blogosphere


 * Question**
 * What do people talk about online?
 * How do they portray themselves?
 * How do their words reflect what is happening in society today?
 * Activity**
 * Find a blog (individual or community)
 * Mine compelling online blogs and/or dialogues
 * Develop a narrative and/or visual piece that will represent the voice to create a cyber identity -- or -- a profile
 * Reflect**
 * What techniques were utilized to mine the information?
 * How did you feel mining the information?
 * What emotions occurred?
 * How can this blog inform research in today's world?

[|Information Architects Web Trends] []
 * Resources:**

Buzz: http://infolab.northwestern.edu/projects/buzz/ danah boyd: http://www.danah.org/ Blog Talk Radio: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/
 * Blogs as Art, Blogs as Data:**


 * Breadth of Information:**
 * __[|Technorati]__ now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
 * The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
 * It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
 * On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
 * 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
 * Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

Excerpt from [|Dennis D. Jerz], 2004
 * Blog Subjects:**
 * Filter: [|www.aldaily.com] (minimal commentary -- like a book club for online articles.)
 * Individual Blogs: Personal
 * [|www.livejournal.com] (aka www.teenangst.com)
 * Blogging and Gender
 * [|Most Bloggers 'are Teenaged Girls']
 * [|Academic Women and the Blogosphere]
 * Blogs can let the [|best and brightest teens] rise to top...
 * ...or [|humiliate] those who lack social status.
 * Subject/Theme Blogs
 * [|www.weblogg-ed.com] (education)
 * [|pittsblog.blogspot.com] (regional)
 * Edu-blogs
 * [|marykreul.teacherhosting.com/blog] (elementary school students; note lack of commenting)
 * [|www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/courses/spring2004/467] (online syllabus)
 * Project/Event Blog
 * [|rhetcomp.gsu.edu/blogs/CCCC_Chair] (officer in a major professional organization)
 * [|When Blogging Came of Age] (blogs as news disseminators and news makers on September 11, 2001)
 * Community Blog
 * [|www.metafilter.com] (funny and weird stuff)
 * [|www.crookedtimber.org] (asked academics, "[|Why do you blog]?" Here's [|my answer].)

"**Pedablogue: A personal inquiry into the scholarship of teaching by [|Michael Arnzen]** In naming his blog, my colleague coined this tongue-in-cheek term, and quickly attracted a following; now there are over 5000 [|Google hits for "pedablogue"]. In a reflection on his chronicle, Arnzen writes, "I've always known that the web harbors a great number of resources for K-12 teachers, but in the past I've always steered away from those exits on the info superhighway, assuming that such info wouldn't be useful for me as a college teacher. But now that I'm self-studying pedagogy, I'm seeing many more cross-overs than I realized and I now see that much more work on learning in general has been done in those areas than on college-aged learners. So I intend to keep studying work that's been done on children and trying to utilize it in my classrooms without dumbing down the content or treating the adult learners like babies. Instead, I hope to tap into that child within -- the one who has a sense of wonder about the world, and a yearning for learning." ("[|End of Year Reflection]")" Dennis D. Jerz, 2004