blogging | The Blogora

blogging

Submitted by Katya Haskins on July 11, 2009 - 8:46pm

I have a confession to make. This is my very first blog. Ever. As someone who has never kept a real diary (except for a nitty-gritty day planner) and remained a spectator of others sparring in electronic spaces, I am approaching this task with some trepidation. To me, it is not unlike shouting to attract attention to myself in the midst of a crowded hall where people have gathered to chat, to network and generally do things unrelated to what I have to say.

Guest Blogger: Katya Haskins

blogging

Submitted by Jim Brown on July 10, 2009 - 8:00am

Please welcome our newest guest blogger, Ekaterina (Katya) Haskins. Katya is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA and is the author of Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle (U of South Carolina Press, 2004). She has published numerous articles and essays on the history of rhetoric, visual culture, and public memory. Haskins lives in Troy, New York with her husband Dereck, daughter Alexandra, and greyhound Jesse.

Jim Brown's blog
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query: posting responses on the blogora

Submitted by slewfoot on April 30, 2009 - 3:01pm

Music: Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works, Volume Two (1994)

The Blogora gets hundreds of discrete "hits" a day, so we know folks are reading. There is wonderment, however, about the general paucity of response posts on this forum in general. Some of us have speculated some rationales: (1) the response interface is confusing; (2) folks without job security (e.g., grads) are "afraid" to post out of fear; (3) there's just no time to sit down and make a response, it's the end of the semester, and so on. But we don't know for certain. So, I offer the question: why don't you post responses on the Blogora? The reason could simply be "I have no compulsion." But, again, we dunno. Feel free to email me anonymously if you don't, you know, want to respond in this forum: slewfoot at mail dot utexas dot edu.

Introducing...Joe Sery and Michael Faris

blogging

Submitted by Jim Brown on March 1, 2009 - 6:14pm

In our ongoing efforts to bring diverse voices to the Blogora conversation, we introduce two guest graduate student bloggers for the month of March: Michael Faris and Joe Sery.

Another Reason To Have Little Sympathy for Journalists

Submitted by Jim Brown on February 16, 2009 - 5:37pm

I love newspapers. I read them every day. We need to figure out a way to keep investigative reporting alive (though, Walter Isaacson's recent appearance on the Daily Show shows me that journalists still aren't really coming up with viable plans).

But whenever I hear someone bellyaching about how blogs are parasites on the news business (I'm looking at you Andrew Keen), I think of stories like this one. It seems that George Will selectively cites when discussing the "myth" of global warming (and global cooling).

As Nate Silver and others dig deeper into Will's citations, they are finding that Will's piece was, at best, intellectually dishonest.

Silver's comments are dead on. This isn't just about blaming George Will, it's about the integrity of WaPo (and the entire field of jourrnalism):

But let's not lay all the blame at Will's feet. Why is it that claims that would never have been tolerated by a competent fact-checker on the news page are okay on the editorial page? The Washington Post owes its readers an explanation -- and an apology.

Small World Blogging

Submitted by Byron Hawk on February 10, 2009 - 1:38pm

I read Collin Brooke’s “Weblogs as Deictic Systems” for class today. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve read it and it is really resonating well this time around. I really like the way he is bringing together C.Miller and D.Watts to articulate the development and movements of small world networks (such as blogs) as simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal. The movement centers on deixis, or the continually shifting now, as a species of epideictic rhetoric.

Identity Remix

Submitted by Byron Hawk on February 3, 2009 - 6:20pm

First I want to thank Diane Davis and Jim Brown for inviting me to come and share this blog space for a little while, and blog about, well, I don’t know what yet. I follow Blogora a bit and have a sense of the discursive space, but don’t yet know who I am in that space. One thing I’ve learned about blogging is that you can’t necessarily police identity and audience boundaries in digital space, even when they are well established.

Happy (Belated?) Birthday Blogora

blogging

Submitted by Jim Brown on November 2, 2008 - 3:34pm

This is the oldest Blogora entry I can find (link via the Wayback Machine. So, I guess yesterday was The Blogora's fourth birthday. Jim Aune said this on the eve of the 2004 election:

"What interests me, as a rhetorician, about this election is the level of hatred on both sides."

How much has really changed?

A Scholarship for Blogging

blogging

Submitted by Jim Aune on October 18, 2008 - 3:03pm

This looks like a good thing.

Jim Aune's blog
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The Ethics of Operation (blog comment) Shutdown

blogging

Submitted by Jim Brown on July 21, 2008 - 10:39pm

For those of you who aren't Pittsburgh Pirates fans (er, I'm assuming this is the majority of you), check out this story for an explanation of my title.

I read a lot of blogs, but I don't read a lot of comments. In fact, The Blogora and my own blog are the only places where I really pay attention to comments. This disregard for comments is probably the reason I don't understand this post by The Valve's Bill Benzon about shutting down comment threads that had gone off topic: