blogresearch

Moving Right Along

So, now that the proposal is out there, we should get to work. If it is funded, we will be able to hit the ground running. If not... well, we'll still be hitting things running. I've found that the best way of doing things is to say "I'm doing this, help me if you like, but if you don't want to, that's cool too." (I wonder how much of this comes from the 8 minutes of Survivor I watched last night.)

So, here's some stuff I'm working on. Not so much research, mind you, but organizationally:

> Have a great panel in the works for the Association of Internet Researchers [link fixed 2/23] conference in Toronto this October. Possibly even two panels, at this stage. Very excited about the abstracts so far. This will be a great opportunity to get together with some folks who are already doing bloggy stuff and those who have done other things related to "Internet Studies" and are interested in working on microcontent.

> I teach a class called "Media in the Information Age." I designed it mainly as an overview of the traditional media industries and fields (advertising, PR, drama, news, etc.) and how they relate to new ICTs, but I had planned on working on things a little differently next year. I will be offering it as a joint class for graduate students and undergraduates. The aim was to take a program approach to the class, and have students specialize in various areas to produce a web zine. This would mean talking about everything from the economics of new media and advertising, to writing for the web, to the basics (and not-so-basics) of content production, design, image manipulation, and the like. I figured I would let the students decide on the topic of the site: anything from a regional focus to media convergence to ???. I'm now thinking about how to integrate this with my research on blogging and microcontent, either by rewriting the course to focus more on the nature and effects of blogging, or (more likely) by making this the focus of the web zine they will produce. It would be great, especially if someone is doing something similar, to do a multi-campus class. Fall is probably too soon for that, but maybe by spring or the following fall.

> I've heard now of at least one other grant that went in during our proposal cycle for blogging and it differed in that it was far more focused. I think it's too early to focus too much at this point, but it might be worthwhile to look more specifically, say, at the blogosphere as a semantic web. Our resources would then would have a more heavily tools & tech focus.

Most of the above is just thinking out loud. Any ideas?