Using Del.icio.us to Share Bookmarks

Published April 9th, 2007 in Research. 3 Comments

Imagine yourself surfing the web, looking for articles that might be useful for a group project on Netiquette that you’ve just begun. You come upon a link that looks great — it’s a Report on the Etiquette of Email — and you want to share it with the other members of your group.

How should you go about doing that?

You have a number of options:

1. You can pick up your phone and call everyone in your group, asking each member to write down the URL on a piece of paper;

2. You can email your link to every member of your group;

3. You can post your link on your group discussion board in Blackboard.

Each of these methods has some merits, but also some significant weaknesses. You probably don’t know the phone numbers of your fellow group-members, and besides — they might make an error when writing down the URL or lose the paper they’ve written it on; your email will soon be lost amid an ever-growing list of new email messages, and even if your group-mates store them in a folder designated for the group, each message will have to be opened individually; and your post on the discussion board, while it has the merit of being in a common working area, has the disadvantage of having to stay there — you can’t share it with anyone else outside of your group.

That’s where del.icio.us, a social bookmarking application, comes in. Here’s how the site describes itself and its services:

del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else’s. You can use del.icio.us to:

  • Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes, and more, and access them from any computer on the web.
  • Share favorites with friends, family, coworkers, and the del.icio.us community.
  • Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone’s favorite — they’ve already done the work of finding it. So del.icio.us is full of bookmarks about technology, entertainment, useful information, and more. Explore and enjoy.

    • del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website — the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.

    You can also use del.icio.us to see the interesting links that your friends and other people bookmark, and share links with them in return. You can even browse and search del.icio.us to discover the cool and useful bookmarks that everyone else has saved — which is made easy with tags.

    Further down on that same page, del.icio.us suggests that its application can be useful for research. And that’s just how I’m going to ask you to use it. So, here’s what I’d like you to do:

    1. Create an account on del.icio.us. I’d suggest that you not use your full name, for privacy purposes. Instead, choose an alias.
    2. If you use a browser like Firefox, you can add the del.icio.us extension, which will make it easy for you to bookmark sites you like.
    3. Begin to bookmark, tag, and share websites that interest you.
    4. Find other del.icio.us users who share your interests; add them to your network, and begin exploring the links that they share.

    I’m going to ask you to use del.icio.us when you begin to work on your group projects later in the semester. For now, though, I’d just like you to get comfortable with the service. If you have problems or questions, well — that’s why blogs have comment sections. Leave ‘em here and I’ll do my best to answer them.

    Oh, and by the way: you can find my del.icio.us bookmarks here.

    YouTube Videos in Political Campaigns

    Published March 21st, 2007 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

    A recent post on Chuck Tryon’s the chutry experiment has got me thinking about the increasing use of YouTube videos in political campaigns.

    Chuck refers to a recent Washington Post article on political videos, which examines the use of video among current Presidential candidates. The author of the Post article, Jose Antonio Vargas, makes the point that “not one of the videos made by John Edwards’s campaign, for example, matches the popularity of the one showing the former senator combing his hair before an interview to the tune of ‘I Feel Pretty.’”

    Politicians are approaching YouTube as they would television commercials, and users are not tuning in. Vargas writes:

    As fans of Web video know, YouTube is a place of irreverence, spontaneity, humor. And for the most part, candidates are giving their online audience the opposite of what it wants.

    Vargas quotes Micah Sifry, who says that “Viewers are looking for that rare, unscripted, revealing moment, to get a little sense of who these candidates really are” — a notion of authenticity that Chuck rightly critiques.

    But I have to differ with Sifry: I don’t think that users want authenticity — they want entertainment. And, while it’s hard to imagine satire becoming part of a national Presidential campaign, I think it’s possible on a more local level.

    And in fact, I have the goods to prove it. Ladies and Gentleman, I give you a video from a current candidate for the Philadelphia City Council: Vern Anastasio in The Anastasio Team.

    I love it when a plan comes together!

    The New Journalism

    Published March 20th, 2007 in Journalism and Blogs. 1 Comment

    I’m sure that many of you have heard about the controversy surrounding the firing of U.S. attorneys by the Bush Administration. It looks as if Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney General, might lose his job over firings that may have been politically motivated.

    What you may not know is that this story originated on a blog.

    That blogs are reshaping the nature of journalism in this country is a point made abundantly clear by a recent story in the L.A. Times, Blogs Can Top the Presses. The story covers the role that one blog, Talking Points Memo, played in bring this story to a national audience:

    In December, Josh Marshall, who owns and runs TPM , posted a short item linking to a news report in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about the firing of the U.S. attorney for that state. Marshall later followed up, adding that several U.S. attorneys were apparently being replaced and asked his 100,000 or so daily readers to write in if they knew anything about U.S. attorneys being fired in their areas.

    For the two months that followed, Talking Points Memo and one of its sister sites, TPM Muckraker, accumulated evidence from around the country on who the axed prosecutors were, and why politics might be behind the firings. The cause was taken up among Democrats in Congress. One senior Justice Department official has resigned, and Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales is now in the media crosshairs.

    Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that Marshall is a journalist who has published in a variety of publications.

    But there’s something about a blog — or, really, a network of blogs, for that is what TPM really is — that makes it the perfect breeding ground for a new kind of muck-raking journalism. As Marshall explains in the LA Times article:

    “Hundreds of people out there send clips and other tips,” Marshall said. “There is some real information out there, some real expertise. If you’re not in politics and you know something, you’re not going to call David Broder. With the blog, you develop an intimacy with people. Some of it is perceived, but some of it is real.”

    Marshall’s use of his readers to gather information takes advantage of the interactivity that is at the heart of the Internet revolution. The amount of discourse between writers and readers on the Web makes traditional journalists look like hermetic monks.

    TPM is, of course, just one of the blogs that is reshaping journalism. If you’re looking for another example of a new kind of journalistic enterprise, you might check out NewAssignment.net, which bills itself as “an experiment in open-source reporting. Run in part by Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at NYU who writes the influential blog PressThink, the site is seeking to reshape the nature of journalism by making it “Pro-Am” — a collaboration of professional and amateur. Check out this interview with writer John McQuaid if the topic interests you.

    It should — after all, the next big story may well break on a blog near you.

    An Instant Classic

    Published February 16th, 2007 in Uncategorized. 4 Comments

    And perfect for this week’s class, I think!

    What’s a Dithered Image?

    Published February 12th, 2007 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

    Or, why does this blog have such a strange name?

    Dithered images, as Wikipedia explains, are images that involve a certain amount of fakery and illusion:

    Dithering is a technique used in computer graphics to create the illusion of color depth in images with a limited color palette. In a dithered image, colors not available in the palette are approximated by a diffusion of colored pixels from within the available palette. The human eye perceives the diffusion as a mixture of the colors within it. Dithering is analogous to the halftone technique used in printing. Dithered images, particularly those with relatively few colors, can often be distinguished by a characteristic graininess, or speckled appearance.

    Here’s an example:

    Dithered Image

    Dithered images are all about perspective: that blend of color you see from a distance gets broken up into distinct colors when you look closer.

    I hope you’ll find that true of many of the subjects that we will study this semester. On the surface, they may seem part of an unbroken visual field. But examine them more carefully, and you will find a startling array of heterogeneous elements.

    I’ll attempt to employ both of those perspectives — the close and the faraway view — while following a variety of phenomena in the digital world this semester. I’ll try to create some convincing illusions, but you might be able to spy a bit of graininess, a speckle or two, behind the illusion.

    I hope that you do.