Keeping with the theme of linking, one of the problems that seems to arise is how to search blog content in order to find connections with which to start. It is also understandable that one might also want to know WHY one would want to search blog content, but I will reserve that topic for another time. Blogs are simultaneously a wealth of information and quagmire of useless drivel.

Doing a straight-up google search may be useful for pulling up the book you want from Amazon or skimming some information in Wikipedia. Despite what our laziness presumes– and we *all* start out lazy when it comes to searching for information– a regular google search is not the be all and end all of finding information.

To search blog content, specialized searches are necessary.  For this I recommend:

1. Technorati -The Mother of all Blog Search Engines
2. Google Blogs - Tip via Learning Aesthetics relayed from Dumb Little Man
3. Sphere - A different approach

Although seeking out blog content is challenging at first, as one begins to develop a network of other informed netizens who are also actively processing and referring various information.  Knowing where to look is just the beginning! Next up: How do you choose effective keywords–not just for searching for blog content but for any content?

Though the Prologue to Manovich’s Language for New Media is a little abstract, it contextualizes “new media” within a historical context. The Man With a Movie Camera, the film that Manovich deconstructs, was made in 1929. Manovich uses still images from the film to frame the underlying characteristics of new media. Though he recognizes the contributions and aspirations of filmmakers like Vertov to fracture existing relationships between audience and film, Manovich does not consider film per se to be a “new media.”

Though I am aware there are semantic reasons for referring to “new media,” it is a messy term. The most inherent aspect of what makes it “new” has nothing to do with time per se. The idea of hypertext, for example, is not “new” exactly. Engelbart, the father of HCI, was conceptualizing how hypertext would function in the late 1960s. “The Mother of all Demos” was conducted in 1968 and should look very familiar to anyone familiar with how computers process data.

The shift from traditional media forms to “new” or digital media has fractured the transmission model of communication, especially in terms of mass communication. Now end-users (aka, digital citizens) have choices about what they want to “consume,” as well as when, with whom, and for how long.

But consumption really isn’t the most interesting part. With digital media, we all have the option to play along too. Ben notes the significance of video games as complex environments. In addition, we all have access to mix, mashup, and redistribute textual, visual, or video content. We can instantly share information via wikis, blogs, twitter, SMS to any number of people from our closest friends to a global community. Though we have this capability, how many of us actually take advantage of the possibilities though?

One important aspect of effective design, I believe, is giving users a clear choice. On my Mac, when I install software updates, the above demonstrates the choices given to me. What if I am in the middle of something? I am provided with only two options, both of which amount to the same result–I have to stop what I am doing to accommodate the software updates. Whenever a user is given choices, the choices should result in different outcomes (to avoid redundancy) and should take into account assumptions a user will make. In this case, a logical assumption is that if I don’t want to restart, my other option would be to wait until later to restart. By providing that option, the designer can minimize potential user error.

If you are wondering, no I have not ever pressed either button and accidentally restarted or shut down. But every time I have encountered this message, I have wondered how it passed usability testing.

One of the most pervasive interactive, dynamic media forms is the blog. Last week in class, everyone set up blogs here on wordpress, and we explored some other essential “Web 2.0″ tools including del.icio.us and technorati.

While blogging may seem like just a simple journaling exercise, it can be very, very different. Notice I say “can.” Not everyone starts blogging with the idea of developing a conversation with other bloggers and with visitors to the blog–but in the course of this semester we will explore blogs with this ultimate goal in mind. This creates both exciting opportunities and a need for caution. You have an audience, and the whole idea of blogging is that you would cultivate and interact with your audience. In fact, audience may not be the appropriate word for the readership of a blog. A popular blog facilitates an involved community of readers.

One of the most effective ways to get a better sense of what is involved in blogging is to read what others have written about it. In On Becoming A Good Blogger, Shai Collins offers helpful insight in this regard. Twenty Tips for Good Blogging also gives important perspective to effective blogging habits.

Posting openly online does leave potential for misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or sometimes just plain malicious behavior. It can be disconcerting at first when someone comments on your words or critiques your words. This will get easier over time. Keep in mind too that with trackbacks in blogs, if you post a critique of someone else’s writing on your own blog, the original author will often easily find it. For this reason, when you are referring to the writings of others, it is best to keep a constructive tone to the writing.

It doesn’t happen often, but there are times when blogging can result in vicious personal attacks. One such example was a widely denounced personal attack on Kathy Sierra. At the time of those attacks, a movement developed for a blogger code of conduct.

You may already be aware that computer-mediated communication can be more unclear because of the lack of verbal cues inherent in face-to-face communication paired with the ease of rapid response, which can result in an escalation of emotion very quickly. As we continue to explore new media over the course of this semester, this will be important to remember.

One of the requirements I gave in the list of three blogs to link to this week was to locate an academic blog. Though it would be great if members of the class were to identify purely academic blogs, I mostly wanted to push people towards locating blogs where people were writing intellectually stimulating commentary. I have no problem with blogs that focus on more the matters of daily life, and in fact I enjoy them, and believe they serve a social purpose. However, for a college course, I would hope that are striving to locate a specific type of content from the midst of all kinds of information that we can find online.

In no particular order:

apophenia: danah boyd comments on her research in the areas of social networking and other new media phenomena, particularly, I believe, from a sociological perspective.

Confessions of an Aca-fan: Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture, among numerous other books, writes about new media and convergence, particularly fan culture and transmedia development.

jill/txt:  Jill Walker Rettberg comments on online storytelling, among other topics.

theory.is.the.reason:  Kevin Lim writes about social technology.

grand text auto: A group blog, whereby several new media artists–Mary Flanagan, Michael Matea, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin– comment on the intersection of art and new media.

Greg starts out this blogging endeavor with a post about reading. There are a number of ideas mingled in the post from computer technology making information more readily available to the fact that there is so much information out there. “And,” says Greg, “it’s because there is so much to do on a computer that people are straying away from books and other print media.”

I am not anti-book by any means. I majored in English literature as an undergraduate student myself because I love books. I move boxes of them with what seems like annual moves, and even worse my husband has art books. Do you know how heavy those books are? Another caveat, not only do we have tons of books, but my husband is a printmaker. In other words, paper-based things go on at home.  But equating with the content of books with the need to read words on a page is missing the point. The recently released Amazon Kindle is one of the steps we are making as a society towards digital distribution of the written word. Is a book less of a book if it is distributed electronically?

The message I am really getting from Greg’s post is this: The type of reading where one person engages quietly and reflectively with a text *might* best be experienced with a printed page.  There are so many distractions in our daily lives that it is not just the literary engagement with the text that is important, it is developing an attention span to engage with something that lasts more than 30 seconds.