Online Journalism 1 - Weblogs and Journalism

Weblog history and who's online

I'm not quite sure how much we'll be able to fit into today's session. It is the first of the unit and it is a Friday afternoon. But here's some links and ideas. If there isn't time to cover them, we'll get to it next week.

First, I want you to research weblog history. This is a chance for me to see what you learnt about research online. Here's a starting point - Rebecca Blood, a well-respected long established blogger, wrote a history of the early days of blogging for a book she wrote on the subject. (Incidentally, she's written lots of interesting articles on blogs and journalism and interviewed lots of well-known bloggers).

It's good, but it only goes up to 2000. Can you fill in the last seven years? We should try to put together a timeline of some of the key events/moments in blogging history.

If there's time, we could also investigate who's using the net these days. 

An awful lot of research has been done over the last ten years into the changing nature and needs of the online population. Try to find some of it, especially some recent surveys of net users.

Then write a short blog post summarising what you've found, with links to the research you've located.

The Pew Internet And American Life Project is a good place to go to get a sense of who's using the net in the States and what they do when they're online. In some respects, America is still leading the way online, so the Pew Internet research can help you anticipate future developments over here.

For a UK perspective, try the Oxford Internet Institute - in particular, their Oxford Internet Survey.

Blogs to look at in class

Here's a few sites I'd like you to look at. I'm not going to say anything about them. The idea is that you look at each one and tell me what it's about, what kind of use it's making of the web, what kind of blog it is and whether you think it qualifies as 'journalism'.

I am Fashion

Go Fug Yourself

Hecklerspray

Punk Football

Who Ate All The Pies

Hippy Shopper

World Changing

Back To Iraq

Where is Raed?

Baghdad Burning

H5N1

Greenslade

VickyWatch

Andrew Sullivan

Collision Detection

OK - that's more than enough to be going on with. I'm not expecting you to look at all of these - at least not in class. I might get groups of you to focus on particular links and we'll pool our ideas after a while. Then I'd like you to write a quick review of one of these sites and post it on your blog.

One thing you could look at after class. BBC Radio 4 recently did a short series called Meet The Bloggers, which looked at blogs and the bloggers behind them. Follow the link and you can listen to the shows (they're only fifteen minutes long) or the unedited original interviews.

Re-capping last term's Intro unit

One of the things we're going to do today is go over some of the things you did with Tina last term. Specifically, we're going to talk about the distinguishing features of online journalism - the link is to some general notes I posted on this a couple of years ago. Give it a read and tell me if I need to update my ideas.

One thing that we need to talk about is 'interactivity' and what it actually means. Again, on a past blog, I posted a long ramble about user control online and what interactivity really means. You could give it a look and pull out the key points from all my rambling.

We're also going to talk about what you learned about blogging. Two years ago, I wrote some quick notes about the different uses writers, some professional journalists, most not, have found for their webogs.

One thing to remember - the thing about a blog is it can be lots of different things at once - it can be a promotional tool, a media filter and a vehicle for personal ranting. You don't have to pick one approach.