« February 2005 | Main | April 2005 »
March 28, 2005
Stall Scribbles
Found a link related to the last class discussion we had about blogs being a space mainly for school kids to rant: Stall Scribbles is an anonymous forum for college students where people can post just one sentence or a whole essay about anything they want to rant about or any questions they need answers for. Based on the ubiquitous random scribblings that people leave in bathroom stalls, the site touts itself as "the digital stall where you can confess anything you want." They guarantee complete anonymity - "We do not keep track of any identifying information" - and you don't have to sign up or register to scribble something. They do, however, have a system of linking scribbles to their author's college. I'm not sure how they do that but my guess is that they log the IP address and can tell if you're on a college network.
Give it a try... as the site says, "You'll get this wonderful feeling that it's off your chest and you've finally told someone about it"!
Posted by chan at 12:29 AM
March 11, 2005
Just For Fun
I don't know if everyone already knows about these, created by a Japanese guy and known as the Blue Room, Crimson Room, and Viridian Room games. I spent an entire hour trying to figure out how to escape from the rooms and even then I had to resort to asking for help (this is where the whole "online community" thing comes in, thus tying this entry to classwork. Haha.). If you google "Crimson Room" or whatever room you're working on at the moment, there are all these threads on various forums that are dedicated to helping people out with these games. The most helpful are the walkthroughs, where people take screenshots of the games and tell you what to do step by step.
Enjoy!
Posted by chan at 04:09 PM
March 10, 2005
White House Approves Pass For Blogger
Another interesting article about the increasingly nebulous boundary between blogging and journalism.
White House Approves Pass for Blogger
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: March 7, 2005 in New York Times
Another signal moment for bloggers is to occur this morning, when Garrett M. Graff, who writes a blog about the news media in Washington, is to be ushered into the White House briefing room to attend the daily press "gaggle."
Mr. Graff, 23, may be the first blogger in the short history of the medium to be granted a daily White House pass for the specific purpose of writing a blog, or Web log. A White House spokesman said yesterday that he believed Mr. Graff was the first blogger to be given credentials.
He is being given a press pass as the editor of FishbowlDC, a blog that is published by Mediabistro.com, which offers networking and services for journalists.
Increasingly, bloggers are penetrating the preserves of the mainstream news media. They have secured seats on campaign planes, at political conventions and in presidential debates, and have become a driving force in news events themselves.
Mr. Graff said he was inspired to try to seek access to the White House by the controversy over James D. Guckert, who used the alias Jeff Gannon. Mr. Guckert was granted daily passes to White House briefings while writing for a Web site run by a Republican operative in Texas. The episode raised questions about who was a legitimate journalist and how access to the White House was granted.
White House press officials and others said it was relatively easy to get a day pass, prompting Mr. Graff to test that premise. He set about trying to get one and chronicled his attempt on his blog.
He made 20 phone calls and got nowhere. Bigger blogs picked up on his saga, and traffic on FishbowlDC increased tenfold, he said. But it was not until the traditional media joined in, Mr. Graff said, that the White House relented.
"USA Today started making calls on Thursday. CNN mentioned it on 'Inside Politics,' and Ron Hutcheson, president of the White House Correspondents Association, raised the issue with the White House Press Office," he said. "I think a combination of all of that made the White House pay attention and decide to let me in."
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said he had met with the White House Correspondents Association and they had decided to let Mr. Graff in. "It is the press corps' briefing room and if there are any new lines to be drawn, it should be done by their association," he said.
Mr. Graff said he was surprised at the help he received from "real" reporters covering the White House, given what he described as the animosity between some bloggers and the mainstream news media.
Mr. Graff is something of a bridge between those two worlds. Although he is a blogger, he has old-media genes: his father, Christopher Graff, is the chief correspondent in Vermont for The Associated Press; and his grandfather, Bert McCord, was the drama critic for The New York Herald Tribune.
Mr. Graff himself was executive editor of The Harvard Crimson. He said he became a blogger because "it's the newest trend in journalism."
In any case, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University and specialist in blogging, said Mr. Graff's odyssey was significant for two reasons. First, he showed that it was harder to get a pass than the White House said it was after the Guckert case.
Secondly, he said, Mr. Graff was expanding the definition of what constitutes the press, just as radio and television once pushed those boundaries.
Posted by chan at 08:55 PM
March 07, 2005
Thoughts on Geertz
"Another view is that of George Herbert Mead the pragmatist philosopher and psychologist, who argued that understanding was based on the ability to 'take the role of the other' - that is, on a form of empathy. And Malinowski pressed the notion that in field work, 'participant observation' was indispensable to even a correct reporting, for only by actually doing what the native did could one understand what it meant to him."
I find it hard to agree with this view. Empathy, while potentially helpful to certain kinds of understanding, cannot possibly form the basis for understanding in general. The notion of "meaning" is interpreted differently, with different intended consequences, to every single person; someone who grew up in middle-class America, for instance, no matter how immersed he became in rural China - even to the point of "doing what the native did" - will never be able to "understand" what each nuance of rural life signifies to its "natives". Thus I doubt the importance (and indeed relevance) of "participant observation" in anthropological reporting. What the anthropologist and outsider observes is deciphered in the only context in which it would make any sense to him, i.e. a context determined by the combination of background and knowledge peculiar to him. Perhaps this is being simplistic, but I always thought anthropologists attempted to leave the narration of "meaning" to their subjects, concentrating instead on the accurate reporting thereof.
Geertz's argument, therefore, of comparing different "sets" of perceptions to bridge the gap between participant (the subject) and observer (and his audience) makes more sense. "In short, accounts of other peoples' subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to more-than-normal capacities for ego-effacement and fellow-feeling... whatever accurate or half-accurate sense one gets of one's informants are "really like" comes not from the experience of that acceptance as such, which is part of one's own biography, not of theirs, but from the ability to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems, which such an acceptance allows one to work towards developing."
The importance of social contextualization as envisioned by Geertz, however, seems to lay a path for the conception of individual (or, more often, group) identity through exclusion, i.e. the definition of "person"/"people" by contrasting him/her/them to other individuals/societies. In the emphasis on sorting, hierarchy, and public relationships (as opposed to personal, individual, private selves) lies the danger of an inclination towards relativism rather than absolutism, towards the group rather than the individual, and towards public labels rather than intimate knowledge. Conceiving of people as inextricably attached to their backgrounds causes a definition of identity that lacks not in customization but in personalization (as Geertz puts it: categorization but not type; placing but not portrayal). "Selfhood is never in danger because, outside the immediacies of procreation and prayer, only its coordinates are assured." But in online communities (using this word in its broadest sense), the conceptualization of "selfhood" is completely opposite to what is outlined in Geertz's article. There is a marked lack of categorization and of situation (save for IP addresses, which can be blocked) -- one's portrayal of oneself is purely individual and deliberate, rather than an accident of birth or circumstance. Why do we, then, think that this is a more evolved communication of selfhood?
For reference:
verstehen: German for to understand. 1. To perceive and comprehend the nature and significance of, to know. 2. To know thoroughly by close contact with or by long experience of the phenomenon. 3. To grasp or comprehend the meaning intended or expressed by another. 4. To know and be empathetic toward. Weber used the term to refer to the social scientist's attempt to understand both the intention and the context of human action.
einfuhlen: German, meaning to try and become what you're studying and look at it from the inside.
Posted by chan at 10:37 PM
The Power of Bloggers
As someone who's been blogging for the past seven years - even before 'blogging' became a word - and as a future journalist, this article in today's NYT really struck a chord with me. It seems to me, however, that if the privileges of journalists are extended to bloggers simply by virtue of their access to audiences - larger, in some cases, than whole newspapers - and of the potential power and destructiveness of their blog content, that opens the floodgates to demands for special rights regarding their news sources from all kinds of people who discover and spread knowledge of any type. On the other hand, if online forums are ruled to be outside of journalistic privileges, that may signal the beginning of the end for online privacy and the oft-associated characteristics thereof, such as greater democracy and freedom. But on to the article...
The New York Times, March 7, 2005
At a Suit's Core: Are Bloggers Reporters, Too?
By JONATHAN GLATER
In the physical world, being labeled a journalist may confer little prestige and may even evoke some contempt. But being a journalist can also confer certain privileges, like the right to keep sources confidential. And for that reason many bloggers, a scrappy legion of online commentators and pundits, would like to be considered reporters, too.
A lawsuit filed in California by Apple Computer is drawing the courts into that question: who should be considered a journalist?
The case, which involves company secrets that Apple says were disclosed on several Web sites, is being closely followed in the world of online commentators, but it could have broad implications for journalists working for traditional news organizations as well.
If the court, in Santa Clara County, rules that bloggers are journalists, the privilege of keeping news sources confidential will be applied to a large new group of people, perhaps to the point that it may be hard for courts in the future to countenance its extension to anyone.
"It's very serious stuff," said Brad Friedman, who describes himself as an investigative blogger (his site is bradblog.com). "Are they bloggers because they only publish online? I think you have to look at what folks are doing. And if they're reporting, then they're reporters."
Apple has long had a devoted following, and leaked information about new Apple products has appeared on Web sites for years. To combat this, the company filed the suit late last year against the sources of these leaks - people the company assumes are employees or contractors.
Apple has asked the court to compel the Web sites that displayed the product information to disclose their identity. Bloggers are fighting Apple's efforts, which it has focused on three Web sites - Thinksecret.com, Appleinsider.com and PowerPage.org.
The judge in the case, James Kleinberg, is required only to interpret a California statute that recognizes a privilege protecting reporters in keeping news sources confidential. A ruling could come as early as this week.
On its face, the lawsuit brought by Apple has to do with theft of trade secrets. But Susan Crawford, a law professor at Cardozo law school of Yeshiva University (and a blogger herself), says that the steps Apple has asked the court to take open a broader question.
"Under what circumstances should an online forum be forced to disclose a source behind information that they're posting?" Ms. Crawford said. "There is no principled distinction between a New York Times reporter and a blogger for these purposes. Both operate as news sources for wide swaths of the general public."
Blogs, she added, are already becoming more and more powerful, and some have readerships that exceed those of small-town newspapers. "We've seen it with Rather being brought down by bloggers," she said, referring to the CBS news anchor, who came under intense scrutiny by bloggers after a "60 Minutes Wednesday" segment on President Bush's National Guard service was broadcast .
Judge Kleinberg is likely to try to decide the case on the narrowest possible grounds, perhaps reading the text of the California law at issue to cover only people who work for traditional newspapers and magazines or television news programs, and to avoid deciding if bloggers are indeed journalists, Ms. Crawford said.
Whatever the judge's decision, it is all but certain to be appealed. But the question of who is a journalist is to many a matter of deeper concern.
Some bloggers want any protection available to journalists at traditional media companies to also be available to them, and journalists at those companies want to make sure that the reporter shield privilege is preserved.
Yet if recognizing a privilege for bloggers means that everyone online can maintain that they are journalists, judges may conclude that rather than giving everyone the privilege, no one should have it. That possibility worries reporters, who could find themselves at new risk for what they write or broadcast.
Apple has not sued the Web sites for damages for publishing the trade secrets, but it could try, said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at U.C.L.A. He is considering filing a friend-of-the-court brief in the case on the side of the bloggers, saying that the privilege should extend to them.
"This turns out to be an unresolved question of First Amendment law," Mr. Volokh said, referring to the issue of liability for the Web sites.
Attempting to draw a distinction based on the medium used by the blogger or reporter is misguided, said Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School (also a blogger). "In 15 years, there may be no clear distinction between reporters on the one hand and bloggers on the other," he said. "It won't just be an either-or, where you have a reporter for The Chicago Tribune on the one hand, and a guy sitting in his pajamas drinking beer on the other."
Not all blogs are equally influential and not all blogs even try to report, in the usual sense of cultivating sources, actively gathering information and then organizing and presenting it to the public, Mr. Balkin added. "There are millions and millions of blogs, and most of them are for gossip."
Many states have privilege statutes like the one in California, and others may consider enacting them. To determine who should be able to claim any kind of privilege against disclosing news sources, he said, courts and lawmakers should look at exactly what the would-be reporter does.
"It should be extended on a functional basis," he said. So a blogger who interviews people and spends significant amounts of time gathering and organizing information could claim the privilege; a blogger who wrote about good and bad recipes, and who one day stumbled onto a copy of the Pentagon papers and printed them, might not.
Such a functional definition could prove elastic, and an enterprising blogger would have every reason to assert any available privilege. Mr. Balkin - asked whether he would assert the privilege if a former student leaked information to him about a Supreme Court justice that then appeared on his Web site - did not hesitate to claim it for himself.
"I would be willing to claim that if you look in my blog, what I'm doing is so similar to what Lewis or Krugman or Safire do," he said, referring to Anthony Lewis, Paul Krugman and William Safire, current and former columnists for The Times, that "although it's done more informally and it's about a much narrower area, that I could claim that I was in the functional definition. That's what happens when you start taking a functional approach."
Mr. Friedman, the blogger, said that ultimately, bloggers' role as purveyors of important information that traditional news organizations might ignore made online journalists more important than before, and so more deserving of protection.
"As the mainstream media has become more and more corporate and more and more like the governmental and corporate bodies that mainstream journalists used to report on," he said, "a lot of this stuff has fallen now to the bloggers - to do what mainstream folks used to do. It's still serving the exact same purpose: keeping the bad guys honest."
Posted by chan at 01:03 AM
Guimp
Just for fun: the world's smallest website, measuring just 18 pixels by 18 pixels! Check out the PacMan game, it's hilarious.
Posted by chan at 12:55 AM
March 05, 2005
Article about China Blogs
(Published January 13, 2005 in Beijing's City Weekend)
Blog On
by Lydia Holden
China is home to hundreds of Web logs -- the online diaries referred to as "blogs" -- from both expats living here and Chinese nationals wishing to connect to the foreign community. After trolling through blog after blog, City Weekend chose a select few that are smart, funny and work to serve expats living in China. Highlighted below are two, with more to follow in the coming months.
Sinosplice
Blog: www.sinosplice.com
Background: Originally from Florida, John T. Pasden, has been blogging about China life since 2002. The 26-year-old is currently teaching in Shanghai while increasing his fluency in Mandarin. With John, expats can share the frustrations of teaching, "I’m really tired of teaching kids and doing all these holiday themed activities," and learn from his experiences with Mandarin, "I found an impressive flashcard database site called Flashcard Exchange," complete with a link to the site. His comments are insightful and often humorous, with great extras like the John and Wilson Chinese Junk Food Review ("I don’t know why I like [the dried squid]. I think part of me doesn’t, but I still finished the bag after the review."). Sinosplice is a well-executed and informative site that is useful for new comers and old China hands alike.
Excerpt: I had barely gotten past the ‘greeting’ part of the class when four kids spontaneously jumped out of their seats and started busting out kung fu moves. They were followed by four more. I was suddenly surrounded by eight little martial arts munchkins, and my protests were completely useless.
Leylop
Blog: www.leylop.com
Background: Leylop, a Chinese college student, logged on in December 2002 using her impressive English skills to introduce foreigners to her Chinese life and muses on everything from opening her own Mandarin language school to traveling to movies. While Leylop is probably a fortunate one (a handful of entries are posted from Europe), her insights are charming and she seems just like one of the girls, "I spent all night sitting at the computer, it was already 9 in the morning, I still couldn't stop-- Ok, I was watching this Korean TV series, and I was totally hooked." Chinese chic meets Western modernism.
Excerpt: Hello Mrs. Mariah Carey, please do not go nuts before considering my suggestion: China is a potential market for you... because you're still popular here. How about moving to China and singing in Chinese? You could be our pop queen! But you have to learn Chinese well first. Don’t worry, I'm thinking about opening a Chinese learning school you could be my first student, for free, but there is one rule you have to follow: get rid of your terrible dresses.
Posted by chan at 08:13 PM
March 01, 2005
Numa Numa Dance
Not sure if everyone already knows about this, but I thought this was a good example of how something you do that you think is restricted to the online sphere can come back to haunt you in the "real" world: an obscure guy from New Jersey made a video of himself singing and bouncing along to a Romanian pop song, and the video was so widely circulated on the Internet that he's achieved fame of the William Hung variety. He's now hiding from the deluge of interest in his video.
The New York Times' report on this:
Internet Fame Is Cruel Mistress for a Dancer of the Numa Numa
Posted by chan at 06:28 PM
