07.31.08

Yog on Online Moderation

Posted in Blogging, Pedagogy and Scholarship at 11:02 am by Lisa Spangenberg

James D. Macdonald, SF author and exceedingly experienced online moderator (remember Yog Sysop? That’s him) offers some rules for moderation under the heading:

Here’s what moderators need to know:

  • a) Sure, there’s freedom of speech. Anyone who wants it can go start their own blog. On Yog’s board, Yog’s whim is law.
  • b) Yog is an ancient ghod of chaos and evil. And he doesn’t like people very much.
  • c) Moderation is a subjective art, and the moderator is always right.
  • d) The moderator may have minions. They need to have a private area where they keep the buckets of Thorazine and the cold-frosty bottles of cow snot.
  • e) The minions speak with the voice of Yog. Yog backs his minions up.
  • f) There is always someone awake, and in charge, when Yog isn’t around in person. The minions know who the Duty Yog is.
  • g) If someone starts off as a spammer, troll, or flamer, he is a spammer, troll, or flamer forever and is liable to instant deletion/banning with no recourse and no appeal.
  • h) If the moderator ever needs inspiration, he can re-read Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and recall that the posters are sinners and he is Ghod.
  • i) Rules? In a knife fight? Yog and his minions have standards, but they don’t need to tell the posters, lest some of them attempt to game the system. Attempting to game the system is, all on its own, a deletable offense.
  • j) ALL CAPS posts are deleted on sight, unread. Mostly ALL CAPS POSTS are ALL CAPS.
  • k) Anyone who doesn’t space after punctuation marks is insane, and can be deleted/banned on sight.
  • l) Personal attacks against Yog and his minions are ignored. Personal attacks against anyone else are deletable on sight.

See the original post at Making Light and be sure to read the comments, too.

07.23.08

Blogging as Conversation

Posted in Blogging at 10:48 am by Lisa Spangenberg

Tor, my favorite fantasy/sf publisher, has just gone public with their new Web site, one that has been re-designed with community engagement with content as a core principle. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor, and one of the founding bloggers at Making Light, has a fabulous essay on blogging.

In the blog post Nielsen Hayden opens with this simple but elegant explanation of the core concept behind blogging and community content:

Effective blogging is a combination of good personal writing and smart party hosting. A good blog post can be a sentence long, or three pages long; what matters is that it encourages further conversation.

Go read the rest of his post; it’s one of the best meditations on blogging and digital communication I’ve ever read.

02.06.08

Hello World . . . Again

Posted in Blogging at 3:59 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

Yes, I’ve changed blogging tools.

Again.

I began this blog in January of 2002, using Radio Userland; I eventually moved to MovableType, and now, I’m using WordPress.

I’ve also changed the location; I was over here, at digitalmedievalist.com, but I’m finally realizing I need to distinguish the scholarly me from the geek me, because it’s awfully confusing to would-be employers.

04.03.07

Online Communities, Women, and Misogyny

Posted in Blogging at 12:59 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

I’ve posted already about the hateful way Kathy Sierra was treated by other bloggers. The reaction has been interesting. Yesterday Chris Locke and Kathy each posted, collaboratively, their takes on the specific incidents, and the larger issue of hate speech and threats in the blogosphere.

The core issues are neatly summarized by Ross Mayfield here:

  • Being safe is something most everyone can agree is a right.
  • Being anonymous on the web matters.
  • Being open on the web matters. Transparency is good.
  • Being free with speech is both what makes us great and makes us go too far.

Mayfield provides four assertions that pretty much anyone will agree with. There is, however, a need to juggle possibly conflicting goals—like preserving the right of anonymity, but not when anonymity is used to perpetuate hate speech, as it was in the attacks on Kathy Sierra. There’s potential conflict between speaking frankly, and the necessity of free speech, and not allowing hate speech.

We do have methods of controlling hate speech, methods that aren’t matters of censorship. There are the less than effective technical methods—banning, and moderating and deleting comments; even, disemvowelling the truly idiotic rabid hate-monger, but primarily, online communities need to enforce community standards. As MacAllister Stone puts it:

I think we have to self-police. I think, when someone says something that’s clearly horrible and inflammatory, we stuff ‘em in a box. Embarrass them. Shame them into either adhering to community standards, or exile them by deletion and/or blocking.

With that context extablished, I want to look at two short quotations from Chris Locke and Kathy Sierra regarding online attacks and hate speech specifically directed towards women.

Kathy Sierra asks:

But if we dismiss every cruel, vile, sexually threatening comment as simply the work of an anonymous troll, we will no longer be able to recognize a real threat. Are we willing to stake our mother/sister/daughter’s life on a sexually and physically threatening photo or comment, simply because it appeared on the internet and therefore must be harmless?

Chris Locke observes

Misogyny is real — and vile. Violence against women is wrong. It must not be tolerated. This issue should be explored and discussed, not swept under the rug, not rationalized away.

There’s something else going on here, besides ordinary hate speech and Internet trolls. Kathy Sierra was specifically and carefully targeted. She was attacked for no real reason—but the attacks, and the language and images used in the attacks are overtly sexualized and exceedingly misogynistic.
Like many other women with online presences, Sierra was attacked because she is female. There’s a culture of harassment online, directed towards women in general, over and above the usual ‘net obsessed trolls and nutters. It’s almost impossible to find a woman who blogs or participates in discussion forums who hasn’t been subjected to sexualized attacks and unwelcome sexually explicit comments, innuendos and email.

Bill Humphries linked to these posts from Min Jung Kim an Asian woman blogger, and Gin Mar, a woman and veteran of the Iraq war.
I think Liz Henry, like MacAllister Stone, has the right response:

I’d like to make a call to action. When this kind of shit happens, we’ll call it out and document it in public. Call it in the moment. Call it in front of your coworkers. Call it if it’s major or if it’s minor, it’s all part of the same spectrum of misogynist behavior. How about just saying, once in a while, right in the moment if you can, “That’s not funny,” when it’s really not. Say it crosses your boundaries. Say it’s not acceptable to you. This takes practice, but with time, we can all do it and find strength in numbers.

We need to be very clear that this kind of attack is not accepted, and that the community, and the ‘net as a whole, object to it. At the same time, I also want to acknowledge that there’s a rise in equally sexually-directed attacks against men on the net, and more often than not, overtly sexualized comments from women that very much qualify as hate speech; that’s not cool either, nor should it be acceptable.

In a subsequent post, I want to talk about the particular difficulties faced by women in technology, on and off the net; the underlying misogny in technology by a loud minority is very much part of the reason Kathy Sierra was attacked.

03.27.07

Death Threats are Not OK

Posted in Blogging at 3:43 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

Blogger and UI expert, Kathy Sierra, had to cancel her talk at the Etech conference, because of really really nasty death threats, and threats of sexual assault. You can read about it here.

There are fairly well-known “A-list” bloggers skirting the outskirts of this. And there are certainly quite a few people who know who’s responsible.

They need to go to the police. This is absolutely not acceptable, ever.

Via Chuqui, here are some blogs that talk about Kathy’s sick, vicious, criminal attackers.

08.29.06

Bloggers As Public Intellectuals

Posted in Blogging, Conferences at 9:58 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

I’m blogging another panel I heard at L.A.Con IV; this one was on blogging.

Speaker(s): MaryAnn Johanson, Phil Plait, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Kevin Drum, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Cory Doctorow (Moderator).

H.L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, I.F. Stone, Germaine Greer, Gertrude Stein, Hannah Arendt all gained prominence as American public intellectuals through newspaper columns and books of collected essays. Is the Blogosphere spawning a contemporary generation of important public thinkers? Who are the ones you can’t afford to miss? What are they saying?

The panelists introduced themselves, and spoke a little bit about their reactions to being described as “public intellectuals,” and their impressions about the intellectuals they were associated with. Kevin Drum referred to a recent article in Mother Jones News which compared bloggers and nineteenth century pamphlet writers. This idea is not new. Patrick Nielsen Hayden suggested that I. F. Stone, particularly with respect to Stone’s I. F. Stone Weekly, might be considered a proto-blogger. MaryAnn Johanson described one of the virtues of blogging as “no corporate gate keepers telling us what we can and can not say” (this is unfortunately increasingly not the case).

Cory Doctorow discussed the idea of blogging as “terse,” with respect to BoingBoing, because the content is driven by the constraints of RSS. Readers of BoingBoing increasingly read it via an RSS reader, so that terse content is more effective. Doctorow is essentially talking about the Economics of Attention. BoingBoing might be competing for a reader’s attention along side a thousand or three other blogs; terse, specific, effective subjects and descriptions are thus more effective at grabbing attention. This is much like the idea behind much journalism; that the shape of the column or article is like an inverted pyramid; the basic information is neatly, effectively, presented at the base of the pyramid, preferably in an attention-grabbing way, and increasingly, the information is increasingly less important so that the tip of the pyramid, and the end of the post, has unimportant details.

MaryAnn Johanson spoke about “blogs as conversations,” and about the fact that the underlying software tools, the blogging systems, ease writing because “the software takes care of it for me.”

Teresa Nielsen Hayden picked up on the idea of the blog as conversation and observed that “if you [blog] using the classic, closed, essay form, you leave your reader no place or point to comment.” This led to a discussion of post length, which, again, relates to an economics of attention. Several panelists commented on the importance of voice, and the idea that blogs are personality driven. Phil Plait mentioned PZ Myer’s Pharyngula, an an example, and Cory Doctorow mentioned Fafblog.

MaryAnn Johanson closed by observing that Cory Doctorow had recently finished an 80K word book by using pieces he’d previously posted on BoingBoing as his research fodder; this is an instance of the blog as commonplace book. Patrick Nielsen Hayden closed by observing that “The uses to which people put your writing is not necessarily what you had in your mind” when you wrote it.

08.27.06

Podcasting Resources

Posted in Blogging at 8:31 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

I attended the World Science Fiction Convention, L.A.Con IV, where, among other things, I listened to a panel discussion on pod casting on August 24th. Here’s the official description from the program guide:

Podcasting Science Fiction Speaker(s): Stephen Eley, Evo Terra, John O’Halloran, Paul Fischer (Moderator)

Is there a market for science fiction and fantasy via podcast? Is there even an audience? Can you make money directly or is it just a way to get your material known? If you’re a reader/consumer, is this a good way to find science fiction and just how do you find what you want?

The panel began with an overview of what podcasting is, with some discussion of its virtues. John O’Halloran likes the fact that podcasts are available on demand; the data is available when you want it, primarily because of the use of RSS and other Web services to distribute podcasts. Fischer agreed, emphasizing that it’s what you want, when you want it, and if you decide you don’t want it, you simply stop downloading it. Evo Terra added that if you don’t find what you want in terms of a podcast, then you can create it. He also mentioned the importance of receiving a response from listeners via email or blog comments.

Since many of the audience weren’t yet making or downloading podcasts, a fair amount of time was spent on basic information in terms of locating, listening to, and creating podcasts. You don’t need an iPod to download or play podcasts; the normal file format for a podcast is an MP3 file, playable in iPods and hosts of other MP3 players, on computers, a number of CD-ROM and audio CD players, and of course, MP3s can easily be converted to other audio formats and even burned to an audio CD.

Apple’s free iTunes player, for Mac and Windows is an easy way to locate and play podcasts. Some people prefer the free Mac or Windows application MyPodder from PodCastReady.com, which allows you to find and download podcasts to a variety of media and devices. Other ways of finding podcasts, aside from the usual ‘net sources like word of mouth, or positive mentions on Web logs and Web pages, are dedicated services, like SFFAudio.com, which offers reviews of SF and Fantasy audio in a variety of formats, both online and off. PodcastPickle.com is a searchable directory of podcasts, organized by name, by genre, by language and by popularity.

The following are suggestions, and pointers, for the beginning podcaster, culled from the panel participants and not necessarily attributed:

  • Get a decent microphone. It doesn’t have to be expensive if you’re doing spoken word.
  • iRiver MP3 players like the T30 support voice recording and work with Windows; they’re good enough to use for recording live interviews and spoken word.
  • If you’re recording a group of people, Paul Fischer suggests putting a microphone inside a salad bowl, and have someone point it at the speaker; it’s an inexpensive but effective parabolic microphone.
  • Liberated Syndication is a syndication and hosting service. For a flat monthly fee they provide server space (starting at 100 MB/$5.00) for your actual podcast file, an RSS feed, and an interface to distribute your podcast. LibSyn also works with extant blogs, they charge only for storage, not bandwidth, and provide archive storage so old podcasts are still accessible but don’t affect your monthly storage total.
  • Think about using Skype for phone interviews.
  • Paul Fischer suggests that you listen to your podcast in all the ways you think your audience might; on a computer with speakers, using headphones, in a car, on an MP3 player . . . make sure the sound is OK for each.
  • RSS or some other form of Web service for syndication, which allows listeners to subcribe to your podcast and download it automatically, is crucial. PodPress is a plugin for the WordPress blogging system that takes care of the syndication/RSS feed for you as part of your blog. Feeder is a $29.95 Mac OS X (PowerPC and Universal) application that takes care of creating the RSS feed for your podcast. Feedburner is another alternative.
  • CreativeCommons licenses are an easy way to protect your rights to your content to the extent you feel comfortable about, yet allow listeners to freely download and use your content.
  • Apple’s GarageBand 3 for OS X makes podcast production and editing very easy but do be sure to correctly export the default GarageBand Podcast file to an AIFF, then compressing and converting it to an MP3 file (possibly with QuickTimePro) which is universally usable and listenable instead of the default M4A iPod/ACC/Apple only format. There are some suggestions about how to do that and even an Automator workflow, and a step-by-step-tutorial. Also see Apple’s Podcasting tutorial and Podcasting resources. Audacity for OS X and Windows is an opensource and free alternative.
  • Steven Eley suggests working with some sort of a script, even if it’s only a list of topics, doing multiple takes, then editing. He uses a dog clicker to mark the spot when he knows he has a slip; the sound produced by the clicker creates a distinctive sound wave form in the editing software, making it easy to edit out the error.
  • In general, advice about creating a podcast include the suggestion to talk slowly, and to think of your first podcast as -5, and that your sixth is the one you actually release to the world. Subject-specific podcasts do better; find a niche. Don’t bother with paying for Google text ads; link to other bloggers and podcasters, get listed in the directories, and ask other podcasters to link to you.

02.23.06

On “Serious” Blogging

Posted in Blogging, Pedagogy and Scholarship, Rant at 8:50 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

New Kid on the Hallway drew my attention to this article in Inside Higher Ed by Jeff Rice.

Rice has two central points, I think, in his initial article. I say “I think” because the argument is less than coherent. Rice begins by referring to the “Ivan Tribble” articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education, asserting that “Too many academic bloggers have taken Tribble and similar commentaries seriously” then makes an initial overture to his central point, his concern regarding “the general seriousness that has immediately encased a fairly novel form of writing.” He defines “seriousness” as “the over-hyped heaviness centered on this one particular type of writing.” This is his first point.

Next Rice segues to a red herring: the issue of anonymous blogging (discussed by Tribble) by academics using pseudonyms like “La Lecturess.” Rice argues that “these names re-enforce the burden of seriousness which has overtaken academic blogging. Writing a blog under a pseudonym is usually an argument that the only safe way for an academic to write publicly is to write anonymously.” He laments that “Lost in this seriousness are a number of quite amazing things blogging has provided writers”—he lists specific aspects of blogging, both those that relate to writing on the Web in general, like linking, that are easier because of blogging software, and those, like automatic archives, that are characteristic of blogs and blogging software. Rice asserts that this “seriousness” will lead to “stagnation.” He points to literary innovators Cervantes and Rousseau as models, and asserts that “finally academia has the opportunity to play with digital form, content, and genre in ways previously denied because of the difficulty of learning hypertext or setting up webspace on university servers.” This is his second point.

Rice closes by giving examples of “provocative and exciting weblogs,” like BoingBoing, or Wonderland, and then points to his own blog, Yellow Dog as a model via a disingenuous occultatio.

Rice seems unaware that blogs aren’t that novel; even the most parsimonious blog historian has to grant them a good six years of life—that’s an age on the Web. Moroever, it’s not like the weblog formats and features he finds novel exist as rhetorical oddities; blogs and blogging correspond with the traditional five divisions of rhetoric. Nor am I the only person to compare blogs and commonplace books or nineteenth century pamphlets.

In his contention that we take Tribble’s warnings too seriously, I wonder if Rice actually read the pieces in question. I’m also not sure who Rice is referring to by “we.” With respect to anonymous blogging, while I am not anonymous, it’s because I know that it’s time consuming and laborious to be truly anonymous on the ‘Net, and I’m too lazy. Familiarity with writing for the Web is part of my professional expertise in any case, and the drive for tenure is not likely to be part of my future. I’m lucky. Many of my blogging peers are less fortunate, and people have been fired for blogging. As Professor Nokes points out, there are anonymous bloggers that aren’t anonymous to me, but I take their decision to remain anonymous very seriously and consider their anonymity a matter of privacy and professional courtesy.

Regarding the “seriousness” of other bloggers, which strikes me as a slightly self-serving assertion on Rice’s part, it’s a little difficult to be sure what, exactly, he means. For instance, he refers to “academic bloggers,” but doesn’t indicate what he means by “academic.” Does he mean any professor, graduate student or faculty member who blogs? Does he mean people who blog about scholarly subjects? The blogs I read in my scholarly field, medieval studies, are often quite serious in tone and topic, but they are just as often humorous. Most of us are medievalists because we fell in love with our field, with the music, the languages, the literatures, the art, and the peoples, and that joy is an important part of our lives, our scholarships, and our blogs. I note that a fair number of medievalist bloggers do blog about our field—but we also blog about our outside interests, and our lives, to varying extents. I know several, anonymous and not, who have decidedly non-academic blogs about their hobbies, or their families. I think too that Rice misses the value of scholarly community in his dismissal of “seriousness.” Take, for example, what began as a semi-frivolous aside about an imaginary sheep DNA project on Professor Drout’s blog. But the response encouraged him to actually explore the project. That’s not anything like stagnation.

Rice exhorts us to “play” with the opportunities blogging gives us— yet he seems unaware that that’s exactly one reason many bloggers are anonymous— the anonymity gives them a safer place to engage in serio ludere. Rice even more surprisingly doesn’t seem to realize that the content and the presentation of a blog are two very different things, and that the presentation is ultimately controlled by the reader’s Web browser (Hint: if you have a blog with a style sheet that uses tiny type, or oddly colored text against a text-hostile background, I’m subverting your style sheet). Indeed, after his paragraph in praise of the features of blogs and blog software, the examples of innovative blogging Rice gives are all innovative in terms of content, not form. I also suspect he’s completely unaware of the often forgotten bastard child of blogging—the journal, perhaps best exemplified by LiveJournal; a fair number of “serious” and “academic” bloggers have a LiveJournal account for their less scholarly musings. In short, it seems to me that Rice is really saying not, “don’t take blogging so seriously,” but “why aren’t you all more like me?”

In his follow up post, Rice renders his argument even more confusing. He asks, via hypophora, if anonymity is an issue with respect to academic writing, and then answers “no.” I’d argue that he’s answering too quickly; sometimes anonymity may be an academic writing issue, especially for the non-tenured and the graduate student (both exceedingly common statuses for bloggers). Rice then asserts that anonymity isn’t so much an issue as “access” is. Rice says that “Because academic writing is just not as accessible as blogging. Google changed the interface of interaction in ways other search engines failed.” Rice argues that in order for him to “access” a fellow academic’s work he has to pay expensive journal subscription fees, or be at a school where a library has a current subscription and back issues, and possibly actually go to the library in question.

He’s introduced yet another red herring. “Access” has always been a problem, it’s part of the history of writing (you try toting all the tablets that make up Gilgamesh), a history that includes chained libraries, unwieldy manuscripts that weigh twenty pounds, and closed stacks. It’s not a matter of access (though I note that Rice would do well to explore the issue of access in terms of his own blog). But it might be an issue of Rice attempting to label bloggers, to pigeon-hole them as “academic” or “innovative,” or exhorting them to be more like him.

11.17.05

Weblog Usability

Posted in Blogging at 11:21 am by Lisa Spangenberg

Jakob Nielsen posted an article on the top ten web log design flaws. Most of his suggestions were things I’ve been doing from the start, but two of them were new to me. He suggests a list of the “top posts,” or most popular posts; I’ve added a category on the side for that purpose, linking to the posts that show up most frequently in my referral logs. He also suggests a picture; that one, I’m still thinking about. It seems inappropriate to me, though I understand his reasoning, and I’m not qute sure how to place it in terms of layout. Maybe later.

10.09.05

More Academic Blogging

Posted in Blogging at 11:18 am by Lisa Spangenberg

Henry Farrell, professor and contributor to the academic blog Crooked Timber, has an interesting essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education on “The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas.” He makes a number of good points for and against academic blogging, and, just as on his blog, is rational and specific in his argument.

Well worth the reading, and there’s a good list of academic blogs at the end.

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