To inspire you, or to give you ideas, here are four final blogs of my choice:

Go Fug Yourself

Fuck Yeah, Space

My Life and Thoughts

Glenn Greenwald

Three of these four blogs are excellently written. That is to say, they are particularly humorous, and/or the sentences are very nicely constructed, and sometimes even beautiful. The fourth demonstrates a popular trend on Tumblr that I suppose we ought to discuss. Which one of these things is not like the other? I’ll leave you to decide.

Please begin working on your final portfolios. I expect big things from your final essay. It’s worth 15% of your grade. By “big things” I mean it should be thoughtfully written, incorporate specific details and examples from the readings and blogs we have studied, and should be impeccably edited and cited (MLA or APA or even footnotes, just be consistent). For questions, please refer to the instructions on the “Portfolios” page of this blog, or email me.

HubbleSite – Picture Album: Black Hole-Powered Jet of Electrons and Sub-Atomic Particles Streams From Center of Galaxy M87.

Here is the Library of Congress’s Twitter feed.

From their web site: “The Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections.”

Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham, sounding admirably reflective at a moment of crisis, said, “I would argue the fragmentation in media makes a place like Newsweek even more important. There are not that many common denominators left.” He’s right—but by moving away from original reporting into the embrace of “point-of-view journalism,” the newsweeklies rendered themselves, or were forced to become, more a part of that fragmentation, much less the common denominator than they were in their heyday, the nineteen-sixties, when reporting from Vietnam and the home front made Newsweek almost as central to public opinion as the Times and the nightly news broadcasts.

It’s not the passing of Newsweek itself—anyway, not the 2010 model—that grieves me. What I’m going to miss is the fact that Von Humboldt Fleisher was reviewed there, and that it mattered. I’m going to miss its defunct authority. I’m going to regret the long goodbye of what Charles Whitaker, a professor at Northwestern’s school of journalism, described to the Times as the “era of mass… The newsweeklies, for so long, have tried to be all things to all people, and that’s just not going to cut it in this highly niche, politically polarized, media-stratified environment that we live in today.”

Every time I say something critical about media and technology I get myself in trouble. Anyway, what was so great about the era of mass? Who doesn’t love a highly niche, politically polarized, media-stratified environment? What else does a New Yorker blog represent? So I will not go on—except to say that, as mediocre as the era of mass surely was, and as obsolete as it surely is, I can’t help seeing the disappearance of widely read, reported facts from American journalism, and their cohesive role in the commonly shared space of our democracy, as a cause for concern.

Now bring on the tweets.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2010/05/newsweek.html#entry-more#ixzz0pj7Oe0Vp

PostSecret

Slaughterhouse90210

Susan Orlean: blog / twitter

Scanwiches

Obviously if you evaluate PostSecret or Scanwiches, you’ll have to think creatively about these projects. Are they worthwhile? Why, and to whom? How do we judge such content, or should we?

To continue thinking about what lasts online this week, one of your three posts should try to connect your blog to the larger issues underlying your sensibility. A philosophical post! We’ll discuss this more in class.

Please also read Nicholas Carr’s provocative article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and please LISTEN to these two writers (George Packer and Susan Orlean) discuss Twitter. Take notes. Be prepared to discuss.

kottke.org

Gladwell.com

NYTimes: At War

The Daily Dish

Then read “The Rise of the Professional Blogger” by Benjamin Carlson.

In addition, please work on including visuals in your posts in creative ways, and generally thinking about and working on the visual rhetoric of your blogs.

Keep tweeting! We’ll be talking about Twitter next week. To prepare, please read this article by Alex Leavitt.

So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back — like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust — of course you can’t, it’s just people talking — but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV — a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

–Douglas Adams (a pretty famous British author. See here. And here.) via kottke.org

• Developing your writing voice
• Incorporating materials from elsewhere on the web in your blog

To practice these skills, this week at least one of your three posts should contain a link (you can use several if you want!) and at least one post should use a quotation, image, video, or other artifact you find online (this should also have a link). If you’re already doing this, GREAT–keep doing it. Also, surf around the web and find some other sites in your topics area to populate your blogroll. I guarantee that there are other people out there writing about somewhat similar topics. What else do you want to start to keep track of to get good ideas, and to see what else is going on in your area of the blogosphere.

In addition, please keep experimenting with your writing style trying to find that balance of being yourself but also considering your audience. Sometimes you’ll overlap: for example, if I want to post a picture of my cat, I find that interesting, and my audience will probably also not be totally turned off by a cute cat picture. I should, however, put the cat picture in context so it doesn’t seem random or like I put zero thought into that day’s post. I might want to tell a story about my training my cat (sometimes I have to spray her with water–she hates it) that illuminates a larger point about making hard decisions, for example, which is something my audience can probably relate to whether they love cats or not.

NEXT! Read another Bloggers on Blogging article: Scott Rosenberg on blogging and make sure to take a look at his actual blog, Wordyard.

ALSO! Read a final chapter from Rebecca Blood’s book: “Weblog Community and Etiquette”

FINALLY! Evaluate TWO or the following blogs:

The Sartorialist

The Pursuit of Happiness

Hard Feelings

Alec Soth

We’re going to be discussing visual rhetoric: how to make arguments and compose with images, so please pay particular attention to the way these blogs use images in your evaluations.

52 books

Smitten Kitchen

Boing Boing

Laughing Squid

As always, please post your evaluation as a comment to this post. Then, read these two articles:

Heather Armstrong: Bloggers on Blogging

Rebecca Blood: “Finding Your Voice”

Be prepared to discuss them in class.

In addition, remember that you are bloggers now! You should post at least three times this week. One of those posts should solicit comments from your readers.