Genres of Weblogs...Your Input Please

Well after a long and tumultuous year, including the move, I am back to working on my qualifying paper. About time I say! LOL

One of my chapters will be defining weblogs and then I will be looking at weblog genres. After that I will be drilling down to diary weblogs specifically. I would like to pick all your brains, metaphorically of course…because any other way is just gross…and ask you to take a look at the MindMap I have drawn. I would love your comments.

The basics of the diary section taxonomy were taken from Mallon (1984). One of the issues that arise out of using an established taxonomy is that the list was developed many years, in most cases, after the diary examples were completed. In other words, I’m questioning if the genres of diaries in process and completed diaries might differ…at least they might differ because a more microscopic lens can be applied to a completed work…a difference in level of specificity rather than a complete reclassification of the genre.

There are two files…a .pdf for the drawing and .txt for the accompanying notes, look at both of them because I don't think the map makes sense without the notes. I’m sure there is a way to get both in one file but I’m very new to the MindMap software, so this is the best I could do.

Comment please…lots of them…and I will post those who wish to be included in the archive…since comments are turned off in the blog. Email to prolurkr@professional-lurker.com

Oh I probably should note here, that my MindMap drawing differs somewhat from my previously published work…I’m growing in my understanding of the subject matter and this map reflects that growth.

Reference List

Mallon, Thomas (1984). A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries. New York: Ticknor & Fields.

Posted by prolurkr at 12:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

FutureMe.org

Have you seen this great site, FutureMe.org?  Write and send an email to your future self...you can keep it private or make it public (either signed or anonymous).  What a great idea since most of our actions are designed to maximize the potential of "future me" now we can check that what we had in mind either came to pass or didn't...because now we can talk to ourselves from today...into the future. 

Interesting research potential here too.  LOTS of it.  LOL

Posted by prolurkr at 12:57 PM | TrackBack

Research immersion or the next two weeks

The next two weeks are basically total research immersion, along with all of the other stuff I do on daily basis.

• I have a a poster to finish Friday this week so I can print it out at IU when I am on campus on Saturday. Topic = readers use of links from a blog. This is preliminary research from a longitudinal study that will close later this month. The poster will be presented next weekend at the SLIS Graduate Forum at IU.
• I will be conducting the final research and writing my NCA paper, The Performativity of Naming: Adolescent Weblog Names as Metaphor.
• I will be pulling together a presentation for AoIR on Teaching Hurricane Katrina.
• Finally, and definitely not lastly, I will be doing my part toward the completion of our BROG presentation for AoIR.

I need to decide if I am going to take the time, since time is a scarce commodity right now, to write and submit a position paper for the AAAI Spring 2006 Symposium, Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs (CAAW-2006). If I do decide to write the paper it will likely be a position paper on gender/age identification in weblogs.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:41 PM | TrackBack

New professional-lurker categories

I've added five new categories to better describe the information in this blog.  They are:  Community Service, some of the fun stuff, Conferences & Workshops...I've attended, Professional Development...learning as I go along, Professional Service...working with friends, and Research...making the world go around. 

I've thought a lot about the tagging issue and have decided to stay out of that fray for now.  You see from my perspective you as a reader do keyword searches to find the information you want to read, assuming you aren't regularly reading a specific site in which case neither keywords or tags matter.  You pick the keywords and, hopefully, narrow your search as you work through the sites you find in the outcome.  I can assign whatever tag I want to a post, but if it doesn't match your keyword then it does nothing to help you find the information I posted.  So I, in essence, I see tags as something that might help a blog author find information in their own blog.  Personally I too do keyword searches when I am looking for information so I see very little benefit to adding tags to my posts.  As usual I reserve the right to change my mind at a later date.

August 21, 2005: I've done away with the "Conferences & Workshops...I've attended" category because I decided it was duplicated in the new "Professional Development...learning as I go along" category.

Posted by prolurkr at 04:31 PM | TrackBack