We badly need more scholarship about weblogs outside of the Anglo-saxon world, and Performance in Everyday Life and the Rediscovery of the ‘Self’ in Iranian Weblogs provides an interesting point of view, using Goffman. The author suggests weblogging is valuable for Iranian women who lack other ways of expressing repressed identities. Some of the arguments sound quite similar to those advanced in McKenna, K. Y. A. and J. A. Bargh (1998) “Coming out in the Age of the Internet”:http://homepages.nyu.edu/~kym1/coming_out.pdf, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75 pp. 681-694.

The BBC provides a case study of what happens when an enthusiastic teacher encourages students as young as seven to blog.

Some of the children who attend the club have improved their knowledge of IT far above what is required of their age group by the National Curriculum. The Government target is for 80% of children of this age to reach level 4 by year 6. All of the webloggers have done that, and some have reached level 6. They are doing what 14 or 15-year-olds are expected to do.

You can see the kids’ weblogs “here”:http://www.hangletonweblogs.org/.

(Or to be more precise Onion-esque humour about a particular kind of teen blogging) from Modern Mirth Magazine. OK it’s a bit obvious and shooting-fish-in-a-barrel-ish but it did make me chortle. Don’t forget I – like ‘Jennifer Meyers’ – allow comments, “so that when you read my thoughts, you can have a place to agree with me and add additional support for what I said.”

But does it have to be the clownish conservative Boris Johnson? In France they have a serious politician blogger, “Dominique Strauss Kahn”:http://www.blogdsk.net/

The “Watchcow”:http://www.watchcow.net/ creates an RSS feed that tells you when any product’s price changes on Amazon in the US, in the UK or in Germany.

Thanks to searchenginewatch for the link.

For those who are interested – the mystery person in charge of the “Atrios”:http://www.atrios.blogspot.com/ weblog (a leading left wing political weblog in the US) has been revealed as Duncan Black who works at “Media Matters”:http://mediamatters.org/, the new David Brock media watchdog group.

See here for the ‘outing’ and here for more discussion about this in the blogosphere.

Turns out I’m probably not many degrees of separation from him as according to his profile, “he has held teaching and research positions at the London School of Economics”.

It seems odd that people on the right like “Instapundit”:http://instapundit.com/archives/016837.php are trying to make something about the fact he gets paid to do the same work that he does on his blog as his day job. It’s not as if Atrios claims to be non-partisan…

Update I learned about this at AoIR and assumed it was fresh news as it was news to me, but it seems the news has been around since late July. Shows how easy it is to miss even ‘big news’ in the blogosphere, even though your RSS reader has “126 feeds”:http://www.bloglines.com/public/derb/ if those feeds are not covering that topic. Shades of “Cass Sunstein”:http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR26.3/sunstein.html…

If you are based in the UK and have a personal home page (this includes weblogs and journals), please visit this home page creation survey and fill it in – it should only take you ten minutes.

If you are an academic I would also be interested to know what you think of it as a survey and how I might improve it (bearing in mind it is only a very rough pilot at the moment!), and if you have a weblog or home pages (anywhere but particularly one that might be seen by Brits) please publicise this survey on your site. The survey will only be up for a month (or less, if I get enough respondents before then).

I don’t expect to publish anything from it as the sample size will be too small and it is very open-ended at the moment so I can get some idea of the kinds of answers people give, but if anything interesting comes out you will hear about it here.

P.S. I am using “QuestionPro”:http://www.questionpro.com/ to do this survey, which from what I have found appears to be one of the best options around for serious surveys (I did some earlier “investigation of survey software options”:https://blog.org/archives/001183.html). If you want to try it out too, please “contact me”:http://davidbrake.org/contact.htm so I can invite you (I would get $10 if you end up using it).

R. A. Stebbins “Serious Leisure: A Conceptual Statement”:http://playlab.uconn.edu/stebbins2.htm has devised a separate category for ‘fun’ things that are or can be also ‘hard work’. He suggests amateurism, hobbyist pursuits, and volunteering are the three forms of serious leisure and that these kinds of leisure are ‘better for us’ than others. Certainly there are many weblogs and personal home pages that contain elements of all three. As to whether we are better off blogging than we would be reading a good book I am not at all clear. But the idea is an interesting tool to think with.

Thanks to Kylie at The Internet Genealogy Community Study for the link.

A study reported in New Scientist “found”:http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996374 regular diarists were more likely than non-diarists to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness.

It’s worth noting however that, ‘the authors acknowledge that the experiment could not demonstrate which came first – the diary writing or the health problems’. It seems not unlikely that ‘the worst affected of all were those who had written about trauma’ because on average most people did not have serious traumas! Unfortunately I have been unable to find the original paper on the web.

Danah “wondered”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2004/09/09/diarying_bad_for_your_health.html whether this has implications for bloggers, too. The ‘side effects’ of personal web publishing – intended and unintended – are something I plan to look at in my own research. One of the things I am curious about is how often people who publish online find that they “lose their jobs”:http://news.com.com/Friendster+fires+developer+for+blog/2100-1038_3-5331835.html or are “embarrassed in other ways”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2003/11/13/mom_finds_out_about_blog.html .

Thanks Danah for the link

Wired News reports, ‘A small California newspaper has undertaken a first-of-its-kind experiment in participatory journalism in which nearly all the content published in a regularly updated online edition and a weekly print edition is submitted by community members. It’s all free.’

“The Northwest Voice”:http://www.northwestvoice.com/default.asp’s experiment seems like a good idea on the face of it (and the creators give a good account of their reasons at “Open Source Journalism”:http://www.opensourcejournalism.org/) but I fear newspaper groups could be tempted to fire all or almost all their journalists and rely on citizen contributors for a lot of small papers. The trouble with this approach is that ‘ordinary citizens’ may not have an interest in doing any investigation into complex issues or underlying causes of problems (or if they do they may only do so because they have a particular axe to grind). Let’s hope instead that this kind of citizen journalism frees up staff journalists to do a better job on that kind of reporting (and let’s face it there isn’t enough of that going on at the moment).