(via Poynter) Dan Weintraub, blogging journalist at the Sacremento Bee, had this advice to the audience of his talk at the “Business of Online Journalism” seminar last week:

Weintraub cautioned that blogging is not a genre you want to force someone into: “I would be reluctant to twist anybody’s arm to do this.” But for those who want to do it, he offered a few tips, including:

Blogs work best when they address a narrow, specific beat.

Successful bloggers post frequently — usually daily.

Writers must remember that the readers of a blog represent a much different audience than those for a mainstream publication. It is appropriate to assume that they are a knowledgeable audience with a large amount of background, interest, and experience in the topic area.

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I’ve been feeling pretty blogblocked lately, that brain-dead I’d rather be outside building my garden pond on this beautiful day feeling that makes it difficlut to concentrate on anything even the slightest intellectual much less write about it so I remembered how often I used to tell my stuck students to follow Peter Elbow’s (and Natalie Goldberg’s) advice to write fast for five or ten or twenty minutes (I did this for an hour once) and see if you can unstick yourself of whatever is blocking you. Just dump out whatever comes to your mind and I’ve done this a gazillion times but never in a blog and so now I’m wondering if this is such a great idea, wondering whether or not this is the type of thing I should be doing here and then wondering why I’m even worried about it since 98.7% of anyone who started reading this will be long gone by now and struggling not to think too much about making this sound like it makes any sense and knowing that I’ll probably erase it when my five minutes is up (only two to go) so that no one will even know it existed except for me just like all those other ones in the paper journals collecting dust on my shelf, the ones I need to read again just for kicks and just to remember how far (or how little) I’ve come from my angst filled youth when it was all poetry and music and simple non-technological fun. My how times have changed. And now I’m doubting this will do any good at all and will just serve as a reminder that sometimes the groove ends, slump happens or something like that…and finally my five minutes is almost up and I can laugh at this and vaporize it unless I listen to some little voice in my head that says “aw what the heck, hit the button just to see how it feels ’cause I can always erase it anyway” but remembering that if I do some Bloglines Sharpreader NewsGator thing somewhere could be right at the moment I click on “publish” be visiting this site, snatching it from me and and sending to God knows who to read…gulp.

A couple of interesting posts today on the workings of Weblogging, one pretty positive from Jay Rosen, the other less so from John Grillo (via James Farmer.) They come at it from different angles, Jay the established blogger/journalist, John the upstart neophyte publisher, but both allow us to get inside their process and thinking in a variety of ways.

Jay has quickly become one of the most widely read bloggers out there, due in small part, I think, to the reputation he brought with him and in larger part to the quality and depth of his posts. As he says, “I try to write short, snappy things, but they turn into long ones.” I love it when I see a post at Jay’s site turn up in my aggregator, but I also know it means I have to wait until I’ve cleared most of my decks before I delve into it. Seems like I’m his target reader:

“…the whole purpose in starting PressThink was liberation: wow, my own magazine. I’m sure it’s the same for most webloggers. I was interested in users who did have time for depth, in whatever number they may prove to exist, ocean to ocean, post to post.

I like the way he articulates the flexible nature of Weblogs, and how difficult it is to find the focus and voice of your own space:

…the Web is good for many opposite things. For quick hitting information. For clicking across a field. For talk and interaction. It’s also a depth finder, a memory device, a library. Not to use a weblog for extended analysis because most users won’t pick that option… is Web dumb but media smart… I probably should learn the more classical blogger form– title, link, quick comment. But there are many doing it that way, and many who do it well. Every good blog asks the Web a question at the start: is there any demand out there for an original… for a me? You have to do the actual blog for a while to find out.

Also interesting is his take on process, not only of how he finds topics to write about but how he crafts his posts.

Hmm. I read the press, watch the news, click around in my blogroll, and hunt for something juicy, current, interesting. Then I collect links, and start writing. Or someone emails me something and it leads to a post. That’s it, method-wise. What I have instead of method is a kind of style sheet, which has self-imposed instructions for how to do a PressThink post.

In this example, The Tipping Point, there are five fields that get filled in: the title, the subtitle, the essay, the “aftermath” (with notes, reactions and links) and the comments. Each requires a different kind of writing. The title condenses what the post is about, and arrests attention. The subheading explains the argument, previewing what’s going to happen in the essay. The essay is an essay, but with links– a gesture unto themselves. The “after” section edits and tracks the wider discussion in the blog sphere. The comments begin the dialogue.

A successful post is when all five parts talk to each other as they are read against one another. A PressThink entry is not “done” until the after matter, trackbacks and comments come in, which sometimes takes more than a week. That’s one cycle in the turning of a weblog. When it works (always a hit and miss thing) the post at some point turns into a forum on the subject that occasioned the post– and the fourm is what “thinks.” Of course, I didn’t know about this stylesheet and the posting logic it enforces until after I had stumbled on it through trial and error.

In contrast, John reflects on his process as one of struggle, particularly with the concept of building community.

As time progressed, I came to realize that online community building takes takes a persistence bordering on lunacy and the patience of a seasoned fisherman to be realized - It doesn’t happen overnight, nor over the course of a few weeks. Community building certainly doesn’t have the instant gratification of a fast-food restaurant. And it took me a long time to realize that.

Which of course echoes what a lot of students might say given the task of blogging for readers. Another point of contrast with Jay’s post is the impetus for blogging in the first place.

When I originally started blogging, I was writing about my life and the experiences which made up my day to day existence. I was satisfied that I could continue indefinitely in that vein, but I wanted to be a community builder so badly that I altered nearly ever aspect of my blog possible. I changed my writing style in an attempt to be more academic, I removed elements, such as a ‘current mood’ status bar, which I thought were too personal, and I gave up on other projects which I had once thought were really interesting, such as daily journaling. I was trying to make my site more accessible to prospective community members, but all I did was make my site more boring for those who were already following me.

It’s a pretty poignant description of what can happen when you start blogging for your audience. It’s something probably every blogger struggles with. There’s no point to putting it up there if no one’s going to read it…right?
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Jill Walker posts a copy of the Weblog review assignment she gives to her students to

“…become familiar with the blog genre, gain experience in writing for a web audience and develop your skills in describing, contextualising, interpreting and assessing websites.”

I’m realizing that many of the assignments of this type regarding blogs and blogging have gone uncollected. Might be good to start a list using my handy dandy Furl RSS feed.
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WeatherBug today announced that it has selected David J. Thon, a fifth grade science educator from William Appleby Elementary in Marathon, NY, to join a team of its meteorologists on a five-day-long tornado chase called WeatherBug Storm Chase 2004. The team will set out in search of storms beginning Monday, May 3 in Oklahoma City.

Thon will play a key role in gathering/analyzing data and readings and in learning more about how and why tornadoes take place. He will write a Weblog — or ‘blog’ — about the experience daily and also answer questions from students and colleagues via email. The Storm Chase blog can be found at http://www.weatherbug.com/stormchase.

Is there any reason why this type of thing shouldn’t be happening more and more? I mean, teachers by their very nature are experts…why shouldn’t they be sharing their experiences and expertise outside of the classroom? This is a great example of how Weblogs can take students beyond the traditional school walls.
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(via ebnWL News) I mentioned this course on Weblogs for Alaskan teachers a couple of weeks ago, and after the first week, the reports are pretty interesting:

I selected the term metablognition for this course because I like to think about weblogs as another layer of thinking for teachers and students. There are class discussions, private conferences and conversations, interactions with all types of texts, response journals, all sorts of formal and informal writing assignments that take place in the classroom. What if we were to consider the blog as another part of our classroom brain, another lobe where different elements of our learning and teaching are synthesized, questioned, rejected, combined, altered etc.? Think of it as a digital zone of proximal development.

Yes, yes, yes…blogs and blogging as metaclass or metaschool even. This is what I’ve been moving toward too. Could the Weblog serve as the space where learning from the various disciplines comes together, gets synthesized? I mean, is this departmentalized construct of learning that we impose on our students anything like the way we learn when we get out of school? Could a Weblog space be the place where students make the connections between science and English, social studies and math, etc.?

That’s why I think blogging (v) is potentially different from any writing that we’ve asked students to do, a genre that may have great value in terms of developing all sorts of critical thinking skills, writing skills and information literacy among other things. We teach exposition and research and some other types of analytical writing already, I know. Blogging, however, offers students a chance to a) reflect on what they are writing and thinking as they write and think it, b) carry on writing about a topic over a sustained period of time, maybe a lifetime, c) engage readers and audience in a sustained conversation that then leads to further writing and thinking and d) synthesize disparate learning experiences and understand their collective relationship and relevance. This just seems to me to be closer to the way we learn outside of school, and I see those things sorely lacking anywhere in traditional education.
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Terry sent along this link that talks about the problems with implementing the “distributed content creation model” that I’m trying to put into place here. And in case you’re wondering, it’s going pretty slowly here. Maybe if I’d read this beforehand:

So how come nobody actually uses these systems once they’re in place? The answer is easy: People don’t like to change the way they work, particularly knowledge workers. Knowledge workers spend years building strategies to accomplish their jobs, practices that likely date back to study skills acquired during their education. So changing those processes — no matter how valid the provided technical solution — is nearly impossible. Users will rebel, even after substantial training.

Now the same could be said of students, who by all accounts are knowledge workers (I would hope.) I’ve been mulling over the blog as e-portfolio idea again and the more I dig into it, the more disruptive it seems. All the more reason to forge ahead.

The article goes on to say:

Put editors in charge. You need an editorial staff in place to make the content on your site as interesting and consistent as it can be. That staff may just be one executive editor, but nothing should go online without that person’s approval. As your Web strategy grows, so too should that staff.

And I have a feeling that’s where this might end up. I have a meeting about the Website with the Superintendent tomorrow where I might pitch the idea of incentivising departmental editors to update and produce content. And by the way, here are my latest departmental Weblog banners. I’m really loving this stuff…
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Every now and then I have an experience totally irrelevant to blogs and schools that I just feel the need to share here anyway. I had one yesterday…

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Micah Sifry extends the BloggerCon-verstation about journalism with this post at his Iraq War Reader site. It’s a great essay that articulates a lot of what I believe in terms of information and the need for media and info literacy…and how blogs can contribute to that. While he makes some great points on his own, I particularly liked this quote from his editor:

Newspapers have abdicated their duties in getting to the “truth” of a story. [I'd add TV even more so.] Instead, in the name of objectivity, they simply report the he-said, she said on how much some new initiative will cost, as if there were no way to empirically determine the answer. Bloggers rarely link to this kind of story. The most widely-read ones seek out some piece of writing on the web where a person has actually determined the real answer, or gotten an on the record quote, or put forth an question no else has asked, and then they link to it, saying, in effect, ‘If you believe me, then you can believe this.’

It’s an interesting aspect of writing that we rarely ask of students, that gaining the trust of your reader part. Have we ever asked students to do sustained writing over time about a consistent topic for an audience? Should we?
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Well, here’s a first. One of our English teachers who has been using Weblogs behind closed doors for his creative writing classes told me that one of his PIPs (Personal Improvement Program) for next year is to incorporate blogging (noun AND verb) into his Media Literacy classes! He really wants to explore the use of Weblogs as a research tool, but he’s also interested in seeing what happens when students read, think, synthesize, write, respond and read some more in terms of pushing their understanding of the topic. We talked briefly today about how regular blogging and responding to other’s blogging might just serve to help students make learning more relevant and therefore more meaningful. (Don’t tease me…) And we talked about how with this particular class, at least, there is an opportunity to write about an area in which they are interested, maybe even passionate about like gender issues, violence, politics…whatever. This might be a great opportunity to do some action research. We’re going to get together over the summer to formalize it a bit more, but I’m really psyched that he took the initiative to make this a part of his professional development plan.

Key is, as Robert Scoble says, is that passion part.

Lately people have been asking me “how or when does weblogging and/or syndication go mainstream?” It goes mainstream when everyone in society gets passionate about something. If someone isn’t passionate about SOMETHING they won’t get weblogs. Hence, the numbers of weblog authors and readers will remain small, when compared to overall society. (Via Dave Winer)

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Roland Tanglao writes at Streamline about using PubSub as a search feed. It’s the first installment in what he calls “The Lazy Person’s Guide to being an NewsMaster.” I’ve played around with PubSub before but without too much success. Might just be the terms I put in. Roland’s enthusiasm may mean it’s time to revisit it.

On a side note, I find his definition of a “Newsmaster” kind of interesting:

I would generalize this further and define them as Internet Dolby. That is, NewsMasters sift through the web, remove the noise and reveal what is pertinent and relevant to you and your organizations.

Sounds like a job description of the future…

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Having the Post is great, but check out the list from the Sun. Very cool. And the Times has added a feed just for politics. (I’m trying to keep track of all of the newspaper feeds I find here.)

So is there any reason why next fall we shouldn’t give our kids their ID numbers, their network passwords, and their login info to their Bloglines account prepopulated with world, national, and local news, the latest sports and weather, and a few choice fun feeds for kids to follow?