Category Archives: blogging

some things get better; some things get worse

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The good news is that I have something interesting to which to look forward. In May, the New York State members of the Hugh O’Brien Youth Leadership organization will be meeting for a conferece at the Legislative Office Building in Albany, and I’ve been asked to be on a panel about blogging. I don’t have the details yet, but I expect it will focus on blogging ethics, connections to traditional journalism, whether it all needs legislative regulations to keep it civilized.

So, if any of my readers have any suggestions for online statements/opinions about any of those kinds of things, please leave me a link. I know of a few myself, including Rebecca Blood’s essay, Chris Nolan’s recent description of “stand-alone journalism” that I found via b!X’s Portland Communique, and also b!X’s Communique link-handy page about weblog ethics and elements of journalism.

PLEASE NOTE (ADDED 08/17): Most of the links above have disappeared, but here is a current link tot he history of blogging. https://blogging.com/history
I’d also like to hear from “personal” (in contrast to political) bloggers, like me, regarding how they feel about government-imposed regulations on blogging. Please pass my request for comments around; I would love to be able to cite other “personal” bloggers’ opinions, not just my own.

And then, on the other front….

It’s 3 am and, again, the phone is ringing. This time it’s her pearls. You move the filing cabinet with all of her valuables into her bedroom so they are next to her all night. Then the robbers can’t sneak in when she’s sleeping and keep taking her things. This morning you find her cash-filled wallet in the bottom of the pillowcase of the bottom-most pillow on the made-up extra bed. It’s been missing for several days, but she didn’t put it there, she says.

And now back to an aspect of the panel discussion: is this the kind of thing that one should “ethically” be posting about. Is it an invasion of her privacy?

I would very much like to know what you think. What kind of guidelines have you imposed on yourself when it comes to what you post about and what you don’t?

Leave comments, please!!
VERY IMPORTANT ADDENDUM:
What I should have stressed is that this is a panel at a YOUTH LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE, so these are all high school kids we will be addressing. Some might already be blogging. I should have phrased my post to relate specifically to what adult bloggers would want high school potential bloggers to know. My fault for not being clear enough. Afterward, each panelist will have about an hour with a group of kids who are interested in the panelist’s “area of expertise.” I suspect the panel topic will be closer to “what can you do in your own life to take leadership and prepare yourself for leadership.” Or maybe “searching for and sharing the truth.” Or maybe not. I don’t have the specifics yet. I probably jumped the gun in asking for input. But I think I was wrong in assuming that the whole panel will be about blogging. I am the blogging person — that’s why I was looking for input. Sorry if, in my getting the cart before the horse, I indicated that the whole panel was about blogging.
This is a really good example how one should make sure she has all the facts before she blogs. Bad, bad Kalilily.
I said it better over here at BlogSisters because I took the time to think it through.
Kalilily Time is sometimes time out of whack.

Floating on the Fringes of the Spiral

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The World Wide Web is usually visualized like a spider web. I experience it as a whirlpool, an eddy, a vortex that spirals me into it. I ride on the fringes of the spiral, a mere droplet among the rushing currents. But I hold on, managing just enough surface tension to keep connected. But never part of the major flow.

For example, there’s this new “friends network” that one of my blogger friends sent me an invitation to join. Wotthehell. I did. But I was curious to see how he got connected to it and who his other “friends” were. And, as the strands of the spiral wound farther and farther outward, I saw the names of other bloggers I know who are also connected in that strand that must have started somewhere, with someone. The first cause, so to speak. After spiraling out about as far as I could go, I’ve decided it might well have been Joi Ito, whose session I attended at the “free” day of BloggerCon held at Harvard last fall, and who has established himself as a consummate virtual community builder.

I don’t know what I think I’m doing eddying around with techies who are way out of my league. But, again. Wotthehell. I’ve got nothing to lose.

Actually hanging around even on the fringes gives me a certain credibility in this blog world. The other day, at the suggestion of Blog Sister Jeneane, I was interviewed by someone developing an article on women and blogging that she hopes to sell to a magazine. I found myself explaining things to her that I never even realized I knew about how these spiraling connections work; I had just absorbed them from all of the stuff washing around me as I hang on for dear life in this wordy whirlpool.

And in the process, I bump up against cool people, like Adam Lasnik, a techie and a Lindy Hopper. (Ah, if only I were thirty years younger and lived on the West Coast; hey, I’m might be aging, but I’m not dead yet!)

Blogs as by-ways.

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Traveling the super-connected Internet superhighway is a lot like driving our high-speed interstate road systems, so asserts Diane Cameron, a local newspaper columnist, in last Sunday’s Times Union. (Warning: The TU only archives for seven days, so the link to her piece won’t work after that.)

She writes:
If you really want to see changes in the geography, culture or climate that make up the United States, you have to take the pokey slow roads.

There’s a parallel here for the Internet, our information superhighway. We’ve developed the habit of zipping around to search for info without ever leaving our desks. You can Google your way to facts and data and deals, and think you’ve learned something. But that’s often as bland and indiscriminate as spending five days seeing five states distinguished only by their rest stops and speed limits.

So, in the context of that analogy, it seems to me that weblogs are the by-ways that we can meander to find out what it’s really like out there in the global hinterlands. Unlike the fast food of IRC, weblogs give you a chance to savor the peculiar spices of the locale, take in the sights. Sometimes you have to kick your way through the garbage, but by the time you leave, you take with you a definite sense that you’ve been somewhere unique. If you leave a comment to show that you’ve been there, you’ve left your own footprint in the sands of that local history. Now that’s connectivity.

Ken of ipadventures recently posted some good stuff about “connectivity.” big picture and little picture, from global signal to personal access. Near the end of his post he says:
What we seek is a signal. A connection. The network isn’t about technology. It isn’t about business. It isn’t about profit. It’s about connections. End points are people and people connect, Sometimes we connect with machines to gather information. Often times we connect with other people because we share some link, or bond, or passing interest.

As I looked around the attendees at BloggerCon last Sunday, I couldn’t help think that I was probably the oldest one there — certainly the oldest female (who were definitely in the minority). As I experienced Joi Ito’s session on “Community” (and it was an “experience,” what with an IRC chat — that included people in the room as well as others — happening on the screen behind Joi as he RSSed and Wiki’d and Wifi’d and excitedly shared information that went completely over my aging head) I couldn’t help feeling that I was creeping along in the right lane while the rest of the traffic sped by me on that superhighway. I’m never going to catch up.

After the blue-haired boy in the straightjacket and his handlers stumbled out of the “T” last Sunday, their seats were taken by a couple of older teenaged girls who were instant messaging on their digital cell phone. I can barely program my non-digital cell phone to do one-touch dialing, and I need my magnifying glasses to see the screen anyway. My engine is stalling. I’m pulling over to the shoulder.

Joi Ito talked about how people with instant messaging no longer have to make long range plans to get together. Now you can instant message all of your friends, see who’s available to do something and meet-up spontaneously. Fast and faster and fastest. It seems to me that it’s all about connecting without really CONNECTING.

This technology is for the young and fast. The ones who grew up with with eye-bytes of MTV, with the machine-gun conversations of IRC, the get-there-quick-and-don’t-ask-questions information superhighway.

I’ve copied Diane Cameron’s entire column into an extension to this entry because she brings up implications for education that I think are crictical.

Me, I’m staying on the slow roads. I’m enjoying the by-ways of blogs, where I can linger and converse and find out what it’s like to really live somewhere else (big picture and little picture).

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