar study of bloggers using systems that do not include any such privacy settings (such as Blogger, Movable Type, etc.). I will then be able to compare these two groups of 'bloggers in order to understand the way that the breakdown of public and private is taking place in the realm of online journaling, and to better understand the breakdown itself. Finally, I will examine the 'blogs of a number of celebrities (musician Moby, comedienne Margaret Cho, and many others keep 'blogs of one sort or another) in order to begin to understand how the collapse of public and private plays out in the lives of those individuals who live in the spotlight.



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Author(s): Karen Gustafson

Title: " Blog Sites and the Creation of Community"

Abstract: Weblogs, or blogs, appeared on the Internet in the late 1990s and remain a significant online cultural phenomenon in the US and internationally. Despite the press coverage of blogs in online and traditional media sources, little has been written in scholarly research about these web sites as a form of community building. The research proposed here will examine several top-ranked political blogs, evaluating them according to standards of online community derived from the work of Jeffrey Abramson, Derek Foster, and Howard Rheingold. Ultimately, this paper intends to argue that blogging constitutes a significant, albeit strongly hierarchical, site of online community formation.
This research is significant because blogging offers a new space of online community and political debate. The Internet has long been considered a significant site of community building, linking distant people together via web sites and email lists. During a period of overwhelming consolidation in US and global media, the Internet is especially important as a public space, and blogs, online journal sites, may offer a new means of public interaction. Although there are no definite counts of blogs and blog participants, Blogger.com, one of the top online tools, has approximately 1.5 million members (Drier, 2003) and in September 2003, MacLean's reported estimates of up to two million blogs in existence (Snider, 2003).While the World Wide Web has become increasingly commercial and influenced by the mass media, blogs are potential sites for independent thought, media criticism, and community-building.

Community has been an important trope for years in online communication studies, and scholars such as Abramson, Rheingold, and Foster have contributed to a growing body of work addressing the potentials of Internet-based community. Jurgen Habermas' notion of the public sphere has been influential in many of these analyses, especially in the context of Internet commercialization. Rheingold draws upon Habermas in his analyses of virtual communities (1993). Referring to the Habermasian ideal speech space, Rheingold calls for a politically-conscious virtual citizenry that will resist the strategies of capitalist mass culture and authoritarian government. Abramson (1997) and Foster (1998) provide valuable theorizations of online community that will be utilized in this study. Foster argues that cohesive mutual interests are needed to constitute true community, and Abramson suggests that strong community is reliant upon manageable participant numbers, shared deliberation, and equality. Although these blogs are not expected to fully meet the criteria for community described by these scholars, this research suggests that blog sites do represent a significant, albeit imperfect, form of online community. Blogs are web sites with brief, frequently updated posts, and can be authored by a single person or by many contributors who post to the site. Thousands of blogs have emerged since 1997, when the term weblog was first coined, and together they compose a media ecosystem, often linking to one another (Stone, 2002). The entire system is often called the blogosphere. The blogosphere is measured both according to incoming links, or other sites linking to particular blogs, and also by audience numbers, measured by hits to the blog site. This research examines six highly ranked blogs, each chosen for its number of viewer hits (the number of times a unique IP address connects with the web site) and number of citations from other blogs. These blogs are Instapundit.com, Daily Kos, Eschaton, Andrew Sullivan.com, The Drudge Report, and the USS Cluelesssites, each of which is cited in the top fifteen of two different weblog ranking websites, www.truthlaidbear.com and www.daypop.com. These sites are all focused on US politics and range from conservative to leftist.

This project addresses the structure and content of these blogs and evaluates them according to their levels of interactivity and community engagement within and beyond the blogosphere. First, the research looks at the content, format, and structure of the sites, including the self-descriptions of the authors, and the posted site policies. Because most blogs publish a large volume of posts per day, only two weeks of actual content will be sampled on each blog, ranging from March 17 to March 31, 2003. This date range was chosen because it encompasses the March 20 US invasion of Iraq, an event of worldwide controversy and protest. The content of the blogs will be analyzed for shared discursive themes, use of mass media news, and explicit mentions of other blogs. These sites will be evaluated for user interactivity as well-while some blogs are completely in control of their primary author, others allow moderated or unmoderated posts from outside contributors. The structure and content of each blog will be analyzed for permanent and temporary links to other blogs, references to the blogging community, and user interactivity. The research will examine how these six popular blogs are situated within the larger Internet community, asking how community is defined on these sites. The content analysis described here is modeled on David Altheide's method of qualitative media analysis (1996). Altheide's method is especially appropriate to this study, allowing flexibility in coding while using constant comparative method to ensure reliability in analysis. The blog sites' structure will be critically studied as well, drawing upon Lawrence Lessig's concept of code, or the architecture of web sites (1999). For Lessig, coding will decide to what degree users have privacy, access, and the ability to engage in free speech with other users.

This research is significant in several respects: It brings attention to an understudied online medium, the web log, and highlights the community-building potential of this Internet phenomenon. Blogs provide a rich site of investigation for online culture, and the sites examined here are particularly noteworthy due to their popularity and diverse political stances. It is useful to study these blogs as elements of a growing group of online communities, and this research will argue that although they do not fully meet theoretical standards of community, these sites do exhibit a sense of membership, common interests, and shared purpose.



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Author(s): Alexander Halavais

Title: " Linking weblog neighborhoods: between ""small pieces"" and ""winner-take-all"" "

Abstract: Even by the time Plato expounded upon it in Phaedrus, the idea that "similarity begets friendship" was an old one. Weblogs are increasingly a venue through which individuals express their personal interests, and by which they identify their networks of online friends. One would expect that the networks of links among weblogs would provide further evidence of how similarity of thought and world leads to connection. We would expect the world of weblogs to appear to be (to borrow the title of a recent popular volume) "small pieces, loosely joined."

At the same time, recent discussions have demonstrated that the distribution of links (either in or out) adheres to a power law; that is, that there are a relatively small number of sites that receive a very large number of inbound links (for example) and a very large number that receive very few links. Rather than a distribution of small communities, a small number of "A-list" weblogs populate the link lists of a very broad part of the blogosphere. Rather than "small pieces, loosely joined," this appears to be "winner-take-all."

This contradiction between the perceived culture of weblogs and the observed network that connects them may be explained through a clarification of types of links. Links are clearly only a distant approximation of social ties. There is a significant difference between the unidirectional links to celebrity bloggers and the reciprocal links among friends and colleagues who blog. The latter may in some ways be an expression of personal opinions and attitudes (linking to a New York Times editorial that one likes, for example), rather than an indication of personal affinity.

The study described here takes both a quantitative and qualitative approach to examining the relationship between blog content and hyperlink structure. For each of a sample of 1200 English-language weblogs drawn from weblogs.com and appearing in the Technorati index, an index of reciprocal and non-reciprocal inbound and outbound links is constructed. The index page of each weblog and each of the weblogs that link to or from it is recorded, and the textual content of the sampled blog and its neighbors are compared, looking for the co-occurrence of words (cosine method). It is hypothesized that homophily is more prevalent among reciprocally linked pages than it is among unidirectionally linked pages.

The nature of these links is explored in further detail by coding a subset of 200 weblogs to determine the nature of their hyperlinks. The context of each link is coded for its apparent intent and utility, and these links are considered within the larger discursive context of each entry. Within this subset, the difference between permanent "blogroll" links and contextual linking within entries is compared. The latter type of link appears to contribute more toward unidirectional assertions of interest rather than reciprocal conversations. Those that appear within the context of blog entries also appear to be shared within the "neighborhood" of linked blogs. That is to say, birds of a feather link together.

By better understanding the nature of linking within the world of blogs, it is hoped that a clearer picture may be drawn of the macro-scale organization of blogs, and potentially of the wider web. The linking practices of weblogs, more than any other element of the genre, differentiate them from the rest of the Web. By better understanding these processes, we are better able to understand how the Web, hyperlink structures, and macrosocial dynamics are related.



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Author(s): Paul Hodkinson

Title: " Subcultural Blogging? Individual, Community and Communication "

Abstract: This paper addresses the increasing ubiquity of blogging as an online form of communication, through an examination of its rapid take-up and use by members of a long established music and style-based subculture. An initial observation of the properties of web logs may invite the conclusion that they offer a predominantly individualistic means of communication, something which rather contrasts with the emphasis upon community which has been discerned in previously dominant facilities such as Usenet groups and email lists (Baym 1995; Watson 1997). After all, in contrast to the collective emphasis and boundaries of public forums, the content of web logs revolves around the unrestricted and ever-developing concerns of the individual in question. Readers, meanwhile, appear to constitute individual visitors to a private space rather than equals within a clearly defined public community. Given such properties, might the growing popularity of blogging provide belated support for those who initially presented the internet as a catalyst for the increased prevalence of unbounded, multi-faceted individualised identities (Turkle 1995; Poster 1995)? Similarly, might such popularity reflect and hence add weight to the proclamations of Bauman, Beck and others, that society as a whole increasingly is defined by the detached, free-floating status of its members (Bauman, 2000; Beck-Gernsheim and Beck 2002)? An ideal case study through which to explore these possibilities is provided by the goth scene, a substantive and relatively clearly bounded music and fashion subculture, which long pre-existed the internet, but which is now heavily reliant upon online communications. Until recently, subcultural discussion forums were the predominant form of internet communication among goths, and there is little doubt that the clearly designated and communal nature of such virtual spaces reinforced and facilitated the cohesion and autonomy of the subculture. However, over the course of the last few years, goths have collectively migrated their communications away from such public forums, in favour of individual web logs on the Live Journal platform. Informed by a combination of participant observation and face to face interviews, this paper asks what happens to a substantive, clearly bounded subculture, when its members transfer to an online communications facility which apparently encourages an individualistic rather than a communal orientation. Drawing upon both observational and interview data, it will be suggested that although primarily organised around individuals rather than collective concerns, web log software offers significant potential for interaction and social networking via comments, search and linking facilities. As a consequence, although the software clearly does contain a bias towards the individual, it appears able to accommodate and facilitate substantive communities, at least in those cases where the latter are already established. This was demonstrated clearly in the case of goths, who in the course of transferring most of their communications onto the Live Journal platform, had utilised a combination of links, searches and comments facilities to connect their web logs together into a relatively coherent and autonomous sub-network. The content of each blog was indeed more individual-oriented and unconstrained than that of previously dominant goth discussion forums. Yet in spite of this, goths had carved out a relatively autonomous and highly interactive subcultural sphere on Live Journal - and one which was more intimately connected to goth content elsewhere on the internet than it was to non-subcultural content on the same platform. As well as offering important insights into the use and impacts of web logs on social identities in practice, the findings of the paper inform crucial debates about the extent to which technologies of communication shape and are shaped by their users.

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Author(s): Troels Johansson

Title: Internet Ubiquity in Cybernetic Geography: A Classification of Cyber-Places, or How the Internet Happened to Be Everywhere

Abstract: One of the most fascinating aspects of the Internet is the popular belief in its ubiquitous character; that the Internet "is" everywhere; globally and on every scale. From a pragmatic point of view, this belief is obviously easy to contest: There are places in the world where you cannot log on to the net, and there are people in the world who do not have access to the net in the same way as others. Still, rather than dismissing the Internet's ubiquitous nature as mere imagination, it is worth while asking in what respect we may speak of Internet ubiquity, and to which extend. Following Lyytinen and Yoo's definition of the notion of ubiquitous computing originally advanced by Weiser (i.e. high level of embeddedness, high level of mobility), this paper claims that the notion of Internet ubiquity could be taken to originate from an epistemological development which took place within geography rather than from the design oriented environments of which Weiser formed part. Following especially the proliferation of web-applications for geographic information systems, geographers began to speak of a virtual or cybernetic geography (cybergeography); concepts which came to designate a new field of study rather than a discipline as such, and which displayed a strong influence from information science and system theory. Most notably, the concept of "cyberplace" in British geographer Michael Batty's outline of a virtual geography suggested that geographers should think of the Internet as being "imbedded" in the material that they are studying (i.e. real places in the world) rather than simply something by which representations of this field of study may be distributed (i.e. geographical information). The concept of cyberplace may thus be seen as crucial for our understanding of Internet ubiquity. This presentation performs an epistemological analysis of the concept of cyberplace and assesses its importance to similar concepts outside the field of geography. Secondly the paper seeks to try out the practical applicability of the concept by means of a categorization of a number of popular cases, which traditionally have been understood as examples of Internet ubiquity. This part of the work tries to characterize cyberplaces in terms of technology, scale, and context.

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Author(s): Lena Karlsson

Title: ""It's like a little book club of sorts except it's an online journal club": Acts of Reading Online Diaries "

Abstract: Online journals, or weblogs of the diary kind, form a significant part of what Murray has called "the global autobiography project of the Web" (p. 252). Recent studies have shown that within the weblog genre, weblogs of the diary kind dominate numerically (Herring et al). However, critical attention has mostly been paid to weblogs of the filter variety where the focus is on external events, not on the everyday narration of self in diary format (Herring et al). Few autobiography scholars have studied online journals, a fact which is curious bearing in mind the intense interest in autobiography studies in the past three decades among feminist and postmodernist literary scholars in particular, and the resultant broadening understanding of what constitutes an autobiographical subject and an autobiographical act. Phillipe Lejeune's as yet untranslated book-length study of online diaries, "Cher écran…" and the Biography special issue on online lives constitute important exceptions. This paper is part of a larger case study of a cluster of female Chinese American online diarists who present large-scale autobiographical writing. Some of them have published journal entries almost daily for the past four years. The focus of the current paper, however, is not on the narration of self in online journals, but on the consumption of online journals and the formation of communities around life-writing texts. On some level, self-writing always has an audience in mind, real or imagined, that "hovers at the edge of the page," to use Lynn Bloom's expression (p. 23). If this is then true of all autobiographical acts, it becomes intensely immediate in a Web context where the site of production and consumption of autobiographical tales is so closely connected, where most readers literally hover at the edge of the page. Yet, visitors of these diary sites view themselves as readers, not as participants, even if the reading encouraged is a participatory one (via tools such as guestbooks, comments sections, mail-to-links). This is a machine-enabled autobiographical situation where the acts of reading and writing a life are closely connected. Three of these journal sites are currently being surveyed to get an understanding of readers' (both lurkers and active readers) relation to the autobiographical texts. Why do they read these autobiographical texts - often relating rather mundane events in the lives of the online journalist? How and when do they read them? Do readers feel that their presence makes an impact? What kind of connection do they feel with the diarist herself and with other readers? In their genre analysis of weblogs, Herring et al. (2004) paint a rather dichotomous picture when they describe filter-styles weblogs as highly interactive and online journals as individualistic, rather static and non-interactive, "vehicle[s] for self-expression and self-empowerment" (p. 1). This is a picture I do not recognize and that my preliminary empirical findings do not support. The online diary's interactive capabilities has allowed for communities to be formed around life-writing texts, an instance when cyberspace indeed generates a new form of social interaction. References Biography special issue "online lives," Biography, vol. 26:1 (Winter 2003). Bloom, Lynn Z. "'I write for Myself and Strangers': Private Diaries as Public Documents." In Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women's Diaries, edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1996. 23-37. Herring, Susan et al. "Bridging the Gap: a Genre Analysis of Weblogs," Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'04). Available online at: http://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2004/2056/04/205640101b.pdf Lejeunne, Phillipe."Cher écran …": Journal Personnel, Ordinateur, Internet. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free Press, 1997.

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Author(s): Carolyn R. Miller, Dawn Shepherd

Title: "The Ubiquity of the Blog: A Genre Analysis "

Abstract: Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg commented in late 2001 that "'blog' is clearly a word whose time has come" (Nunberg 2001). Since then there has been a flood of blogs and of commentary and discussion about blogs. A search of the Lexis-Nexis database shows the first press mention in 1998, and by 2002 over five hundred articles referencing blogs. A 2003 survey found that new blogs on eight popular blog hosting sites increased by more than six hundred percent between 2000 and 2001, with over four million blogs by the time of the survey and 10 million projected by the end of 2004 (Henning 2003). Blogs have a strong claim to ubiquity, and it's worth it to ask why. What is it about this form of internet discourse that has been so compelling to so many? We propose an answer to this question deriving from rhetorical analysis. A cultural approach to rhetoric suggests that when a type of discourse or communicative action acquires a common name within a given context or community, that's a good sign that it's functioning as a genre (Miller 1984). In other words, ubiquity provides a strong presumption that a rhetorical type functions as a genre. Genre analysis points us to questions about exigence and motive, relationships between form and function, and the evolution of cultural communicative practices over time. The blog is a new rhetorical opportunity, made possible by technology that is becoming more available and easier to use, but it was adopted so quickly and widely that it seems to serve well-established rhetorical needs. Why did blogging catch on so quickly and so widely? What motivates someone to begin--and continue--a blog? What audience(s) do bloggers address? Who actually reads blogs and why? In short, what rhetorical work do blogs perform--and for whom? And how do blogs perform this work? What features and elements make the blog recognizable and functional? Our analysis first examines the cultural moment in which the blog arose and caught on, then characterizes the substantive-semantic, structural-syntactic, and rhetorical-pragmatic features of the blog, surveys the ancestral genres of the blog and their influences on it, and finally discusses the generic rhetorical exigence that seems to motivate blogs. To conduct the analysis, we examine blogs available on major hosting sites, the evaluative criteria generated within blogging communities, and the lively commentary by bloggers on blogging. Genre analysis has become important in understanding the discourse of the disciplines and the workplace, relatively structured arenas of social interaction in which, as Berkenkotter and Huckin note, "Genres are the intellectual scaffolds on which community-based knowledge is constructed" (1995). So far, however, genre analysis has been applied to digital communication in only a preliminary way (Agre, 1998; Dillon & Gushrowski, 2000; Zucchermaglio & Talamo, 2003). Our analysis will take a next step in this direction, focusing our attention on the relatively unstructured rhetorical environment of the internet where constructing knowledge and getting work done aren't necessarily the driving exigences. A genre analysis of the blog will thus reveal something about the emergent culture of the early 21st century--the self-organized communities that support blogging, the rhetorical exigences that arise in them, and the rhetorical roles (or "subject positions") they support and make possible. Works Cited Agre, Philip E. 1998. "Designing Genres for New Media: Social, Economic, and Political Contexts." In Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, edited by S. G. Jones. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 69-99. Berkenkotter, C., & Huckin, T. N. (1995). Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/Culture/Power. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Dillon, A., and B. A. Gushrowski. 2000. "Genres and the Web: Is the Personal Home Page the First Uniquely Digital Genre?" Journal of the American Society for Information Science 51 (2):202-205. Henning, J. (2003, 4 October). The Blogging Iceberg [website]. Perseus Development Company. Retrieved 4 January, 2004, from the World Wide Web: http://www.perseus.com/blogsurvey/thebloggingiceberg.html Miller, C. R. (1984). Genre as Social Action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70, 151-176. Nunberg, G. (2001). I Have Seen the Future, and It Blogs [website]. Stanford University Center for the Study of Language and Information. Retrieved 28 May, 2003, from the World Wide Web: http://www-csli.stanford.edu/%7Enunberg/blog.html Zucchermaglio, C., & Talamo, A. (2003). The Development of a Virtual Community of Practices Using Electronic Mail and Communicative Genres. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 17(3), 259-284.

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Author(s): Christine Ogan, Kursat Cagiltay

Title: " Confession, Revelation and Story telling: Patterns of Use on a Popular Turkish Web Site"

Abstract: This paper is a study of the users of Itiraf.com, a website based in Istanbul Turkey. The authors conducted a web survey of the 40-60,000 users who visit the site each day in July and August 2003. The survey takes a uses and gratifications theoretical approach to the study of this web community to determine why the readers and contributors to this web site return so regularly and the uses they make of the site. Uses and gratifications is a mass communications-based theory that is increasingly used to understand web site user behavior. Since we have very limited information on Turkish Internet users in general, the survey of 4,531 respondents (a very large response rate for a web survey) also serves to provide a partial profile all Internet users in Turkey as well as a profile of the Itiraf.com users in particular. Comparisons are made to previously collected data on national samples of Turkish users as well as to studies that profile U.S. users. The study adds to the body of knowledge that applies uses and gratifications theory to Internet use. Itiraf is the Turkish word for confession, but the submissions to the site are more than that. Some are actual confessions-of infidelity, theft, jealousy and other matters the submitter expresses shame for having done. But much of the content actually does not fall into that category. The rest of the stories tell of sexual and platonic relationships, family relationships, interesting experiences, embarrassing incidents, or perhaps even made up stories-though the editor of the site claims that all published "confessions" actually happened. Ersan Ozer, creator of itiraf.com, noticed that television audiences were attracted to programs in which celebrities told their personal stories and thought that stories of the everyday lives of non-celebrities would be just as interesting to Internet users. Factor analysis and multiple regression were used to analyze the data. The study finds that Social Interaction motivations were the main reasons for using itiraf.com for reading others' confessions, writing confessions and comments and meeting people found on the site, while Diversion was a prominent motivation for reading other people's confessions. None of the demographic variables predicted the use of the site in any important way. However, being younger and having less education were significant in the regression predicting the frequency of visiting the site for the respondents who completed this survey from outside Turkey. And those international respondents who were female and younger were more likely to submit confessions to the site. Other patterns also emerged from the data in which these were the main findings. Several frames for understanding the uses and gratifications for the popularity of this confession web site are described in this paper. They relate to the lack of a practice of confession in the Turkish religious experience, the recent popularity of reality media, and the society's move toward an individualistic society and away from a collectivistic society. Motivations for use of this web site are similar to those found in some U.S.-based research.

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Author(s): Gregor Petric

Title: "Personal web site in the context of late(post) modernity "

Abstract: Each internet user with a set of relatively undemanding competences can produce his own web site and publish it to satisfy his specific social needs. To better understand this widespread and diverse activity, which is largely reduced to the genre of personal homepages and weblogs in the scientific literature, we propose two theoretical backgrounds, one leaning on the idea of late modernity and second on that of post modernity. This way we can assess the activity of users on the internet in the context of everyday life's social circumstances. It is supposed that contemporary social conditions strongly influence everyday conduct and specifically the activities of individuals on the internet. According to two different conceptions of relation between an individual and society, two understanding of personal web site use are put forward. Giddens' late modern individual actively copes with risky social conditions in order to restore a coherent self-identity, while Bauman's postmodern individual passively retreats from them in temporal identity games. Correspondingly late modern individual uses his personal web site to (re)establish personal relationships with other users of internet on the basis of common interests, beliefs and values and the postmodern individual uses his personal web site for experimenting with his social identity. The lack of encountering social spaces, the individual choice of personal relations, the lifting of relations from traditional anchorages are important structural conditions of late modernity. On the individual level, correspondingly, specific factors - the crisis of identity, loneliness and physical incompetence - result in intentions to produce a personal web site to satisfy society induced social needs. A personal web site is not a platform to develop a full personal relationship, but only to initiate or enrich a certain relationship. The conduct of postmodern individual is structured by contemporary consumerist system, which is providing a path for increasing narcissism. Narcissist individuals are not able to deal healthy with their social environment, they perceive it primarily through the lenses of self-interest. The body is the center of social activity and personal web site offers an innovative place of experimenting with it. The extent of control that an individual has over his self-presentation through his personal web site stimulates experimentation that results in production of idealized self, which offers its author temporal satisfactions. While the late modern author of a personal web site uses it to establish long-term relationships, even intimate, the postmodern stroller builds it only to play around and usually abandons it quickly. The paper not only builds a theoretical framework for understanding the production and usage of personal web sites, but puts an equal interest in methodological and empirical part. In the methodological framework two explanatory models are presented - one for establishing personal web site for interpersonal relations and the second for experimenting with self-identity. Operationalisations follow explicit definitions of concepts. The data were collected in the form of web survey in June 2002. The proposed concepts of personal web site use prove to be empirically valid on a sample of more than 1000 authors of personal web sites. Using a linear structural equation modeling approach, it can be shown that the theoretical models have some explanatory power. The data supports the idea that internet activities are strongly entrenched in the context of everyday life, which is structured by various contemporary social conditions.

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Author(s): Lois Scheidt

Title: Addressing the Unseen: The Audience Envisioned for Adolescent Diary Weblogs

Abstract: Dairies have traditionally been used "as a spiritual exercise, personal therapy tool, and literary production" (Mcneill, 2003, p. 29). As one example of "life-writing" (Coleman, 2000), dairies have created evocative pictures of people, their lives, their times, and the culture that surrounded them. While there is much variance between examples, most dairies display such trademark features as dated entries focusing on the diarist's experiences and interests, tone that can run from confidential to confessional, and a concern with the everyday details of the writers own life (Mcneill, 2003, p. 45).

These features have been transitioned to the diaries' online descendent, the weblog (blog). Significant numbers of adolescents have adapted the personal diary to this new format. In their genre analysis of weblogs Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, and Wright (2004) found that teenagers made up 40% of the 203 weblogs analyzed with female accounting for 58% of the teenager weblogs. LiveJournal.com (2003), only one of many sites where adolescents can build diary weblogs, publishes daily user statistics. In their December 19, 2003 statistics they cite 699,704 users, of these 257,050 are between the ages of 13 and 18, 36.7% of total users. LiveJournal.com statistics do not separate age groups by gender, of those users specifying a gender (1,251,689), 63.5% are female and 36.5% are male.

The picture of weblogs as online dairies, often written by women, has not been part of the popular construction of the genre. In their article "Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs," Herring, Kouper, Scheidt, and Wright (under review) found, in a semi-random sample of popular press articles, that male bloggers are mentioned more then females - 88% to 12%, and 93 of the 94 males mentioned were adults, one adolescent male blogger was mentioned. While one published article (Orlowski, 2003) asserts that teenage girls make up the majority of bloggers. Herring et al. (under review) found that the numbers of teenage female bloggers slightly exceeds the numbers of adult male bloggers, with female teenagers dominating the 'personal journal' category.

Unlike the paper-based adolescent diary of previous generations that primarily served as personal archives, in monologue, for thoughts and daily activities, blogs are publicly accessible spaces where adolescents can target their words to a variety of different external audiences in spaces that allow the writer to develop active dialogues with their audience.

In these spaces the "time-worn assumptions that the diary is kept only for the diarist and that it is an intensively secretive and private enterprise are unworkable" (Bunkers, 2001). Mcneill (2003, p. 26) notes "Given the conventional understanding of the diary as a private form, a public online journal seems to many people an abomination, or at least a contradiction in terms". The invited gaze of the audience displaces the boundaries of the private (Gill, 2001, p. 83).

By inviting the audience's gaze the diarist becomes a conscious communicator shaping the diary into a version of the story of a life (Fothergill, 1974). But inviting the gaze of the audience does not necessarily invite the view of random web surfers who stumble onto the diary blog site. Some interfaces allow bloggers to password protect their sites, thereby limiting access from the general public to only those privileged few granted knowledge of the password. The ability to limit to only the specific readers the diarists wishes to allow into their writings distinguishes the online from the paper-based diary where protection was often only as strong as the leather clasp connected to the gold lock waiting for the hand that held the scissors (Bunkers, 2001, p. 4 & 32). However the very nature of limited access to password protected diary weblogs limits this papers consideration to publicly accessible diary weblogs.

What makes an audience read a diary weblog? At their best diaries are stories, though without the requirement of a coherent continued plotline (Bunkers, 2001). Anthropologists have shown that people prefer and remember chronological narratives with a clear structure (Bird, 2003), weblogs with their chronological framing and technologically mediated structures may meet this criteria. Additionally the ability for the audience to participate in the development of the story through interaction (Bird, 2003) may also add to the appeal of the medium. But this discussion moves from the private dairy constructed by the writer for their own purposes to the use of that material by an audience outside the writer, and potentially unknown to them. Who are the audiences envisioned by the writers of accessible online diaries?

Clues to their idealized or known audiences can be found in the narratives the diarists' create. Langellier (1998, p. 210) postulates five types of audiences for narrative performances, audience as: witnesses to the experiences reported upon in the story, therapists and emotional supporters of the storyteller, cultural critics commenting on the events that produced the story, narrative analysts of the systems of discourse embedded in the narrative, and passive observer. This paper looks at the types of adolescent diary blogs currently posted on the web and qualitatively applies Langellier's five definitions of audience to the implied and explicit audiences of adolescent diary blogs.

Examples used in this paper are drawn from weblogs categorized under Blog Search Engine's (http://www.blogsearchengine.com/ ) "Teen Blog" or from the corpus of blogs randomly gathered from blo.gs (http://blo.gs/ ) for use by the Blog Research on Genre (BROG) Project at Indiana University, of which the author is a member. The role of excisor[1] (Bunkers, 2003) looms large in a project such as this; primacy has been placed on the selection of text that illustrate Langellier's types of audience. However in making these selections visual and textual elements that create the whole cloth of which the weblog is woven are lost, much as Bunkers (2001, p. 32) implores her readers "remember that no excerpt from a diarist's work is intended to represent either an entire diary or an entire life."

One issue becomes immediately problematic in that Langellier's types of audience are primarily developed to address the dialectic between the performance as a single entity and the audience for that entity. This perspective is missing the unique character of group blogs, where the primary explicit audience is the bloggers themselves. In this case, while the blog may be organized around a topic the primary goal of the writing is group cohesion.

Reference List
Bird, S. E. (2003). The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World. New York: Routledge.

Bunkers, S. L. (2001). Introduction. In S. L. Bunkers (Ed.), Diaries of Girls and Women: A Midwestern American Sampler (pp. 3-40). Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Bunkers, S. L. (2003). Whose Diary Is It, Anyway? Issues of Agency, Authority, Ownership. A/B: Auto/Biography Studies, 17, 11-27.

Coleman, P. (2000). Introduction: Life-writing and the legitimation of the modern self. In P. Coleman, J. Lewis, & J. Kowalik (Eds.), Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism (pp. 1-15). Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.

Fothergill, R. (1974). Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries. London: Oxford University Press.

Gill, J. (2001). Someone Else's Misfortunes: The Vicarious Pleasures of the Confessional Text. Journal of Popular Culture, 35, 81-94.

Herring, S. C., Kouper, I., Scheidt, L. A., & Wright, E. (under review). Women and Children Last: The Discourse Construction of Weblogs.

Herring, S. C., Scheidt, L. A., Bonus, S., & Wright, E. (2004). Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs. In Proceedings of the Thirty-seventh Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-37) (Ed.), Los Alamitos: IEEE Press.

Langellier, K. M. (1998). Voiceless bodies, bodiless voices: The future of personal narrative performance. In S. J. Dailey (Ed.), The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions (pp. 207-213). Washington DC: National Communication Association.

LiveJournal.com Statistics (2003). LiveJournal.com [On-line]. Available: http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml

Mcneill, L. (2003). Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary on the Internet. Biography: And Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 26, 24-48.

Orlowski, Andrew (2003, May 30). Most bloggers 'are teenage girls' - survey. The Register

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Author(s): K.D. Trammell, Justyna Hofmokl, Alek Tarkowski

Title: Rzeczpospolita blogów: Identifying the uses & gratifications of Polish bloggers

Abstract: Weblogs, or blogs, are online journals where the content is arranged in reversed chronological order (Blood, 2002; Walker, 2005). Blogs have been noted to dethrone major politicians (Shachtman, 2002; Williams & Trammell, 2003), raise others from obscurity to popular fame (Ratan, 2003), and serve as an "unedited, published voice of the people" (Winer, 2003). Scholarship on understanding blogs and the implications of blogged content is underway, yet relies mostly on blogs published in English. This study attempts to not only answer new questions about the motivations of bloggers, but does so in the untapped space of Polish bloggers and their blogs. Using the theoretical perspective of uses and gratifications, this study will seek the motivations of Polish bloggers. Uses and gratifications (Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1974; McQuail, Blumler, and Brown, 1972) provides a framework covering "a broad variance of media effects including knowledge, dependency, attitudes, perceptions of social reality, agenda setting, discussion, and politics" (Ruggerio, 2000, p. 25). Uses and gratifications is designed to get at the needs a particular mass medium provides its users (Blumler & Katz, 1974). As such, the media user's motivations and gratifications are key. Rubin (1993) asserts that the cornerstone of the theory is that audiences are active and that to understand effects scholars must explain motivations and behaviors. The theoretical perspective assumes an active and goal-directed audience seeking out particular media to gratify informational, social, and psychological needs (Rubin, 1994). The theory has been used to investigate both perceived motivations through content analysis and actual motivations through surveys (Kaye & Johnson, 2000; Papacharissi, 2002a, 2002b, 2003). Motivations for media selection include diversion, surveillance, social utility, and personal identification (Ruggerio, 2000). Papacharissi (2003) discovered social utility to be at the heart of the perceived gratifications for English-language bloggers. Her content analysis of 150 registered, public online journal blogs hosted at Blogger.com suggest that the posts were intended to be read by friends or family. While this provides an understanding of the motivations behind English-language blogs, little is known about Polish-language blogs. Demographic data collected in Poland by other researchers is only preliminary and does not provide the richness needed to understand the actual motivations of blogging. In Poland, there are 6.75 million estimated Internet users (SMG/KRC, 2003) and more than 150,000 registered blogs. Polish blogs started appearing on the cyberlandscape around 2000 and therefore gained popularity relatively early in the history of the medium, which had very limited reach until around 1997-1999. Finally, Polish blogs are possibly the fourth biggest language group in the world (Blog Census, 2003). Therefore, the ubiquitous nature of blogging in Poland is unlike that in other nations. Due to these factors we can expect blogs to play a different, and possibly prominent, role in the Polish online space. We consider blogs not only an interesting media form in themselves, but most of all one that is most often chosen by Polish Internet users seeking means of self-expression. The methodology employed in this study is a quantitative content analysis of Polish blogs using an expanded version of Papacharissi's (2003) code sheet. As such, this study will provide an exploratory understanding of 1). the motivations for Polish Internet users to blog, 2). the aspects of blogging that make the medium attractive to Polish bloggers, and 3). the patterns in perceived motivation. Additionally, this research will determine the extent to which Polish blogs are different from blogs written in other native languages (in the selection of subjects, form, demography). Finally, this research seeks to identify possible correlations with other self-expressing activities, such as managing a personal Web site or life outside of the Internet. This study will provide insight into a different type of blogger not yet explored. By providing basic data about Polish bloggers and the characteristics and motivations behind blogging in Poland, this study provides an empirical data helpful in understanding use of the medium. Data gathered will also be used to conduct a comparative analysis, using similar research of North American blogging behavior. Data is currently being analyzed.

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Author(s): Kaye Trammell, Richard Ferdig

Title: Blogging from a Pedagogical Perspective

Abstract: As technology advances and more Internet tools become ubiquitous, educators look with excitement to utilizing technology in the classroom. In recent years, students have experienced learning in virtual activities such as bulletin boards, using the Internet to conduct research, and communicating with people from geographically dispersed locations. Backed by Vygotsky's social constructivist framework, weblogs, or blogs, offer instructors a way to increase collaboration in the classroom. This paper provides the pedagodical argument for implementing blogs into the curriculum as a learning tool.

Blogs are Web pages often likened to online journals (Blood, 2002; Winer, 2003; Walker, 2005). Blogs are recognized as Web pages that have dated posts that are arranged in reverse chronological order (Blood, 2002; Winer, 2003; Walker, 2005). Even so, there is a lot to know about blogging beyond the technical definition.

Blogs are both similar and dissimilar from other technology tools used in the classroom. In some ways, blogs can be likened to Web pages, online discussion forums, etc. As such, blogs are similar in that they are a) computer-mediated, b) published messages, c) that occur asynchronously, d) to be shared with an unknown public/audience. Even so, blogs are not just Web pages, nor do they perform the same function that online bulletin board system.

There is currently little academic scholarship on the blogs, let alone how blogs might be useful as a prospective learning tool. Even so, previous research on online learning and collaboration in education provide an excellent framework for understanding how blogs can be harnessed within the classroom.

The work of Lev Vygotsky provides a theoretical framework in support of what blogging can add to the academic environment. Vygotskyis credited with developing a social constructivist approach to understanding learning and education, is said to have began his research journey in an attempt to help us better understand what it is to be human and improve our human situation (Wells). Although Vygotsky did not reach this goal, his ideas laid the groundwork for challenging traditional "recitation script" classroom learning (Tharp & Gallimore; Wells). Using Vygotsky's constructs, teachers are able to move beyond the memorization exercises of learning and create an environment more conducive to the learning process.

Vygotsky saw learning as a social interaction between the student and the teacher. Using the Zone of Proximal Development he created, Vygotsky hypothesized that there are two zones that teachers must work with to encourage learning. First, there is the zone of what the student has the potential to learn on his own. The second zone encompasses all that the student can learn with the assistance of a teacher. According to Vygotsky, these zones bridge the gap between what is known and what can be known; this is where learning occurs. Therefore, what a student can learn by collaborating with a teacher is much greater than what he could have learned/accomplished on his own.

As educators begin to incorporate electronic and interactive elements in their classrooms, Vygotsky's ideas become more feasible. Additionally, the need to incorporate these concepts become more important and central to ensuring that learning is occurring. Wells suggested that teachers could think about learning and teaching by a) seeing the classroom as a collaborative community, by b) creating purposeful activities that c) allow for diversity, originality, and are d) situated and unique.

For Vygotsky, the idea that collaboration facilitates learning is key. When students blog assignments, reactions, or real-world applications to what they are doing in the classroom, then students have the ability to learn from each other (creating a collaborative community in the classroom). By this, student bloggers are able to share their ideas and news on their blog. Other students will read the blog posts and learn something. Often, when comments are available, students will even leave comments for one another furthering the learning and sharing process. This illustrates the cycle where the student blogger becomes the teacher in sharing knowledge and the blog reader becomes the student. Then, in the comment section, the roles reverse again where the reader has the ability to provide feedback as a teacher would and point out other relevant information. This interaction encourages more a deeper learning where the student is able to transcend what he could have only learned on his own in zone 1 to what he learned as the result of collaboration in zone 2 (Vygotsky; Wells).

Based on Vygotsky's principles, blogging appears to be another worth-while educational tool. Even so, blogging is only as good as the teachers and students make it. There is much to be learned by educators about how to properly implement blogs and what benefits they can serve. Regardless though, blogs create interesting opportunities for self-reflexive learning for students of any age.



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Author(s): Jill Walker

Title: Distributed Narrative: Telling Stories Across Networks

Abstract: Distributed Narrative: Telling Stories Across Networks

A new kind of narrative is emerging from the network: the distributed narrative. Distributed narratives don't bring media together to make a total artwork. Distributed narratives explode the work altogether, sending fragments and shards across media, through the network and sometimes into the physical spaces that we live in. This paper explores this new narrative trend, looking at how narrative is spun across the network and into our lives. I will trace stories told across weblogs, looking at the possibly fictional She's A Flight Risk, the authentic Bagdad Blogger and the proven hoax Kaycee Nicole. This networked distribution will be compared to a physically distributed narrative, Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg's sticker novel Implementation.

The endless hypertext has been a spectre of new media for over a decade, feared by some and sought after by others. Today's "book without end" is not a single website but rather an interlaced patchwork of narrative traces across medias and genres: distributed narrative.

The term distributed narrative is inspired by distributed computing, which spreads processing across many computers, attaining as much or more power than is possible in a single supercomputer. The immersive game Cloudmakers used the tagline "distributed biological processing" to characterise the ways in which thousands of players participated in solving the puzzles of the game. A distributed narrative, then, is a narrative that instead of trying to gather itself into one "whole" structure spreads its story across many spaces, both virtual and physical.

Distributed narratives can be literally distributed, as in Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg's Implementation: A Novel, where readers are asked to post stickers printed with fragments of the narrative in their surroundings. From a traditional point of view, the pages of pristine stickers, before they are stuck on sign posts and toilet doors, constitute the work. Or perhaps the website would be viewed as the work, with its photos of pasted stickers. Such a view disregards the expansive ambitions of this narrative. Fittingly for a story about "psychological warfare, American imperialism, sex, terror, identity, and the idea of place", Implementation not only seeks to be read, it asks its readers to colonise the world with, to paste its fragments everywhere, inserting it into their everyday lives and spaces. Although the authors publish selected photos of pasted stickers on their website, ultimately they surrender control of how their work spreads and is pasted in new contexts giving new meanings.

Tim Etchell's Surrender Control is the title of another distributed narrative that merges digital space with the reality of the reader. The reader of this piece received SMSes over the course of 72 hours instructing her to do many strange things, thereby spreading the narrative into her physical surroundings. Invitations to sign up were both advertised on the web and distributed on unsigned fliers in London, combining physical and networked space much as Implementation does.

Another way in which narrative can be distributed access media is by combining it with textual performance, as when Isabella V., the possibly fictional protagonist of

She's A Flight Risk, steps outside of her weblog to ping her readers in iChat or to participate in interviews. Kaycee Nicole, the famously fictional teenaged web diarist who "died" of leukemia in 2002, presents a parallel example of a distributed narrative. "Kaycee" participated in chats and email conversations in addition to writing frequent diary entries at her website. Both fictional and non-fictional weblogs tend to have narratives spun across sites, through comments in other blogs, mentions elsewhere, participation in discussion sites and chats, and sometimes interviews and the like. These are personal, distributed stories, stories for a new time.

Immersive gaming, sometimes called unfiction or pervasive gaming, is a related phenomenon, however there is a distinct difference: distributed narratives don't expect the reader to play along, they expect the reader to distribute the narrative, virus-like, a narrative meme. One might also compare distributed narratives to similar attempts to release art from the "work" or from the white or black cube of the gallery or theatre in the visual and performative arts. Literature and narrative have been slower than these art forms to explode the shackles of the work, and it appears that the ubiquity of the network has been a driving force in this.

Distributed narratives demand more from their readers than reading or suspension of disbelief. They ask to be taken up, passed on, distributed. They seek to be viral, the memes of narrative, looking for readers who will be carriers as well as interpreters.

In the evening it was back into town where Anna Martinson, fellow IU SLIS PhD student - in her case PhD Candidate, and I dined with a gathering of women scholars at Terre a' Terre. The restaurant has been voted the best vegetarian restaurant in Britain. Of course I can't comment on the award as I have not eaten in all of the vegetarian restaurants in Britain, but this was a very very good restaurant…probably one of the best I have visited. The presentation was so pretty that the food was almost to attractive to eat. Oh and they sell Australian Port too, always a good thing for my ranking system. It got to be amusing as each new party that entered the restaurant was from our conference. I'll make a bet that 70% of the people they served that night were internet researchers.

Posted by prolurkr at 11:50 PM | TrackBack

Day Two of the conference

Slept in on Monday, well just a bit, so I missed the first session. Rolled into the second session to hear my friends Jennifer Stromer-Galley and Anna Martinson talk about their research. They are using a topic visualization tool designed by Susan Herring and Andrew Kurtz at IU. Research by friends using friends research, synchronicity is wonderful. Program information says:

Author(s): Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Anna M. Martinson

Title: "Coherent Argument or Fragmented Flaming: Comparing Entertainment and Political Chat Online "

Abstract: One of the pressing questions of the social impact of the Internet focuses on democracy. Citizen deliberation on political and social issues and current events is a key component of a strong democracy (Barber, 1984; Habermas, 1984). What impact, if any, does the existence of the Internet have on democratic processes and structures? This is a big question, and it has been tackled from multiple angles over the years. This study focuses on deliberation in synchronous chat from the perspectives of communication and information science. Our theoretical foundation is in the area of e-democracy. That is, the larger theoretical concern is in determining if and when the Internet is used in ways that benefit democracy in the strong sense (Barber, 1984).

Much of the research of online citizen deliberation has focused on asynchronous, threaded discussion (Davis, 1999; Graham & Witschge, 2003; Hill & Hughes, 1998; Schneider, 1997; Selnow, 1998). These studies of Usenet are important, in part because Usenet has been around longer that the HTML protocol that enabled the World Wide Web, and because Usenet has provided a vibrant space for political conversation by early adopters of the Internet. Now that the Web has experienced a decade of adoption, newer channels for conversation have been developed. Although Internet Relay Chat (IRC) has also been in existence since before the Web, it has been used more for social than political interaction. Even today, there are few places for synchronous political conversation. America Online has rooms devoted to politics, but they are lightly populated. MSN, Microsoft’s Web portal, has restricted access and use of their chat rooms. Yahoo!, however, has by comparison a vibrant set of political chat rooms open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Studies of political conversation on Usenet may not be generalizable to political chat (i.e., synchronous political conversation). Prior research indicates that the user base for Usenet is older and is more dedicated to the discussion space than users of Yahoo!’s political chat (Stromer-Galley, 2002). Research on political conversation in non-mediated settings suggests that those who talk are likely to be older than those who do not. If Yahoo! has a relatively younger user base, then it is possible that the substance of these discussions is different from those on Usenet.

Further, synchronous interaction is a different experience than asynchronous interaction. Synchronous interaction has minimal delay in sending and receiving messages; as such, in temporal terms, it feels more like an unmediated interaction. Chat messages tend to be shorter than asynchronous Usenet messages. There is a general perception that political chat is fragmented, shallow, incoherent, and filled with ad hominem attack. One study of political chat suggests that the conversations are not filled with flame wars—participants calling each other names rather than engaging in political debate (Hill & Hughes, 1998).

More research is needed in this area, however. One weakness in prior studies is a failure to compare political chat with chat of other topics. Without comparison it is difficult to know whether political chat differs from chat on other topics. If other topics compare similarly to political chat, then we have a basis for surmising that synchronous chat is a poor technology for promoting healthy political deliberation.

The aim of this study is to better understand how focused or fragmented political conversation is, employing Dynamic Topic Analysis (DTA) developed by Herring (2003) in combination with methods adapted from Cappella, Price, and Nir (2002), Graham and Witschge (2003), and Kuhn (1991).

The study tests 6 hypotheses:
- H1: political chat it is less coherent than non-political chat
- H2: political chat has more instances of personal attack than non-political chat
- H3: political chat provides more sourcing of information than non-political chat
- H4: political chat provides has a higher level of reasoned argument than non-political chat
- H5: Political chat will exhibit less agreement than entertainment chat.
- H6: political chat will exhibit more questions and requests for information than entertainment chat.

For this comparative study, 10 hours of Yahoo’s political chat and 10 hours of Yahoo’s Entertainment Lobby chat were archived between January 23 and January 27, straddling the New Hampshire Primary. After an initial observation of the discussion spaces, it was determined that the evening hours were the most active. Recording was slightly staggered so that each night of recording started one hour later than the prior night in order to capture the range of evening conversations. For example, recording on the 23rd began at 6pm and ran until 8pm. Recording on the 24th began at 7pm and ran until 9pm.

A preliminary test of a small sample of political and entertainment chat data suggests that political chat is more coherent, provides more reasoned argument, has more instances of agreement, and more instances of questions and requests for information than entertainment chat.

At lunch I again hung out with the gang from the night before. Laughter abounded and was good.

In the afternoon I went to a session on "Identity Online." Three papers bear some comment. Lewinsky Anet's paper applying; Bechar-Israeli, H. (1995). From to : Nicknames, play, and identity on internet relay chat. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 1. It was a good presentation that makes me think about my own work with adolescent nicknames applying the same article. Program information:

Author(s): Eimi Lev, Lewinsky, Anat

Title: "The Presentation of Self in Online Life: The Importance of Nicknames in Online Environments. "

Abstract: The names people carry have major significance both for their own personal identities and as identifiers in social interactions. Though in most cases one cannot choose his/her own name, the name has an enormous symbolic, psychological and social significance. Lieberson (2000) emphasizes the symbolic quality names have. Names, according to this perspective, can be seen as one of the best examples of the theoretical approach known as Symbolic Interactionism. According to this approach, human communication is based to a large extent on symbolic representations rather than on actual features and characteristics. Hence, the name a person carries represents him/her when interacting with his/her surrounding. Goffman’s Dramaturgical approach (Goffman, 1959) is the one most relevant and helpful in the matter discussed here. Goffman emphasized the fact that people are constantly displaying characters, and expecting other people to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. People are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he/she appears to possess. The same applies for names as “Identity markers” on the Internet. People do believe that the name (or nick name for that matter), has a meaning, and that many things can be learned from the name on the personality and characteristics of the person. Attributing meaning to the names, enables us, as Goffman claimed, to understand the situation and adjust our behavior accordingly. A common distinction in the academic literature related to names, is between names and nicknames. Nicknames are informal names, that are subjected to more changes than formal names. Nicknames are thought to better reflect the person’s identity than the formal name. Both names and nicknames play an important role in determining how other people would perceive the person carrying that name/nickname (Anderson, 1997). Social interaction on the Internet, especially in interfaces that support transient acquaintances (e.g. chat-rooms), must be affected by nicknames chosen by participants . In these interfaces, the nickname is, many times, the only detail that is available to other people to recognize the person by, and thus the image of a person and other people’s decision as to whether to interact with him/her or not, depends on the nickname he/she carries. On the Internet, choosing a nickname usually involves thinking of two different goals: hiding the “real” identity, and attract attention to the virtual one (Danet, 1996). Empirical research done by Bechar-Israeli (1995), on the distribution of nicknames on the IRC revealed that most nicknames (45%) are referential to the personal identity of the user , though only a small number of users used their real name. The second largest group included nicknames that refer to the medium, and the smallest group included nicknames that related to sex or were otherwise provocative. The focus of the current research was to achieve a better understanding regarding the effect nicknames have on internet mediated interaction, and to provide an updated description of the distribution of nicknames along different interfaces and types. To achieve that purpose, two different studies were conducted. The first investigated the effect of nicknames on the way other people perceive the person, other people’s willingness to interact with the person, and the type and length of interaction developed. Significant findings will indicate the importance of nicknames in online environments, and their effect. Results of this study indicated that nicknames indeed affect other people’s response. Based on this conclusion another study is presented that sought to provide an up-to-date mapping of the popular nicknames in different online interfaces including chat rooms, forums and instant messaging software. This study used as a departure point the categorization of online nicknames created by Bechar-Israeli (1995). Study # 1: This study used a vignette design. It examined the connection between the nickname and participants’ reaction to it in online interaction. Findings indicated that the chosen nickname is a strong factor regarding the reaction of the user. Study #2: A samle of 800 nicknames was collected from 4 different internet tools: forums, chat rooms and popular Israeli portals, Israeli chat instant messaging program- “Odigo” and IRC- Internet relay chat program. This sample of nicknames was divided into groups based on the categorization in Bechar-Israeli (1995) study. The findings of this study indicate that most nicknames (42.8%) were ordinary names from real life. The second largest group (24%) included nicknames refering to the person’s identity. The smallest group (2%) included provocative or sexual nicknames. Given the unique characteristics of the internet in general, and especially when talking about names, the current study sought to examine whether the importance of names is significant in Internet based interactions as well. The results of the current study strongly indicate that this is indeed the case. Study # 1 clearly supports the importance of names online, while study # 2 adds another important stratum, providing an up to date mapping of the names used in different online interfaces. Analyzing the two studies together, gives rise to several insights: As noted, the findings of study # 2 indicate that despite the choice given to people on the internet, with regard to their name, nearly half of them chose to represent themselves with a nickname that is based on a regular name. The second largest group was names that include some kind of reference to the person's identity, and the third largest group included names that are based on either an animal name or an object. The current study clearly indicates that most people do not use the opportunity given to them on the internet, to change the name representing them, and to choose unconventional names. The choice of names is usually conservative in nature, and the percentage of regular names is the highest of all. This interesting finding can be better explained when taking into consideration the results of the first study, where it became apparent that regular names are the names to which the response is the most positive of all. Bibliography: Andersen, C, P.(1997). The name game. Simon & Schuster: New-York. Bechar-Israeli H, (1995). From to : nicknames, play, and identity on internet relay chat. Dept. of communication & journalism. Hebrew University of Jerusalem: jerusalem. Danet, B. (1996).Text as mask: gender and identity on the internet. Paper prepared for the coference on "masquerade and gedered identity". Vebich. Italy, Feb 1996. Goffman, E. (1959). Presentation of self in everyday life . Garden City, NY: Anchor. Lieberson, S. (2000). A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change. By Stanley Lieberson. (New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 334.

Lori Kendall's paper "The Narrated Self: Self Presentation and Image Management on Live Journal" is a wonderful companion piece to my own work. I will be pulling the paper off the archive as soon as possible to read and cite it. Program information for Lori's presentation is not available online.

Finally Naomi Baron presented work she had discussed when we last talked - in New Orleans at ICA. Her project, titled "You are What They Post: Third-Party Identity Construction on the Internet" is a great look at who we appear to be when our name is inserted in a search engine. I know I have a very amusing set of tracks online some that I placed, often not thinking about the persistence of such tracks, and some that have been posted by others. Program says:

Author(s): Naomi Baron

Title: "You Are What They Post: Third-Party Identity Construction on the Internet "

INTRODUCTION The Internet is recognized as a medium that allows individuals to construct identities of their own choosing. Chat rooms, MUDs and MOOs, and Web pages and Blogs enable biological males to morph into online females or teenagers to appear as suave thirty-somethings. Such repackaging of self is hardly novel. The theme of disguise permeates literature; wigs have long camouflaged baldness; and bending the truth to “make a good impression” crosses time and medium. Erving Goffman’s analysis of how people “present” themselves in everyday life was standard fare among social theorists decades before Internet scholars recognized the applicability of Goffmanian constructs to life online. But if computer mediated communication invites individuals to craft virtual identities, the emergence of powerful Internet search engines has introduced a new phenomenon we might call third-party identity construction. Instead of individuals crafting their own public identities, users of the Internet (“third parties”) form conceptions of others on the basis of information gleaned from Web sites on which those individuals’ names appear. As the number of Web pages continues to soar and as search engines become growingly sophisticated, end-users are becoming increasingly dependent upon the Internet not only for gathering “objective” information but also for shaping their opinions regarding unfamiliar domains. University students commonly google their would-be professors before selecting courses for an upcoming semester. Academic professionals often go online to size up job applicants or unknown correspondents from whom they have received unsolicited email. The vetting procedure once entrusted to Who’s Who or journal indices is moving to Web searches. After perusing the first dozen or so hits produced by a major search engine, Web users begin constructing mental profiles of the individuals referenced in those pages. However, outside of the homepages those individuals may have created (or approved) themselves, the contents of Web sites on which their names appear are beyond the individuals’ control. Like our construction of virtual public selves, third-party identity construction is not unique to the Internet. Radio listeners imagine what favorite announcers actually look like. Public figures are plagued (or blessed) by images projected by the media or word of mouth. Third-party identity construction on the Internet is similar to off-line formulations in a number of ways: End-users need to be prepared to receive different information from different sources (e.g., conservative vs. liberal news media; Google vs. Alta Vista); end-users must decide whether to accept information uncritically or with a grain of salt. However, third-party Internet construction seems unique in that first, the end-user is generally working alone (not part of a mass media audience); second, search engines often produce tens of thousands of hits, only the first few of which most end-users pursue; third, the heuristics determining the order in which hits appear vary across search engines, thereby all but guaranteeing discrepancies in the kinds of information (and hence profiles) yielded in the top entries; and fourth, since yields from even the same search engine change over time, the profile emerging on an individual may shift even though the individual’s accomplishments or activities haven’t altered. Finally, if Internet search engines enable end-users to construct identity profiles of others, the same tools can be used by individuals to discover information about themselves that they either had not previously known or had not been aware was known to others. While the former information may prove useful (comparable to hiring a private investigator to gather personal information), discovery of instances of the latter can lead to concerns that the Internet is becoming a Panopticon, severely compromising privacy. EMPIRICAL STUDY To understand how third-party identity construction on the Internet works in practice, an empirical study will be undertaken analyzing the results of multiple searches on the present author’s own name. Using the search engines Google, Yahoo!, Alta Vista, and Lycos, the first 150 hits (from each search engine) will be collected during the months of February and May, 2004, respectively, yielding eight data sets. After removing duplicate hits and hits referring to people with only the same first name or only the same last name, the entries will be categorized by content type (e.g., references to publications, notices of academic lectures, other people sharing the same first and last names). Taking rank order in the search results into consideration, the content categorizations will be used to construct eight identity profiles. These profiles will then be compared across search engines and across time. The personal use of search engines for information about oneself will be studied using data from two sources: the above corpus plus pilot data collected by the author over the past 12 months. The pilot data suggest the following categories of analysis will prove relevant: (1) Doppelgänger: other individuals with the same first and last names as the author (2) Revelations: personally relevant information about which the author was previously unaware (3) Stalkers: email messages from unknown interlocutors referring to forthcoming activities of the author (presumably accessed through a search engine) (4) Space Junk: long-outdated Web pages referencing the author’s past activities (5) Transience: hits from a search at time T1 that no longer appear at time T2 (6) Lost in Translation: citations on Web pages in other languages for which even rough online translations are unavailable FUTURE RESEARCH This study is the first step in an attempt to understand how information and knowledge are created on the Internet. Simple extensions of the present research include (a) looking at third-party identity construction of individuals in non-academic settings and (b) interviewing end-users regarding their perceptions of how they use search engines to create profiles of others as well their perceptions of Internet constructs of their own identities. A more far-reaching enterprise will explore how Web pages and search engine usage are changing the ways members of the educational enterprise understand the nature of research and of the knowledge we assume derives from it.

Monday night was the conference banquet which I spent with the same core group I had been hanging out with previously. The food was good and the service was outstanding. Of course the real fun started after the banquet when many of us retired to the adjoining bar. Laugher, cheers, and comradery ran as freely as the Guinness. Great conversation with lots of self-deprecation - toward all our chosen careers and research areas - was had by all.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:03 PM | TrackBack

A quiet first day of the conference and an evening with friends

The conference started on Sunday, luckily later in the day so I could sleep in. At lunch I ran into some friends and we made plans to go into town for the evening.

During the afternoon there was one session, I choice the "Academic Discipline" panel which had four papers scheduled. In particular I went to hear Denise Rall, her paper will be linked here when it is available online. You see most of us go to conferences to hear what others are working on and learn things that will add to our own research, but Denise comes to watch us do what we do. I love the levels of all of that; it's a nice professional lurker stance. Information from the program follows:

Author(s): Denise Rall

Title: "Exploring the breadth of disciplinary backgrounds in internet scholars participating in AoIR meetings, 2000-2003 "

Abstract: The Internet Research 5.0 call for proposals indicates that ?IR5.0 will feature a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives on the Internet.? This shows the recent interest that internet researchers have taken in locating their work within the academic disciplines. This started with the discussion thread, ?What is a Discipline?? in 2002-3 and continues with the AoIR President, Nancy Baym, and her role as guest editor for the special issue of The Information Society (TIS). This special issue posits the question how both inter- and transdisciplinary theory intersects with the practice of internet-based research (Baym, 2003). Some scholars have viewed internet research as a special content area in new media studies, while others explain Internet Studies & Research (ISR) programs as coming from a variety of related disciplines: IDS - Interdisciplinarity Studies, CMC - computer-mediated communication, or as specifically tied to the theory and practice of social infomatics (Rall & Boyd, in review). Other scholars have used the term cyberculture studies to describe their area of research (Silver, 2000). This interest in the disciplines which comprise study of the internet is important. Yet the empirical studies are still lacking. In particular, there are no empirical studies which reference the breadth of disciplinary backgrounds by those scholars who focus on ?the internet, its use and users? (Rall, 2003). Following the lead of Ennis (1992), this researcher examines the disciplinary affiliations of internet researchers represented in the last four years of AoIR international meetings (2000-2003), either as guest speakers, presenters, panel members or workshop coordinators. This brief analysis, while no means exhaustive, will indicate the academic disciplines in which AoIR participants hold degrees as well as the departmental affiliations where they are currently employed. This short longitudinal study will show whether interest research is strongly affiliated with a single area of study, such as communication, or whether it is increasingly dispersed among many disciplines. The results may be controversial, or they may be seen as disappointing for those scholars who hope that interest-based research has acquired a broad representation amongst the disciplines.

In the evening a group of us headed into town on the city bus. By unanimous vote we decided to head for The Lanes and sushi.

We ended up at Moshi Moshi Sushi, the restaurant listed as the original conveyor-belt sushi bar in the U.K. Oh my goodness we are talking sushi almost as good as what I had in Hawaii, totally outstanding food and great company. I haven't laughed that much in - well in forever.

Posted by prolurkr at 09:17 PM | TrackBack

Arrival at University of Sussex at Brighton or "You want me to do what where?"

The flight landed at Heathrow at 6:00 am, having circled for 10 minutes because landing before 6:00 am is not allowed. The AoIR Conference was held at the University of Sussex at Brighton so landing simply got me in-country, significant travel was yet required. After gathering the baggage it was on to the Central Bus Station to catch the National Express to Brighton. In Brighton then I grabbed a cab to the Falmer House on campus. I did the cab rather than the train or the bus since I had enough luggage for a 6'1'' person to stay in the U.K. for 10 days. (If you are tall you will definitely know what that means.)

Logistics were interesting, after pulling my luggage up two flights of stairs to the check-in point I was told that my "packet" had instructed me to progress to York House for accommodations check-in. I replied that I had received no such packet and had been instructed, via to response to my personal email that specifically asked where to check-in, to come to Falmer House first. And so it began. The entire conference was like this - bad communication, worse planning, and lots of excuses.

By the time we got my luggage the five or so blocks back to the dorm I was very very tired. Local time was about 10 am. I decided that a shower and a short nap in my en-suité would help before my 2:00 pm pre-conference session. Would that it had been so.

The bathroom was a very frustrating process. First you had to turn on the water heater at a switch in the ceiling via a pull cord, see the picture at right.

The heater is a box within the microscopic shower. On the box are four buttons, a large series of lights, and a dial. The buttons are; start/stop, high, medium, and low. You start the water flowing then you select the temperature range and finally you adjust the exact temperature on the dial. Oh but wait, this is a "smart" box that has a series of lights to alert the user to the box's decision that the water temperature is too high and the user might injure themselves.

Like a good American I set the temp to High and get into the shower, no small fete that I will tell you more about in a bit. So the water starts flowing, freezing my tush, and begins to warm only to have all the warning lights light up and the heater shutoff, thereby shutting off the water. Of course I jumped out of the shower. *sigh* So there I stand on the paper bathmat, bearing the University of Sussex crest, pushing buttons in frustration trying to get a nice warm shower and being consistently told by a small box that I can't make appropriate decision to bath myself without causing bodily injury - the box knows best.

I finally figured out that the only way I could shower was to set the box on low, the dial to medium, and let the water run so that it was thoroughly heated. This, no doubt, saves electricity but certainly does not save water.

The shower stall itself was the smallest I have ever seen, a conference participant later referred to it as half-a-phone-booth. For me it was just a sub-size zero thing, not proportioned for an average human being over say 6 years of age. Showering in this stall was very much like being locked in a glass coffin. *shivers* After the conference banquet a lively conversation was held about the various ways people were pressing themselves against the wall so they could get the door closed. One day I dropped the soap and decided that there was absolutely no way to pick it up from INSIDE the shower. ***Please note that objects in the picture many appear larger then actual size.

After that deeply frustrating interlude of trying to take get hot water in the micro-shower stall I finally succeded in showering and curled up for a nap and then promptly slept through my scheduled pre-conference session, a very inauspicious beginning for the conference all-a-round.

I had been told on check-in that there were very few eating places open on campus on the weekend...translate very few to basically none. But upon awaking I stumbled out to find some dinner at about 5 pm having not eaten for 12 hours since the morning "snack" on the plane. I didn't find an open café on campus and was trying to decide on an action plan when I ran into a scholar from Florida and we decided to take the bus into town for dinner. That meeting ended up saving the day. It was a lovely evening of dining and chatting.

Following are pictures, albeit a touch blurry in some cases, of my third floor en-suité accommodations at the University of Sussex. All and all the rooms were very nice.

Two of the nicest things about the room were that it faced a rolling pasture complete with calves and cows and had windows that opened. A country girl in another country listening to its night sounds. I got to explain about pasture rotation and calve weaning to several of the academics in attendance, for once being a farm girl came in handy at a conference. Here are a few pictures of the land behind the building. Sadly I didn't snap any pictures from the room and waited until I was on the ground to catch a few before I left campus for the last time, by then I was not interested climbing back up three flights to get better shots. Sorry folks.

Posted by prolurkr at 09:24 PM | TrackBack

The trip to the U.K. has begun

I caught an afternoon flight from Indanapolis to Chicago and then on to Heathrow. The flight from Chicago was full so there was no real resting. Usually when the flight is not full you can fold down the arms between a couple of seats and curl up and sleep somewhat more normally, but not on this flight. This was a sit up straight and sleep if you can kind of flight. Not good for a tall person who barely fits in coach-class seating.

Posted by prolurkr at 08:25 PM | TrackBack

Weblog posters at 2004 SLIS InfoVIs Lab

The following posters were up at the 2004 SLIS InfoVis Lab open house on Friday, September 10. Linked for your pleasure:

Visualizing the Blogosphere (small version) by Ning Yu et al. I am part of the "et al." though the beautiful visualizations are all Ning's work. Wish I was that talented.
Visualizing Weblog Term Spaces by Elijah Wright and Kazuhiro Seki

Shamelessly stolen from the BROG website.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

The 10 Best Utilities You've Never Heard Of!

I subscribe to a Maximum PC, mostly because in a nice concise way it keeps me up to date on whats going on with PC hardware and software. Plus their annual PC Dream Machine makes to green with envy, even when the machine itself is some other wild color. The October 2004 (vol 9 no. 10) issue has an article with the same title as this post and I decided to share the list with all of you. Following is a list of the programs they recommend and links to the websites.

1. RSS Bandit...free. RSS reader.
2. APP Rocket...free trial. Productivity tool.
3. AM-Deadlink...free. Checks bookmarks for deadlinks.
4. Autopatcher XP...free. Allows you to archive WinXP patches for reinstallation from a single disk while offline.
5. Express WebPictures...free trial. Allows you to extract a URL's image archive.
6. Restoration...free. Lets you find deleted files on the hard-drive.
7. MP3 Album Art Downloader...free.
8. SlimServer...free. Stream MP3s over the net.
9. DVD Shrink...free.
10. GSpot CODEC Information Appliance...free.

I in no way have tested these, though I am downloading several of them as I pull this post together. Download and install at your own risk I am not responsible for what you do. *discontinuing legal notices* LOL

Posted by prolurkr at 09:17 PM | TrackBack

Preparation for departure

I spent today beginning preparations for departure to the UK later this week. Between now and then I have a paper to finalize...will this one ever be finalized...hours to pull at work, and a monthly Human Subjects Committee meeting to prepare for and attend. Somehow far to many logistical items for this trip have gone unfinished up until the last minute, I think I was to deep in research to realize the conference was sneaking up on me. I don't like that...I like logistics to be in line and ready to roll. LOL It's my obsessive organization thing. (This is why I need to be rich, so I can have a personal assistant.) So I'm scrambling to get the last of the agenda and logistics together as well as doing those last minute things one likes to have done before one leaves hubby home alone for two weeks.

I do look forward to the Association of Internet Researchers Conference. It's a time to find out what other people are doing in their research and to catchup with people you don't get to see often enough. Hopefully there will be some nice quiet evenings as well, so I can finish the detail work on my submission for the Second Internet Research Annual, click here for the Amazon link to the first volume. Then when the conference is over I get some down time in the UK.

So in short there will probably be very little - if anything - posted here for the next couple of weeks, but expect lots of pictures and knowing me a few funny stories when I get back. To those of you who will be at AoIR 5.0, look me up and say hello.

Posted by prolurkr at 12:38 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Oh my goodness a quiz that got it right! To bad the picture isn't a redhead.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

Posted by prolurkr at 06:59 PM | TrackBack

Remembering 9/11/2001

Three years ago today I was glued to my computer talking, in the chatroom, to teenagers in New Jersey and New York who had missing parents and relatives lost in the WTC. I spent the day - all day - talking trying to keep them calm, letting them know they were not alone, listening to them cry, and working to keep them from lashing out at others. It was the longest day of my life.

I did not watch the video from New York until much later, I could not watch the news that day and keep myself together. I listened to the radio instead, finding the presence of another voice in the house to be reassuring. I found out later that I was not alone in turning from the internet for news that day though TV was the first choice for most rather then my preference of radio, click here for the article that quoted me on the subject.

Two years ago I marked the day by attending a memorial service at the Episcopal Church near campus. It was a very nice solemn service that soothed the soul.

Last year I marked the day by spending some time sitting next to a quiet stream reflecting on the attack and the aftermath, and fearing for who we were (are) becoming.

This year I am doing nothing special except writing this blog entry. I hope the kids I talked to in 2001 have found their own peace with that happened to them that day, both those that lost loved ones and those that feared they had done so but had not. I hope they and many of the others who were in the chatrooms that day have come to realize two things 1) that violence does not solve anything rather it begets more violence, and 2) that terrorist and Muslim are not synonymous terms. Finally while I know very well that time does not heal loses it does make the wound less sensitive to the touch, I hope that these annual commemorations do not reopen those wounds for them rather that the company of others reminds them they are not alone in their grieving.

Mostly today I think I will enjoy the somewhat returned sense of normality that three years have bought us. I will look up and take in the skyscape with all its contrails and I will enjoy their presence in my view. You see here in Southern Indiana we have the busiest skies in the country. You can not fly east to west or back without flying through our airspace so contrails are a constant companion with clouds in our skyscape. On September 11, 2001 there were no contrails after about 11am. The only planes that passed overhead that afternoon were Air Force One and its escorts as they headed back to Washington DC. It was very eerie to go outside that afternoon and evening, and see the clear blue skies not a contrail in sight. For me at home taking a break with a cup of tea on my back steps, it was the most visible manifestation that something was terribly wrong. Had you asked me prior to that day if it were possible for me to miss all the planes that litter our sky, I would surely have said no and I would, just as surely have been wrong.

Posted by prolurkr at 01:35 PM | TrackBack

Two crazy weeks

Well this is one of two crazy weeks I have to get through before I head back to the United Kingdom for a conference. I have the book chapter done and have sent it to my copy editor for cleanup before I meet the September 15, 2004 submission deadline. I have a conference presentation and a conference poster to pull together, one for the trip to the UK and one for a doctoral student conference at Indiana University respectively. I also have a short essay on why I blog that is due for a journal special issue by September 22, 2004. Finally I need to rework the paper I just wrote, and add the final research section to the data, for submission to yet another call for papers (CFP) for a book chapter. All of that and laundry and packing and working...oh my.

So if you see me and I look tired...it's because I am tired. Thankfully kitten duty will be over shortly so that is two hours of each day I will have back in my schedule.

Posted by prolurkr at 06:24 PM | TrackBack

Nursing the kittens

In between all of the writing I have become Mom or at least a partial surrogate Mom to four kittens. They live at my in-laws farm, next door, and their mother has not taken to the job easily. She will nurse but only if the kittens are brought to where she decides to lay down. She stays until she gets tired of the process, then she is off with little kittens flailing around lost in her wake.

So a couple of hours of my day, since the in-laws are busy, has been spent matching mother to kittens and bottle feeding them when they don't get enough milk from her. Kind of a nice peaceful activity in an otherwise crazy world. I treasure my moments of peace.

Posted by prolurkr at 02:09 PM | TrackBack

Research Ethics and IRB's reprise

Today I again gave a guest lecture for Yung-rang "Laura" Cheng's L509 Introduction to Research and Statistics, School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. My topic was Research Ethics and IRB's for this roughly one hour presentation. I am posting my slides here so that students can gain easy access to them.

Posted by prolurkr at 06:29 PM | TrackBack

S&H as a profit center on eBay

I have been buying things on eBay since 1997. In that time I have had only two negative experiences both having to do with sellers using shipping & handling charges as a profit center. One of those incidents was revealed today when I received the package I had ordered.

I have been using a Gyration mouse for over a year. It worked really well and felt good in my hand, which is important when you do as much searching as I do for my research. However mine pretty much died a couple of months ago. I started looking in stores and online for a replacement. In stores they sell for $79.95 new, when you can find just the mouse - which is rare. Online I have seen them rebuilt for $59.95 which I had decided I didn't want a rebuilt as I was just coming off one that didn't work.

Enter eBay. I have friends who refer to me as the "eBay Queen" because I buy so many different things there and get great deals. I found a new-in-box mouse on eBay with a starting price of $59.95. When I found the listing it was shortly to expire with no bids everything looked good including the shipping statement:

Shipping: Shipping costs are the responsibility of the winning bidder, and will vary according to your location. International bidders are welcome, and shipping costs will be determined according to country of residence.

So I bid, I win. Life is good.

Then I get a statement from the seller moviemakerca that the s&h charge is $40.00. That is almost double the price of the product. That makes the total sale with shipping $20.00 more then I can buy it in a store here. So I emailed the guy asking if there was cheaper shipping. He said he would knock 10 bucks off the rate bringing the total down to $89.95. Well at that point I considered emailing him and offering to pay his eBay charges and then cancelling the sale. But I decided that the difference between his eBay costs and the 10 bucks was probably not worth having to wait to find another mouse so I went ahead and paid the $89.95 thinking at the main cost was for shipping.

Today I get the package in my hands and find that the actual shipping cost was $5.10. So I paid the guy almost $25.00 in handling when his ad said nothing about a handling charge at all. That also means that had I not asked about the costs he would have made almost $35.00 on handling costs. I got screwed. *sigh* So I'm considering leaving him negative feedback. Though I may not since it will have no effect whatsoever on the guys eBay rating - he's a Power Seller - and may just cause a "comment war" which I have been part of before and is just no fun. As I typed this I decided no negative feedback, just a note to self to avoid this kind of seller in the future.

Word to the wise, if they don't list a handling charge email them and ask about what makes up their "actual charges."

Posted by prolurkr at 09:58 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

A cool summer

Well we made it to the record. Seems that we have had no official 90 degree days in Indiana this year. Of course I realize I have had a few of them. LOL One memorable one spend riding around London on the top of double-decker tour bus, but not a since one here at home. Lord'y it was hot.

Several years ago I heard something about a National Arboretum study that said that temperatures were actually cooling but that hot spells were hotter then they had been before. Or something along that line. Made one think that we might be cooling to the next ice age. Oh well all I really know is that no 90 degree days in Indiana is not how I think of summers here. Summers here are hot and sticky and humid from the middle of July though August.

I'm well enough conditioned to that kind of weather that when I moved to Alabama, several years ago, everyone kept saying "You northerners can't stand our summer heat y'all just melt." I moved there in February and this discussion started in almost immediately. Well by June I responded "So when does it get so hot?" The person talking to me quite literally just stared. Seems they already considered it hot and most folks I knew there had had their air conditioning on since March. LOL I only turned mine on for two days that summer...just never got hot enough. Oh and they stopped saying I was going to melt, the line changed to what a crazy person I was because I didn't think it was hot. LOL Go figure.

Posted by prolurkr at 09:46 PM | TrackBack