A Glut Of Occurences

After class Monday I was thinking about what makes a blog a blog. Aldon's definition seems reasonable: a reverse chronological list of events, sometimes with feedback, sometimes not , depending on the rules set by the "publisher". It's interesting to think about the first paper ever published in the United States in 1690. Benjamin Harris promised to present news "no more than a month old" and he included a blank page at he end of the paper for readers to write down their own thoughts/comments.http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/citizen_journalism/

Reps, Dems, and Memes

On Susan Blackmore's site about memes in an interview for Nextmodern she states, "I think language was once a meme-parasite that co-evolved to become symbiotic with us, and that culture is a vast system that is parasitic on human beings."

Could be the best description yet for the machinations of the political blogosphere.

The curent state of political blogdom seems wild, unruly , unpredictable, and to use Colin's metaphor of a new frontier: lawless. That's why it's so potentially disruptive. The Time magazine article on Netroots just seems to me to be another example of missing the significance of a new technology. Think of Bill Gates' greatly disputed late to the importance of the Internet legacy ( I'm not disputing Microsoft's bundled Internet Explorer contribution to the rapid uptake of the Internet) or of the portal CEO who infamously passed on funding Google stating that "search wasn't that important to our customers".



Someone said ( will amend this post when I remember who) the present administration in the white house is not so much a political organization as a media organization. Yet the republican party in general tends to use old school techniques on a new medium. For example they seem to have built a pretty impressive database early on to augment their get out the vote activities. Yet it doesn't seem they imagined a space for political social networking in their online strategy in the same way that Daily Kos or Huffington Post or others had.

It's ironic that the party's most infamous "killer app" use of the Internet is as Tony Snow calls them "naughty emails".

Here goes

First post ever. I pretty much feel like I'm jumping off a cliff. I hope to make it worth your time to check in from time to time to see what happens.

This blog is an account of sorts of a graduate class on Blogging. You could say this course is still in beta since the english department just started offering a graduate degree in Writing, Rhetoric and Media Arts. As our professor/journalist/writer/radio host/blog guide describes it, it's about all things "bloggy".