I'm finding myself fascinated by the use of the Internet for purposes of public mourning. For example, The Steve Irwin Tribute Pool on Flickr. I've also recently seen it following the passing of a friend of mine, and when a Carleton student died last year.

I sense a paper.... too bad I have a dissertation to write and an R&R to get back to at some point.

Progress, 8/30/06

I didn't get as much written today as I had hoped, because I had to spend a fair bit of time chasing down details of what I wanted to write. Other times I might have just put in placeholder text, but today I was making it a point to actually go and look things up and take screen shots and so on. Makes one feel much more productive. I've developed a lovely "spectrum of blogging privacy" that's made the actual writing go much more easily, because it serves as a kind of outline for what I want to actually say.

The plan/goals for the next week:

Tomorrow: finish the descriptive section on the blogosphere.
Tomorrow/Friday: Plug holes in lit review and methods section.
Tuesday: Fill in whatever other gaps remain (transitions between sections, introduction), do a quick edit.
Tuesday/Wednesday: Send first draft to Bob.

I think it's a totally reasonable schedule.

Stupid technological progress...

In my proposal (and probably in my eventual data-analysis), I'm grouping blogging systems by amount of privacy/security they offer. So you really have a spectrum* from LJ (most security features) to Blogger (fewest features). This is all well and good.

Except that then Blogger had to go and release their new beta. Which not only messes up my spectrum, but also will make my survey just a bit more complicated, because I'll have to ask respondents if they're using OldBlogger or BloggerBeta. Phooey. Oh well, I'll survive. ;^)

*Damn... now I need to go make a graphic of that way to express it.

Updated reactions to the new Pew Report

Late last week I contacted Amanda Lenhart at PIALP to ask her about the decision to separate out Blogger & Blogspot and MT & TypePad in the new report on bloggers, which I commented on in passing a couple of weeks ago. We had a pretty good e-mail conversation and she was quite forthcoming about how decisions were made . My main concern about the separation was that it might be capturing some confusion amongst bloggers about exactly which tools they were using to blog (particularly among Blogger users). I suspected that it was an open-ended question. In fact, it was an open-ended question with a group of pre-coded responses, and it might be capturing some of that confusion, but as I thought about it more and more, does it really matter all that much?

I hate starting up again

After being away from my proposal for a couple-plus weeks (daycare was closed for a week, so I of course got a fat lotta nothing done, and then the grownups went on vacation all by ourselves, hooray), I find myself baffled as to where I stopped. And that makes starting again very hard.

But I've found my place again, and am writing utter crap at a decent clip. Here's hoping that I can later turn that utter crap into something actually coherent and use-able.

*toasts*

Various and sundry

Finished reading selections from the last 2 volumes of A History of Private Life.

Am now perusing the new Pew report on bloggers. Some interesting stuff in there, but I must quibble with their categories of blog tools. There were separate response categories for "Blogger" and "Blogspot" as well as for "Moveable Type" and "Typepad". Was this question open-ended or closed-ended? I'm assuming the former, because I'm sure that the good folks at PIALP know of the relationships between MT & Typepad and Blogger & Blogspot (which isn't even worth linking, since all it does is take you to the main Blogger page).

Progress, 7/18/06

Friday and today, I read a number of chapters from A History of Private Life: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War. Filling in the gaping 19th and 20th century hole that existed in my review of the development of contemporary conceptions of public and private.

Progress, 7/13/06

Worked through my pseudo-outline of my lit review, rearranged, deleted a lot of stuff. Emphasis on the "deleted", as you can see below.



I also was frustrated to learn that for whatever reason, EndNote 7.0 won't play nicely with Office 2004. I've downloaded the trial of Bookends and I'm liking it so far (and it would cost less to buy that than to upgrade my EndNote). We'll see what happens.

Oh, and Matthew picked up my books for me so I can just work with them from home tomorrow.