It Is Very Dark

Final Paper

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

A Blog, A Blorg, A Bloog: The Anatomy of A School Blog

I’ve been running and reading blogs for the past several years. Starting in 2001 I ran a comedy writing blog and I’ve run it in various different iterations to the present day. I’ve had quite a few personal blogs which I’ve gone through various phases of interest with. In 2001, blogs weren’t highly considered. Teenagers had their livejournals and xangas, and tech geeks had their high falutin blogs discussing tech geek stuff, but they hadn’t made much an impact. Skip to today when the word blog is so ubiquitous we don’t even notice that it sounds silly. At the Mets baseball team website, there’s a link to the MLBlog, all major news organizations have their anchors and newspeople keep blogs. It is my aim to create another blog, a blog designed to be an alternative news outlet for the University of Mary Washington.
Before designing that blog, one must define what a blog is. Though observation of a few varied blogs I think I can find a solid idea of what one is. To look at Dr. Campbell’s blog “Gardner Writes” (http://www.gardnercampbell.net) it (generally) is a regularly updated website running off the Wordpress blog software. The content on it is personal in nature to the effect that it is all material that is interesting to Dr. Campbell. A lot of the posts begin at a personal experience and then broaden to a greater point that he wants to make. “Gardner Writes” is an example of a personal professional blog. It doesn’t delve into angsty personal information, both because he’s well aware that his students can read it and write papers on it, and because he probably isn’t of a mind to put that on the internet anyway. Instead it projects an online identity that is both personal and professional. Wonkette, (http://www.wonkette.com) is a political website that I’ve read regularly for some time. Wonkette is part of a greater blog network, Gawkermedia. Wonkette, and Gawker blogs in general, are written with tongue firmly in cheek. These blogs are news blogs, make no mistake, but they offer a strong point of view. To look at a post from April 30th, under the heading “Our Flourishing Economy” the post is titled “Americans Selling All Their Possessions On Craigslist”. Snarky, jerky, and mean spirited. Wonkette doesn’t report news; it gets news from other sources and offers its Wonkette opinion on it. A final blog I’m going to observe is The Colonialist (http://www.thecolonialist.com). The Colonialist is a school blog for George Washington University which follows a similar mold to Wonkette. Its cheeky, but not nearly as cheeky as Wonkette is. Most of the news is from other sources, but on occasion it is known to branch off into personal essays, comic strips, and bits of satire. The Colonialist goes out of its way to give the school newspaper “The Hatchet” a hard time.
Looking at all three of these different blogs, it’s easy to find a pattern that arrives from them. They all come from a strong point of view. “Gardner Writes” comes clearly from Dr. Campbell’s perspective, as a personal blog. “Wonkette” has a point of view that all politics is nonsense and all politicians are fools. “The Colonialist” has the point of view that the administration of the school is failing to provide any actual perspective. Every one of these blogs comes from a place where it addresses the reader in more of a personal light. It isn’t like a formal newspaper article which tries to do its best to seem neutral, but each of these blogs laces every post with a strong personal bent which is what makes the blog worth reading. As McLuhan says “The twentieth century has worked to free itself from the conditions of passivity…” (Mcluhan, 202) He’s speaking of a world where there’s an interaction between the writers and the readers. Blogs provide that through the strong point of view. A newspaper is detached from us, where a blog reaches out of the computer screen and addresses you as someone in the writer’s personal little club.
Mary Washington has had an alt-news blog in the past. Its name was Middlesell (formerly at http://www.middlesell.com now empty). Middlesell went through a variety of faces, it was first a political blog absent of content relevant to UMW, then it started to add UMW content, until it became a rival portal to UMW’s own portal. At Middlesell’s height it had more users than the UMW portal did. In February it closed up shop, due to no user submissions, low traffic, and general disuse. Where did Middlesell go wrong? Certainly there was a sense to it that the webmaster of the site didn’t care much about maintaining it anymore, and that’s true. Beyond that, though, there were a few other reasons. In the final days of Middlesell, the content on the site was entirely user submitted. This might work for websites like Digg.com and Slashdot.org but not for a niche school news website. Not only did this slow down the rate of submissions but it also lead the point of view to be diluted. Looking at an August 2006 version of Middlesell on the Wayback Machine shows a series of articles across three columns written by what appears to be a writing staff. This writing had a point of view of a happy go lucky college information website with articles like “The Art of Textbook Bargain Hunting Made Simple” and “Tender, Juicy Pieces of Advice for Fresh Freshmen”. I would also argue that Middlesell’s kitchen sink approach didn’t do it too well either. In this writing staff era Middlesell, there’s no forum, no user submissions, and the portal replacement is relegated to a few links. The later Middlesell which ran more autonomously had a forum, user submissions, and tried to directly compete with the portal. Middlesell sold out its personality to try to be something much larger, and in doing so it lost the audience that had come to look to it. The conclusion I draw from this is that people aren’t willing to go to blogs to get information they can get elsewhere for the same consequence. You could get everything that was on Middlesell in both iterations elsewhere, but the older version had a draw to picking up this information here over a staid news source. If you remove a personality, you remove any reason for people to look at your material.
Next semester I plan on opening “The Devil Goat”. I won’t be running it, as I am graduating and won’t be able to be very relevant for it. However, I am setting the parameters for it and will preside over it for a short time to see it through in how I believe a school alt-news blog should work based off the conclusions drawn from all the blogs above. First, I believe that it should be updated regularly, which I think is a no brainer. No one is going to a blog that doesn’t look like its updated regularly, and anecdotally, I don’t believe most people use RSS readers. Most tech nerds I know do, but the standard college student doesn’t. This isn’t based off of cold statistical facts, so this could be wrong, but you’re as likely to find someone in this college who can define Web 2.0 as you are to find someone using an RSS reader (not bloody likely). Second, the website has to have a clear point of view, which should make sense because I’ve been pushing that idea this whole paper. The point of view will be similar to The Colonialist’s, one that is wry and satirical. It won’t make targets of students, but it will wryly make fun of targets that deserve it (dumb things the administration does). Third, the website will be hosted on Wordpress.com. I prefer clean basic layouts, I think the less that a reader has to go through to get the information they seek, the better. No Flash, no javascript, no heavy images, nothing like that at all. The site’s design will be basic; the content on it will be the draw. Too often do websites try to fool the readers into believing there’s a wealth of content when its just obfuscating it through flashy design. Fourth, a main staple of the updates will be regular updates on the events on campus. Certainly, there is a weekly email, but this will be regular, it will have the wry comments (not mean) and it will be sandwiched between other material that the readers should find interesting.
The Devil Goat will not expect many visitors to it from the start. Or even a semester through. It is to be expected that the audience for it will not find it right away. People tend to be suspicious of blogs. There needs to be a long backlog of posts to prove that the staff can prove their mettle and it has to offer that personality that the readers need to connect to. We’ll promote through facebook, and through the improv shows, but word of mouth will be the blog’s best friend. Next semester the school’s next great alt-news source will appear following all of these ideas. Based off of my observations of other blogs, after a while it should find resounding success and become part of the fabric of this campus.

Filed in umw_nms_s08 | Comments Off

I don’t like, nor do I trust, anything I’ve ever read on the internet

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

And so here we are with the LAST ASSIGNED READING. This fills me more with fear than sadness because it means that I need to really get in gear on this wacky final project that I’ve heard bandied about.

Once again, and even more so than last reading, I feel that this reading is there merely to serve a symbolic hole. Ah ha! The book says to us! You have hit the end and now here is an old explanation on the world wide web, how quaint, you can fill in the rest yourself with THE INTERNET’S AMAZING POWERS. It is a dry article that doesn’t seem to push any philosophy or anything, it just presents us with some basic history on where all this came from and a simple rundown on how it works. I suppose among the things that I didn’t know about was the gopher protocol, but according to wikipedia, we don’t need to know about that since its not used anymore. So there.

We are presented though with some brief ideas as to where the future will take us, and one of the more telling signs is a note on creating something that people can easily make their own websites where they could link all their stuff from. Here we are a decade and a half later and everyone in the class has one of these magic online platforms that does all the work for us online and automagically requires very little in the way of work. In fact, for those of you who have to install the damn things on their servers, they’ll realize that even THAT is pretty simple (though playing around with databases is kind of a pain in the ass sometimes, oh well).

I think that we don’t really appreciate how important hyperlinks are. I didn’t. This book really nails the damn thing home though, from that silly old memex that everyone got all excited about. Blogs, the biggest blogs we got, aren’t anything but blurbs with a link on the end linking to something else. All the websites on earth are just a series of doors leading to other doors, information nesting to information nesting to further information. All the bullroar about a 3D webclient, we didn’t need take into it. There may still be Second Life and mmorpgs, but our web is this, the words on the screen, occasionally blue with a line under it. If its anything that this class taught me is how massively and extremely important those little doors are.

Filed in umw_nms_s08 | Comments (2)

Games are for children

Monday, April 7, 2008

One thing I noticed about this article, though I guess it was appropriate for 1984, was that the author kept bashing pinball. Better than pinball this, video games do it better than pinball that. Well its because of jerks like her that we don’t have pinball anymore. Well, that and the fact that they’re extremely easy to break, wildly expensive to maintain, and not really that much popular. But frankly, the games that Turkle is talking about don’t really exist anymore. Well, not entirely. But this is a clearly dated piece, and unlike many of the other articles that we’ve read so far it hasn’t really come out to state something far reaching (or wildly incorrect) as much as its cool to read a scholarly text on video games. But having been someone who has read a bunch of them, a decided meh from this direction.

About the games that don’t really exist anymore, at the very end of the reading, she speaks of David, who makes the clear point about these eighties video games that they’re very simple and exactly what they are. Asteroids, Pac-Man, Missile Command, you name it, they are games that are a constant challenge, and the only challenge is more of the challenge that you’re facing. Arcade games, Atari 2600 games (and games of that generation, including from stuff like the Intellivision and the Coleco), and even NES games (throwbacks to this genre existed in every following generation, but it was no longer the norm), were all about that. You could make the argument that games are pretty much all the same with a lot of sexy new graphics. I probably would, but it’d deflate my argument and I’ve already written so many words. We see, though, that there are games that go further to recreate the DnD experience that was spoken of, more so rather than the arcade-zen experience.

Actually, now that I think about it, there’s all those rhythm games, and those are pretty much exactly along those lines of the zen thing. And that massive genre of puzzle games that is similar. And retro stuff like Geometry Wars. Still though, I’m going to make the argument that the main thrust of gaming right now is moving in a direction away from what he was saying, especially because there’s a huge difference between arcade games and games that run on your home system. An arcade game was designed specifically to swallow your quarters, and thusly the difficulty curve would usually let you get maybe one level in before it beat the poo out of you. With home systems, we’ve already made the investment by the time the game is sitting inside our respective console (or souped up PC). The mainstream gamers (which has moved away from a hardcore group of masochists, which is perfectly fine by me) so unless you’re playing a game that’s designed to be a throwback to that, almost every game now doesn’t offer much in the way of huge difficulty in the way that there will always be the existential dilemma (I was actually writing a short story about this) of the fact that you will always lose no matter what. Part of that was something that made those arcade games work.

If you want to watch a further discussion of some aspects of the difference between this classic era of arcade games versus us soft mushy people that need to “win” games to have our fragile self esteems held up by garish colored lights and fancy textures, I’d recommend renting the excellent documentary The King of Kong. Look it up, you lazy bump, I’m not going to relate the plot since people have done better on this internet, but I will say that there is some talk about what makes games of that era way different than what we see now. Its also really funny, and about way more than video games.

Filed in umw_nms_s08 | Comments (2)

Final Paper

I don’t like, nor do I trust, anything I’ve ever read on the internet

Games are for children

Search

Contents

Categories

Archives

Ben's Blogs

RSS Feeds

Meta