Week one: The Blog! !#^)(@ What is this crap!?

During our first week of class, we were asked by our professor to get into groups, work in Google Wave, and come up with one blog post.

Let's just say we learned that even with the help of the magical Google Wave, collaborating is a hard business.

Our wave was absolutely FILLED with quote after quote. We managed to have it so that after a lot of our quotes were smaller wavelets with our thoughts and interpretations.

I'd say the wave process helped us to understand a lof of Jill Walker Rettberg's text, but we weren't so great at coming up with one cumulative blog post. We managed to crank out 2 (two!) paragraphs (they pale in comparison to the epic essays another group wrote):

Although at first it may sound contradictory,

the idea that we gain more from weak ties than strong ones is an important one. Over

the internet we can have tens to hundreds of weak ties. These are totally

different from our offline connections. In the “real world” we usually connect

to people in our family or “shared space” (61). Online we may have strong ties

via our interests, but we are much more likely to make several weak

connections. Particularly, the way blogging is set up aids this process. Our

blogs are commented on or linked to by strangers, all of which we have access

to. If we were looking for information on a subject, such as where’s the best

place to get coffee, our “real world” friend might already know, and if they

had a good idea, they would have already told us. But if we mention it on our

blog, that one stranger who reads it who just happens to be a coffee bean connoisseur

could tell us (ignoring the fact that google maps is amazing, as is urban

spoon).

and!

Blogs can serve as part of a social networking arena, but

really, communities like Facebook and Myspace are more conducive to making

personal connections like that. As we read in earlier chapters, blogs can be

professional and about fields of study, or personal, but they usually aren’t

out-reaches to friends (the one exception would be Twitter, a micro-blogging

service wherein the majority of people tweet both for personal connections and to use as a filter). One of the many good things about blogs is that they can cover any

subject at all, and therefore inform readers of information they may have never

learned otherwise. We learn in our reading that blogs often cover topics that

are too specific, or aren’t usually deemed “newsworthy.” Even though most

bloggers don’t view themselves as journalists, there are some that do consider themselves to be acting as journalists.. Some bloggers report on

subjects more in depth than the news does. This has led to protections for

journalist-bloggers such as not having to release sources, much like the protection real

journalists have.

So you see, we weren't so successful. And looking at this week's wave, coupled with the fact that I currently don't have a laptop, makes me feel pretty sad about the outcome that will appear tomorrow in class.

On a side note, we learned that right clicking isn't so useful in wave.