I spent an hour or so this evening browsing around on Blogcatalog, where I recently set up an account. I’m still getting used to using sites like Blogcatalog and MyBlogLog, so I haven’t done that much with them yet. But I do like being able to look for interesting blogs by zooming through their categories, or by noting what blogs are associated with folks who have interests similar to mine. Tonight I paged through Blogcatalog’s history category, and ended out adding four history-related blogs to my Newsgator feeds and to this site’s blogroll. The blogs, and the things that got my attention from each one, are briefly described below.

From Civil War Memory, an article on the tension over memorializing individuals — in this case, a potential plan to create a monument to recently deceased black civil rights attorney Oliver Hill — when the very act of memorializing seems to conflict with dominant political or social leadership and their influence. While I’ve studied quite a bit about the Civil War, my ongoing interest in Civil War history tends to revolve more around issues of this kind, and the difficult challenge of handling historical memories … whether related to the Civil War or other key (especially controversial) historical events.

From Clio and Me, an article asking questions about a pair of dramatically different stereo images from the First World War. The meaning of imagery like this and how we relate to it in terms of historical memory and contemporary culture is, to me, something we would do well to understand more about, as more and more of our world is represented to us in pictures and video, rather than text.

From Ponder and Dream, wonderful original historical illustrations that just make you think. See for example, this one, which is prefaced by a Longfellow poem.  Or just start with sites home page and look at as many as you can.

From The Victorian Peeper, an image and article about a Victorian “dinosaur theme park,” originally intended to demonstrate themes in evolution. I’m pretty much fascinated by all things Victorian — European and American — and by the connections between Victorian England, Victorian America, and our contemporary culture. Such connections are much more compelling than our stereotypical view of the Victorian period tends to encompass, a topic that I hope to cover in future articles.

I had read a couple of articles about Windows Live Writer during the week, so this morning I thought I would try it out. This post was written with Live Writer; and unlike other similar tools I’ve tried, I didn’t have to go back into the WordPress editor and tweak the results because they didn’t look right after the article posted. As far as I’m concerned, that alone is H-U-G-E!

I’ve just started exploring Live Writer’s functions, so may write a little more about it in future articles. One thing I noticed that I already like a lot is that you can click a check box when inserting a hyperlink and the program automatically adds ‘target=”_blank”‘ to the link so that it opens a new tab or window when clicked. I’ve been trying to follow a rule of my own when I add links, especially to blogs: I link to blog home pages so they open in a new window, and blog articles so they open in the current window. I noticed that that’s how I often read and follow articles, so I thought it would be a good practice. I usually end out going back through the draft of a post and adding ‘target=”_blank”‘ to a bunch of the links so this is a real time-saver for me.

You can download the Windows Live Writer Beta here, and there’s a blog here.  Since it’s a local install, you would of course need to install it on any computer you plan to blog from (I wonder if there is, or if they’re planning, a web version). A local install works for me, though, since I do most of my writing on a couple of computers at home, especially articles with lots of links, pictures, special formatting, or whatever.  I also can already see that I’m a whole lot less likely to get lost and confused when bouncing among multiple browser windows and working on a post, when the post is in it’s own application window rather than the browser … you know what I mean?

Of course I already have a couple enhancement ideas. I’d like to be able to preview the draft in the browsers installed in my computer, since I always check my articles in both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox. And I’d like to see a text-to-speech option, since I almost always proof my articles using the Firefox Speak It extension.

Here are the two articles I read that prompted me to try Live Writer:

Windows Live Writer for Blogging – Great or Garbage? by Michael Martine, where Michael describes his experiences with the tool and lists his likes and dislikes. He’s also surprised to be satisfied with a Microsoft tool;  I have to say that, despite being steeped in most-things-Microsoft, I’m having the same reaction.

Windows Live Writer by Mark Avey. Mark covers quite a few of the functions he’s used, and likes the tool as much as I think I’m going to.  Mark also contrasts Live Writer with Scribefire, a tool I’ve used occasionally that I like but find I need to clean up after before my article is ready to post.

Thanks to Michael and Mark for previewing this software and writing about it; I probably wouldn’t have even tried it otherwise.

I’ve recently noticed that over at Georgia on My Mind, Elementary Historyteacher regularly hosts Georgia Blog Carnivals, featuring posts from Georgia bloggers. I think it would be a good idea, following Joe’s suggestion, to spend some part of this weekend taking a look at the sites EHT lists on her blogroll. Yes, I know they meant last weekend, but I just discovered the carnival a couple of days ago and I was painting my front porch last weekend anyway. With Atlanta temperatures forecast to push 100 degrees for a couple more days at least, I know I won’t be out there painting on Saturday or Sunday, so it will be a good weekend to immerse myself in some new reading.

A few site updates and some housekeeping notes….

I’ve added the social bookmarking button available from the Add This! site to each post.

I’ve also added a Mybloglog “Recent Readers” widget to the sidebar. I’m not entirely sure what to do with Mybloglog yet, but I’ll catch on soon enough. My posts are now appearing there, and I’ve also set up a profile.

In addition, I think I’ve come up with a way to replace my sidebar Blogroll with my Newsgator feeds. Actually Newsgator already lets users generate a script containing their feeds, but it doesn’t take the folder/feed structure into account; it simply creates a list of links. From what I see in Newsgator’s support forums, there have been requests for this feature, but it doesn’t exist yet. I should be able to pull it off anyway with some creative cobbling, and may try it over the weekend. If you happen to stop by, the site should be fine, but the Blogroll may be unstable at times.

Finally, following David Airey and his list of Top 5 Essential WordPress Plugins, I attempted to install a feature I’ve seen on several sites and liked a lot. It’s the Subscribe to Comments plugin, by which anyone leaving a comment can elect to be notified by e-mail when additional comments are posted to the same topic. Unfortunately, activating the plugin causes this WordPress database error for me:

WordPress database error: [Access denied for user to database 'blog']
ALTER TABLE wp_comments ADD COLUMN comment_subscribe enum(‘Y’,'N’)

I take this to mean (and a few searches around the Internet seems to confirm) that the way I’m set up with my web host doesn’t allow me to alter the structure of the WordPress database via this plugin. So, while I like the function a lot and I think it’s a fine plugin, I’m not so sure I should even inquire about changing whatever needs to be changed to make this update possible.

I have to admit this sort of thing frustrates me a bit, and reminds me of a recent article from Lorelle on WordPress, Bloggers Are Not Webmasters and Webmasters Are Not Bloggers. While I have enough passable HTML knowledge that I’ve been able to modify this site’s various templates and can even poke at the PHP code a bit to make it do my bidding, I’m way over my head when issues surface that have to do with MySQL or the WordPress database. I’m pretty fearless and fairly patient about trying different things and learning from what works and doesn’t work, but I have no context within which to translate a database error and correct it. Lorelle’s article is a good reminder that even though I might find a solution to the problem with additional research and some phone calls to my web host, that’s not how I should be spending my time. So … I’ll give some thought to what I wanted to accomplish by installing the plugin, and take a look at alternatives, whether they’re plugins or something else.

While looking for some information on how to export photos directly from Adobe Lightroom to Flickr, I landed on Andy’s My Enlightenment blog. In addition to featuring some beautifully illuminated photos there and on his Flickr account, Andy also had a couple of posts that included an embedded Flickr slideshow. Off on a different search now, I found a tool called “flickrSLiDR” on the Great Flickr Tools Collection, that turns out to be the same one Andy is using.

The tool is available here and it described in more detail by its creator, Paul Stamatiou, on his site, here.

Below is a slideshow of my photographs from the Atlanta History Center. You can move the mouse toward the top of the slideshow to control the display and speed, and toward the bottom to select individual photos from the set. Or, click on any photo to stop the slideshow and get links to my Flick account.

I seriously love the way this thing works!!

From Marc Andreessen, a nicely written set of observations on his experiences since starting a blog less than two months ago. My favorites are the fifth and the seventh. Some excerpts:

Fifth, writing a blog is way easier than writing a magazine article, a published paper, or a book — but provides many of the same benefits. I think it’s an application of the 80/20 rule — for 20% of the effort (writing a blog post but not editing and refining it [to] the quality level required of a magazine article, a published paper, or a book), you get 80% of the benefit (your thoughts are made available to interested people very broadly). Arguably blogging is better because the distribution of a blog can be even broader than a magazine article, a published paper, or a book….

Seventh, it is totally clear that original content is what generates readership, at least for most bloggers. Some bloggers who blog a lot and link to a ton of interesting things every day have high levels of readership without a lot of original content, but I’d argue they are in the minority — most of the bloggers I’ve talked to over the last year who have significant levels of traffic attribute their readership mostly to original content, and this is certainly true for my blog….

His comments on challenges to traditional media are exactly true, I think, especially when he points out that the scope of that challenge is still unknown. I think creative discourse across all fields will benefit, in time, but there’s a rupture out there waiting to happen that will need to be healed first. While I hate to cast it as a battle (especially one that hasn’t fully engaged yet), I still think “both sides” will need to be vigilant as we begin to confront the ways in which media is once again changing. What matters, in the end, is that the conversations continue through the connections we make. “Only connect,” is the well-known E. M. Forster phrase we should resurrect for the new century and stamp somewhere on our sites.

Original source: Matthew Ingram: Do Blog Comments Still Matter?

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… it sounds an awful lot like a gun going off! Trust me! Don’t try this at home:

Apparently this is what happens when you sit down to write a quick blog post after setting some eggs to boiling, the blog post takes longer than you thought, and you forget about the eggs … they wait about forty minutes then remind you to PAY ATTENTION! Or set a timer next time….

Lunch will be delayed indefinitely….

Well, not a “break” exactly, but the last few weeks of my Science and Technology in Western Culture class. I’ve spent most of my “free” time over the past few weeks focused on a paper about the cultural significance of photography… more on that another day, as I may rewrite parts of the paper and post it here. I did learn a lot from writing it, and came across some surprising ideas about media and imagery, so it would seem like a good fit for this blog.

In Question Of The Day: Who *Does* Have The Time? at Deep Jive Interests, Tony asks this legitimate question about online video. I’ve often wondered the same thing. I very seldom watch any Internet video, exactly for the reason he asks his question: it’s too time consuming. And, I think, I’m much more of a reader when it comes to absorbing information, especially since I’ve gotten pretty good at successfully skimming or quick-reading  when I’m short on time. Videos just take too long to get to the point (and advertising you can’t skip over doesn’t help); at least that’s how it seems to me whenever I try some out.

Coincidentally, I just spent buckets of time reading Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and certainly have a better appreciation for the power of image-based media as a result. Still, online video just doesn’t do it for me; I doubt I’ll ever switch from reading to watching, though I suppose if the kind of web video that’s available now had been around all my life, I might look at it differently.

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Bloggers, like writers of all sorts throughout history, are constantly asking themselves why they do it. While I wouldn’t necessarily say that’s something unique to writers, writers do tend to attach (angst-ridden?) debates about purpose and meaning to their writing lives in ways that, say, doctors or chemists or engineers, typically do not. And at some point in nearly every debate about the whys of writing, money comes up — usually in some negative context, as if writerly professions are the only ones where economics should somehow be kept at bay.

Before this morning, I had never heard of Payperpost. I didn’t start this site with the intention of making money, and have so far not invested the time necessary to figure out what options I might have for actually generating some supplementary income. Granted, I have the Amazon associates links here and there, but I included them mainly because I love Amazon and wanted to experiment with something easy and small just to see what was involved. I’m typically not bothered by advertising on blogs or web sites, as long as it’s not intrusive (like popups or graphic overlays) and doesn’t distract from my ability to focus on the writing or imagery on the site. And, admittedly, I don’t understand the business model behind blog ads and have never actually followed the links to something being advertised — so don’t I really get the economics behind it either.

In any case, I followed this series of posts this morning, starting with Honoring the Hard Working Blue Collar Bloggers by Lorelle. Lorelle links to a discussion of Payperpost at Deep Jive Interests. A notable and praiseworthy element of both posts is their recognition of the folks they’re calling “blue-collar bloggers” — which I take to be everyone but those who think they know better than the rest of us what this medium should be used for. In other words, most of us. See also the precise characterization of the underlying intellectual issues on Seth Finklestein’s Infothought. Seth makes some very good points.

One of the things I like about the whole idea of blogging is the very democratic nature of it. While I think the large volume of writing out there may demand new skills at finding and absorbing information that matters to us, that simply means we need to develop those skills — ones which for each individual can mean learning more about what’s really important to them. In that sense, the democracy that blogging offers works in multiple directions to potentially make us all better writers and better readers. That people can get paid for that, in whatever form, simply means that we’re attaching economic value to that process and its potential. The economics of an activity are not evidence of its perniciousness; they just represent one piece of the activity’s cultural significance that we need to consider in our discussions.

I could probably spend the whole day spinning out various related themes from these posts and the ones that inspired them (which I’ve only glanced at so far), so more on that another time. Those original posts could use a highly critical eye. I’ll close by saying I’m typically very suspicious of anything that sounds like elitism or is written from an obvious embrace of cultural stratification. That’s not to say that cultures, all cultures, are not layered in one way or another; but is to make the point that blogging’s very nature as a wide-open, available-to-anyone medium has the potential to tilt windmills away from the elitist tendencies in any culture, toward something more inclusive that engages us with each other as individual human beings instead of stereotypes.

In How Do You Choose What You Blog About?, Lorelle VanFossen of The Blog Herald asks that question and a series of others that delve into different reasons bloggers keep up with their blogs. Setting aside for a moment the different types of blogs and bloggers, I think all questions about blogging ought to also consider one other element of the phenomenon:

In the earlier days of blogging, it was mainly a form of public writing. Expanding technological capabilities have allowed it to tag up with all sorts of other media, mainly (I think) still imagery, video, and music. But at its core, it’s still a medium of writing, and that fact makes me wonder about why people want to write so much so badly, and why they want to do so — with relative ease — in a public manner. Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s great — I just also think the question is an interesting cultural and social one that’s well worth exploring.

Following Tyler Cowen, Ezra Klein states that of 140 blogs he subscribes to, he regularly reads only 20 to 30. I use Bloglines to keep tabs on around 230 blogs, but the number that I actually read is somewhere in that 20 to 30 range also. Like some of the folks commenting on Ezra’s post, I deal with the “information overload” by periodically throwing them all away, marking them all as read so they disappear from the feed list. The conversations go on whether I tune in or not; the small stress-point of feeling like I have this list of stuff I should get around to reading falls away nicely when the unread item count disappears.

Over the next few days (or weeks (or months)), I’ll be adding links to this site for those blogs that I actually do make a point to read. It will give you some clues (but they’re only clues, mind you) to my beliefs, interests, and background, and to the kinds of writing and imagery that I find consistently enjoyable. Relatedly (!!), I’m working on a short “About the author” page; but I’ve discovered that I’m not so autobiographically inclined, so it’s hard to say when I might get around to finishing that.

Update:

I used to use Bloglines. I tried NewsGator a few weeks ago, and like it a lot. By accident, I stumbled across a beta version of the online reader last week, so have been testing it and posting feedback to one of their forums. The beta’s very nice, very snappy, has a great interface, and is a lot of fun to use. If you’re interested, browse through the NewsGator forums for additional information.

In early 2006, I completed a class on American Intellectual History, where the first book I read was Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. The course – an independent study course where I worked directly with a mentor to define its content and purpose – was intended to give me a beginning understanding of some of the theory of intellectual history and the different ways it can be approached. Anderson’s book describes the emergence of the idea of a nation as a imagined construct, and his book covers an incredible amount of intellectual territory.

As I was reading the book, I made several notes at the time about blogging as an imagined community, and have since discovered that at least a few others have considered that idea also. One notable essay along these lines is Imagining the Blogosphere: An Introduction to the Imagined Community of Instant Publishing by Graham Lampa – which does a fine job of describing blogging in terms of Anderson’s thesis.

There were a few finer points in Anderson’s book, however, that I found compelling to consider with respect to blogging, and potentially worth exploring from the perspective of intellectual history. Anderson anchors much of his thesis around the impact of the emergence of print publishing, and the spread of newly published material to masses of people as a result of the logic of market capitalism. Anderson goes on to relate this to changes in concepts of time, specifically describing how the conceptual experience of time changed to one where we grasp the idea that there is a distinct past and present, and more importantly that there are people engaging in actions, and events taking place, outside our (approximately) immediate perceptual awareness. Anderson states, as an example:

An American will never meet, or even know the names of [most] of his fellow Americans. He has no idea what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity. – pg. 26

Anderson goes on to explain this by describing the experience of reading a newspaper, in which all the news stories are connected first by coincidence of time, and second by their immediate obsolescence:

The obsolescence of the newspaper on the morrow of its printing … creates this extraordinary mass ceremony: the almost precisely simultaneous consumption (“imagining”) of the newspaper-as-fiction. We know that particular morning and evening editions will overwhelmingly be consumed between this hour and that, only on this day, not that…. The significance of this mass ceremony … is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned? At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbors, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life. – pg. 35

If you find these ideas difficult – as I did at first – try to imagine not having an awareness of simultaneous activity. That is, try to imagine how differently you would look at the world, if you didn’t have an awareness of a distinct past and present, and of human beings engaged in simultaneous activity. While you won’t really achieve that state of mind, you might begin to grasp what sort of intellectual revolution occurred in human thought for the shift toward this awareness to take hold.

As Anderson also describes, this intellectual revolution occurred within a historical context where existing social and political power structures began to crumble. Blogging is often described as democratizing, in the sense that it moves some control over information from traditional institutions to anybody who has enough interest, and takes enough time, to post their thoughts on a web site. While there are certainly questions to be raised about the efficacy or value of the information on a typical blog site, the fact that blogs even exist – and that they are written and managed by individuals usually working on their own – has implications for human intellectual development that, I think, have yet to be considered. Their potential influence is dramatic; the potential of that influence to effect political, cultural, and social change is also dramatic. And if Anderson’s thesis is true, or even mostly true, then they even have the potential – at least partly because of their immediacy and the speed with which information now travels – to permanently alter some elements of the way human beings think.