Monday, February 28, 2005

term paper handed in

yay! - handed my term paper in an hour ago. i did make some last-minute changes today and i would have maybe rewritten a sentence or two more, but i wanted to hand it in in person and i was beginning to wonder whether the constant modifications were still making sense...
anyway, my teacher and i set another meeting for march 14 to discuss the further procedure with the thesis, including the decision on a precise topic. by then she will have read the paper and can help me decide, i hope.
i'll try getting some other work done within the next two weeks and maybe take some time to relax as well. :-)
watch this space...

Sunday, February 27, 2005

eureka!

*phew* rc1 (read: release candidate one) is done and printed. i'm getting it proof-read tonight and tomorrow morning, and then handing it in tomorrow afternoon or tuesday, depending on when i can arrange a meeting with my teacher. i'll probably come up with some last-minute changes tonight and tomorrow morning, but apart from that, i'm done. all in all, i am happy with the paper, although i could have easily continued editing things for another week or so. watch this space for further updates regarding this paper and my thesis, though you can expect things to quiet down for a week or two while i get other work done.

Saturday, February 26, 2005

gettin' there

well well... i managed to complete the body of the term paper today, along with the introduction. i'll try to do some smoothing out tomorrow and then write the conclusion by sunday at the latest. it feels like it's almost done and i can't say i mind. it's not like i'm really gonna have to live without writing for now, cause the thesis is right around the corner... well - first things first. now: sleep!

Thursday, February 24, 2005

weblog ethics

i came across an interesting subtopic today: weblog ethics (rebacca blood's way and jonathon delacour's way). note the interesting discussion prompted by jonathon's blog entry. the key discussion point, i would say, is whether blog entries should be edited by their authors after publication. both stances make sense: comments, links etc. are in danger if an entry is edited. then again, many people see their blog as their own playground, their work of art. thus, if they see something differently afterwards, they feel entitled to changing it. personally i'd say the best idea is to refrain from deleting and to keep editing to minimum, and mark any non-trivial changes made.
writing is going ahead pretty nicely - nearing an end of the term paper and gathering ideas for the thesis.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

mla style

well, my new categorization survived my next-day scrutiny. kinda relieving that i don't have to rewrite two pages...
i did spend quite some time trying to figure out how to quote from wikis, or rather, how to add them to the list of works cited according to mla fashion - luckily the mla has an faq entry regarding citations from online sources. but still: not as easy as one may think... that's what you get for not working the old-fashioned way, with books and other printed works. i did not manage to find out how to refer to two different, author-less (or at least unnamed) sources from within the main text if the sources have the same titles - but i managed to circumvent the problem.
next step is to provide some more examples in the text to juice it up a bit. i have some already, but it would be good to write a little more about them and add a few more. and i would like to get the whole thing done (in beta quality) by the end of friday.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

categorizations, classifications, divisions... criteria!

apart from getting more writing done (yay!), i spent a few hours wracking my brain trying to decide what to do about the categorization of weblogs. i "decided" on about four different approaches, ending up with one i am pretty happy with. this was pretty much the first time i noticed the difficulties of working with an evolving topic; i was not happy with the categorizations i could find, so i had to bend them to make them fit the thoughts in my head.
in the end, i'm sticking with the MeatBall Wiki's classification into chronicle, journal, diary, soap box and community blog - although i am making one modification. the problem i have with their division - and even more so with the Wikipedia's division - is that they mix criteria: division by content and division by format. this becomes obvious as soon as you try to find examples for the different types listed. come to think of it, this might be a general problem with collective writing in the form of wikis: one person starts a classification according to his set criteria; then another person adds a class, but using slightly different criteria; then when a third person adds something, it starts getting really messy...
let's see what i think when i reread and rethink my divisions later. providing it still makes sense tomorrow, it should be all downhill from here.

Monday, February 21, 2005

progress!

good news: today's progress was better than anticipated. my paper currently has two content parts: "What is a weblog?" and "Types of weblogs". after revamping the first part of my paper yet again, i mainly concentrated on filling up the second part today, and did manage to get some interesting concepts into it. all in all i'm up to about 6 pages of written text and still have quite a long list of notes i would like to incorporate. i might actually end up with more content than needed for my term paper. who'd have thunk? :-)
i hope to continue along this line tomorrow and wednesday and then have lots of time left for patching and revising. in the end, i do want to be happy with what i hand in.
lotd (link of the day): Beginner's guide to the blogosphere

Friday, February 18, 2005

weekend? eh?

ok, so this week hasn't been as successful as i had hoped. i did get a little writing done today, and also a bit of reading & thinking. i'll make myself write a bit more tomorrow and then head into the final week. i am quite happy with what i have written so far - it is just rather tedious work. i did order the book "we the media" today - it deals with blogs and their influence on media. maybe that'll help me decide what to do about my thesis.

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

progress update

slowly but surely work is going ahead on my term paper. i haven't bothered posting since saturday since i didn't get any work done on my paper. now i'm back to writing and it's going ok. so far today i've concentrated on explaining "tools" used in blogs, such as blogrolls, trackbacks, pingbacks, and permalinks. i do hope to get more done as the day progresses.

Saturday, February 12, 2005

weekend!

yesterday i wrote a page on wikis - i thought i should at least mention them due to their similarity to weblogs - and on the two-way web - including a short history lesson featuring tim berners-lee's worldwideweb, the original browser. i also revised my text on the types of weblogs.

i think i need a bit of a break in writing over the weekend. i'll see what i can get done today and reserve tomorrow for other work - that way i can think about things a bit until monday. it can't help to make yourself write each and every single day. it would be nice to average a page a day for weekdays, and that would mean i'd have to write another page for the past week. we'll see...

Thursday, February 10, 2005

treasure cave

mission accomplished - for today at least. didn't get all that much writing done today, but i am happy with what i did get done. the text is starting to fit together nicely and things are beginning to clear up in my mind. let's just hope that tomorrow will be productive as well.

quote of the day by jorn barger, who coined the term "weblog" (taken from this interview):
But by that point [1997] the Web had grown into a vast impenetrable treasure cave, generally in pitch blackness. I desperately wanted someone to 'turn on the lights' so I could see what was where, what treasures were there for my enjoyment.
So I determined to take on that task for a while-- to devote full time to lighting up the dark corners, building my "Net.literate" portal, and keeping up a running commentary in my weblog.
nice way of putting it, i thought.

goal for tomorrow: fill up pages 4 and 5.

indyjunior

i just stumbled upon an interesting tool: indyjunior. peter merholz, the coiner of the term "blog" (as opposed to weblog), uses it to show his travels.

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

wikis

again, i've managed to achieve my goal set for the day - even if only just. along with writing some new stuff, i used the good old reformatting trick to increase what i had written so far. well, it's not really cheating, since it's now in the format i need it in in the end. at least i did get more reading and researching done today. i'm pretty sure i'll include some rough outline regarding wikis as well, since i just realized how closely related they are to blogs. today i stumbled upon the term "two-way web" which i hadn't been familiar with - interesting to look at blogs and wikis as the web returning to its roots.

enough for now. 1-2 more pages tomorrow i say...

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

update: this might be a diary

upon further analysis, i have come to the conclusion that this blog is in fact a mix of a journal and a diary: a journal due to the lists of links etc. and a diary due to some introspective analysis.

anyway, regarding my writing: i'm up to two pages of text and two more pages of notes now. even though i spent the better part of the day trying to write instead of writing, i am now satisfied with the result. let's see how tomorrow goes. the minimum: another page of written text.

Monday, February 07, 2005

news: this is a journal! - and apparently meaningless and irrelevant

i started writing today. i more or less reached my goal of "one page by monday night": i've written half a page of text along with two pages of notes. that's sufficient to put my mind at ease for the day.

after reading some more interesting sources on blogs (updated my "blog resources"), i realized that according to meatball wiki, my blog here is in fact a journal: "a subjective, time-ordered history of events that happened to the author." and, having read ryan's "blogger manifesto" on periodicdiversions, i'm afraid to say that the following does seem to apply to my blog:
Diary-minded authors write temporally specific articles . . ., making them almost instantly obsolete and rendering a site's archives completely meaningless and irrelevant except as, well, an old diary.
oh well, i'll have to live with that for the time being. after all, this is my blog, and it's mostly meant as a journal of my thesis work; for that purpose, an "old diary" might in fact be useful.

back to my temporally specific article: by tomorrow night, i would like to have another page written, or two more pages of notes - or both!

Saturday, February 05, 2005

term paper topic ok'ed

my teacher replied yesterday evening saying that she thinks my idea is very sensible - so now nothing stands between me and my term paper. i guess that means i have to start writing... my short-term goal: at least one page by monday night.

Friday, February 04, 2005

term paper topic

i've come to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to start writing generally about blogs: what they are and what types exist. this would help me get a good overview of the topic and give my teacher some insight before tackling the big thesis project. if these general topics prove to be too little for a term paper, i'm thinking about extending it to a history of blogs and a brief overview of technical aspects.

i pitched the idea via e-mail to my teacher today - let's see what she thinks.

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

blog resources

what follows is basically my ongoing link collection surrounding a) blogs themselves and b) their effect on media:
i'll keep this updated with any appropriate links i stumble upon.

why? how? when?

after having decided to write my thesis on some to-be-defined aspect(s) of the blog phenomenon, i thought it would be a good idea to start my own blog.

a thesis on blogs? why?!

the simple answer is that blogs have captivated my interest. even though i have been very active on the internet for almost as long as i can remember (dating back to the early days of the WWW, thanks to my father), blogs have mostly slipped by me so far; only recently did i realize that some of my daily online literature (slashdot.org, theregister.co.uk, doom9.net, heise.de) would - at least by some people - be regarded as blogs.

motivating me further is the fact that blogs are clearly one of the most hyped-about aspects of our contemporary internet. i thought - and so far still think - that it would be interesting to write about something that is emerging as a key feature of the internet - somehow i prefer this to writing about some historical episode. it fascinates me to not know what will happen to blogs in the long run and how (or even whether) they will influence mainstream journalism and life in general to a stronger degree than they already do today.

only recently have blogs really made their way to germany. the us presidential election was cause for the german tv news show tagesschau to set up a blog on their website which i followed more or less regularly; but after the election, that blog seems to have all but died down - along with my interest in it. the tsunami disaster sparked a few more blogs by news companies etc. in germany.

ok, that's the why. what about the how?

this is proving to be the hard part. that said, i don't think it has much to do with the topic. the problem i face whenever writing a paper - and i know i'm not alone - is: how to start?

i am trying to work around this problem a little by first writing a term paper (comprising a dozen pages or so) on the general topic and then building my thesis on that. the good thing about this method is that i can "test" the topic to see if i'm compatible with it before starting on the real thing - my thesis. and, maybe even more importantly, i only have to start once, since the thesis isn't a real start, but rather a continuation of my term paper.

at least that's what i keep telling myself. but... even this small start is proving to be a little more difficult than i had anticipated - and that's what brings me here. maybe a little "feel" for blogs will help me start the creative writing process. and it can't hurt to put the things in my head into writing in a simple, uncensored way. the hope is that when i look at this in a day or two, ideas will simply pop into my head - i hope...

ok, ok... got the why and the how. where's the when?

the when has always been a bit of a problem for me. or why not call it a challenge instead. i'm quite the procrastinator when it comes to things i am not keen on doing. one solution is to change that; i do try to do all things asap, but it's not easy as everyone will know. the second solution is to enjoy this "job". if i like doing something, i can't stop myself. so this is what i have to do: enjoy the writing and see it as a learning process.

but, being 27 years old, i do have enough experience in life (and know myself well enough) to realize that i am at least partly fooling myself if i think this is going to solve the problem completely. that is why my teacher and i have set a feb. 28 deadline for the "small" paper, the so-called term paper. there is no fixed deadline for the thesis yet; that will come as soon as i finish my term paper and sign up for my thesis. the plan is for me to hand it in sometime during the summer.

enough already!

that's where i stand now. i want to come up with a concrete topic for the term paper by this coming friday; that would give me three weeks to write the paper. i'll keep blogging as i go...