Author Archives: Bradley Dixon

Assessments, Networked Media

Tagging and taxonomy

There are two main taxonomies used in blogging: categories and tags. Categories are what they sound like: top-level, broad categorisations usually referring to the type of content. Categories are arbitrarily named and differ from blog to blog. For example, a political blog might have categories like “News”, “Opinion”, “Investigative Reporting”, etc., while a sports blog could have categories like “Football”, “Basketball”, “Hockey”, etc.

At a more granular level are tags. Tags are arbitrarily named keywords that are generally used to indicate that a certain topic, person, company or thing has been mentioned or referenced in a post. This aids readers and researchers looking for information on a particular topic find posts that match. The sports blog, for example, might tag a particular player or coach in every post mentioning their name, and then readers could find all posts relating to that player or coach in the one place.

While typically a post will belong to one or very few categories (because content generally only has one type), conventionally tags are much more liberally used and a single post could potentially have dozens of tags depending on how many things are referred to in the post.

Categories and tags became extensively used on the internet with the rise of blogs (and in particular the Web 2.0 era of the early 2000s), because they provide a handy way to categorise and search large volumes of information without having to perform a resource intensive full-text search. The general idea of categorising and tagging has existed in bibliographies for centuries, but its particular digital form has only come into widespread use in the last decade or two.

The WordPress knowledge base has a more detailed explanation of the difference between tagging and categorising.

Tagging isn’t necessarily limited to blogs. On the film diary service Letterboxd, where I often post short reviews of films I watch, tags are used extensively by users of the site in a number of ways. Tags like watched-at-the-cinema or watched-on-netflix indicate the circumstances in which a film was watched, and tags like 52-films-by-women are used by people participating in group-watching marathons and challenges. This particular tag helps bring together all of the people participating in a challenge to watch one film directed by a woman each week of the year, enabling them to meet and engage with each other through Letterboxd.

I use categories and tags extensively on this blog. I use categories to split up my posts according to the subject for which they’re created, such as the Networked Media category. I also have tags like blog-checklist, which collects all of the posts that constitute the first Networked Media assessment task.

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Assessments, Networked Media

Audio post

This is a track I found on Soundcloud published under a Creative Commons license. The song is “Sock It To Them” by Paul Flint.

There are many ways to post music online. I’ve chosen to post a Soundcloud track because of the ease of embedding it into a WordPress post, but I could have just as easily used music from Bandcamp or even uploaded an audio file directly and presented it to the reader using a media player plugin.

Embedding media poses some interesting questions around ownership and copyright. For example, if the track I posted was a copyright track instead of Creative Commons, am I legally responsible for infringing copyright by posting it to my blog, or is Soundcloud responsible because they made it available in the first place and are hosting the audio file? Or is the person who originally uploaded the infringing track to Soundcloud?

This is another case where it’s best to stick to the public domain, Creative Commons or work I’ve created myself.

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Assessments, Networked Media

Video post

I was recently on holiday in Japan, and I took this video out the window of a Shinkansen travelling from Tokyo to Hiroshima. I wasn’t expecting to share this online so I didn’t think much about its technical qualities (I should have taken it in landscape and not portrait), but the result is a pretty nice little view of the Japanese countryside.

I’ve posted this to Vimeo for a couple of reasons:

  • My phone (which is what I used to record the video) can upload to Vimeo natively
  • Vimeo makes embedding videos in a blog ridiculously easy
  • I prefer it to the overcrowded, low-quality nature of YouTube

Anyway, here it is:

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Assessments, Networked Media

Anatomy of a blog

Blogging grew out of early publishing on the web, a mix of personal and news websites. A lot of this legacy still defines how blogs look and how they work. The header is like a newspaper masthead, the footer is similarly influenced by print publishing, and the column layout (including a sidebar and a main content area) is reminiscent of newspaper layouts. One major affordance of blogs is that they present posts in a kind of endless and ongoing timeline, in reverse chronological order, with pagination to limit the number of posts per page (like books).

The internet and the web are the other major influence on the blog format, such as the use of hypertext to including rich media and hyperlinks to other websites, or the use of widgets which bring content from other locations into the blog’s context. This is a result of the fact that the web is dynamic, with content stored in databases and presented to the user through the use of a content management system, with the look and feel controlled by templates. Authors don’t have to manually build every single page they publish, a lot of the code can be re-used or embedded from elsewhere. This turns the author’s focus to the content itself, rather than the context in which it sits.

This dynamism also enables rich metadata and posting properties (back-dating or forward-dating, viewing/editing permissions, drafting, etc.), none of which was possible in print media.

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Assessments, Networked Media

Blogging ethics

The defining characteristic of blogs is that they are online, therefore public and accessible to people of all kinds from anywhere in the world. Though they share some characteristics with journals (chronological posting order, often filled with personal thoughts), it’s important to remember that they’re anything but private.

Online communication has allowed all kinds of voices to flourish and find their own space on the internet, including those usually suppressed or drowned out. This is good in many cases, but it can also shed light on undesirable groups and opinions that the world really doesn’t need to boost, such as hate groups. My own use of the internet has enabled me to find scenes and subcultures aligned to my interests (particularly in the art and culture space), but I’ve also witnessed some truly horrible things online. The overall effect is in my case a net positive, but for some people the internet can be a huge, unfriendly, frightening and unwelcoming place.

Today, social media websites are increasingly good at allowing users to control their privacy settings and decide who can see what they post, which is good in that it gives users control over their content, but it can also condition people to think they’re operating in a bubble away from the prying eyes of the world. It only takes one incident to shatter that illusion. The author Jon Ronson wrote a book about people whose careless posting on social media had a huge negative impact on their lives, called So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which does a great job of exploring the strange public-private dynamic of online spaces.

I’ve honed my online public persona for a number of years (on personal social media, on professional networks like LinkedIn, and on my own websites) and this blog is just another extension of it. I’m quite comfortable with the “voice” I’ve developed, though I’m sure that if someone Googled my name or trawled through my Facebook timeline they could find something I would consider embarrassing.

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Assessments, Networked Media

Blogging and copyright

I posted an extensive set of notes on copyright last year — it’s still a pretty handy overview of copyright law in Australia and I’ve referred to it a few times since I posted it.

The basics are:

  • Copyright is automatic and doesn’t need to be registered, and even unpublished works are subject to copyright
  • Ownership of content can be shared/assigned to another (e.g. employer, or through licensing)
  • Copyright comes with moral rights of attribution and integrity
  • There are exceptions:
    • Fair dealing (research, study, criticism, news reporting, parody), though there are restrictions to what is allowed under fair dealing
    • Education
    • Libraries / archives
    • Cultural institutions and museums

These guidelines are particularly pertinent to bloggers who might use non-free media like images and videos in their posts, or for example critics who quote from works of literature or cinema in order to criticise it. Bloggers have to be careful not to use infringing material in their posts or they may be liable to prosecution.

I’m going to aim to stick to public domain or Creative Commons media in posts where I can’t use my own work.

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Assessments, Networked Media

Blog security, spam and plugins

Security

Any responsible digital citizen needs to be aware of the threat posed by hacking, not just to them but to everyone in their contact list. Hacking can lead to two major issues: identity theft and loss of data, which depending on the victim and the severity of the hacking can lead to serious consequences for the company or individual hacked.

I’m lucky enough to have never fallen victim to hacking in any form yet – emphasis on yet. Ever since I read about Mat Honan’s digital life being destroyed by hackers – which they did for no other reason than they wanted to exploit his valuable three-letter Twitter handle for spam purposes – I’ve been meticulous about my security habits. I generate random passwords with high entropy, save them in a password manager so they don’t have to be easy enough for me to memorise, protect my password manager with a very strong master password, and never use the same password twice so that if I were ever hacked, the hacker wouldn’t be able to compromise my entire digital identity. I also lock down my phone – in a previous life I had the contact details of a number of prominent Australian film industry figures on my phone, and didn’t want to be the one responsible for losing control of them.

Based on all of the above, if this blog were to be hacked by someone all that would be lost is the content I’ve posted here. (And depending on your opinion of my work, that’s not much of a loss.)

The hacker wouldn’t be able to use my password from this blog to access my email, internet banking, or social media profiles. They couldn’t send phishing emails to my friends, send themselves money from my bank account, or post spam links on my Facebook profile. (Also, they wouldn’t be able to send themselves money from my bank account because I don’t have any.)

The last line of defence to data loss is back-ups, which restore a website to a previous state. In most cases regular back-ups are handled by the web hosting provider, in my case edublogs, but I can manually export my content through the WordPress control panel as well.

Spam

I’m old enough to remember the web before spam, and let me tell you: it was paradise. Now, spam is literally everywhere. It is embedded into the very fabric of the internet, and no website is launched without serious time being put into spam prevention. It poses serious threats for online publishers. Not only does it take a lot of moderators’ time to delete spam comments (or manually approve acceptable comments, depending on the comment system), when comments get through they can place some truly objectionable material on innocent websites. Spam can even get you struck off Google’s search results, which is a death sentence for a commercial website.

Ultimately, though, the arms race over spam is a losing battle. Botnets are too large and powerful, there is too much money to be made with shady medications and pornography online, too many people who will fall for extortion rackets. Spam has won, and all we can do is try to minimise its impact. I’ve chosen to disable comments on this blog, which was originally motivated by my belief that they actually add nothing to whatever discourse I’m engaged in, but it’s also a very effective spam prevention method. Spam bots can’t advertise on my blog if they can’t post comments. But for a lot of publishers, disabling comments is not an option for various reasons.

Plugins

One way to fight blog spam on a WordPress blog is to install the Akismet plugin. A plugin is a piece of code that modifies a piece of software so as to change how it works or add new capabilities not available in the default configuration. Today, most publishing software includes a formally supported plugin system that allows people who need specific or niche features to have them without requiring everyone who installs the software to have those features. The two primary sources of plugins are:

  • Officially released and supported plugins written by the first-party software developer (generally for niche features, e.g. Jetpack by the developers of WordPress)
  • Third-party plugins written by independent developers and made available in repositories or as internet downloads (e.g. Akismet)

Since this blog is hosted on RMIT’s Media Factory platform I can’t install Akismet, so I’ve taken a screenshot of another plugin I’ve installed just to show that I can do it:

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Assessments, Networked Media

Blog Case Study – kottke.org

Following on from my earlier discussion of blogs and what function they serve in media education, I’ve been revisiting a couple of my own favourite blogs and seeing how they fit into the blog landscape.

Kottke.org was founded in 1998 by Jason Kottke, an American web developer and writer who was an early adopter of many of the web’s nascent technologies, including blogging. I’ve been reading the site since around 2004 or so, when I was reading a lot of technology writers like Daring Fireball and others who would link to Kottke’s posts with unceasing regularity.

Its primary editor is Jason Kottke himself, and the site is officially “authored” by him, though there have been times when guest editors like Tim Carmody, Sarah Pavis or Adam Lisagor took over for days or weeks at a time while Kottke was on holiday or taking a break. The use of guest editors has ensured that at no point over the site’s 19-year lifespan has there been a significant dip in the amount of content being posted to the site.

In terms of content, kottke.org is simply an aggregation of interesting links from around the web, mostly under the topics of technology, arts and culture (and particularly where these topics intersect). Each post typically takes the form of a quote or embedded image/video at the top, followed by a paragraph or two of written commentary providing context and opinion. In this sense it is a typical “filter blog”, and indeed helped popularise that format in the blogging space.

Since 2005, writing for kottke.org has been Kottke’s full time job. He is an extremely prolific writer, with between one and ten new posts going up on the site every single day, and it is for this reason that his site has remained popular since its founding. No more than a day goes by without new content being added to the site, so readers can continually come back and find something new and interesting to read.

Kottke has a long track record of drawing attention to prominent artists, technologies, services and products long before they become popular in the wider world. There was a time when Kottke was among the web’s most influential figures, particularly in technology and culture circles, and his posts spread far and wide across the internet as bloggers added their own thoughts on the topics he would write about. This is one of the main reasons I enjoy reading kottke.org and still read it today: feeling connected to the newest and best things happening in the worlds of technology and culture.

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Assessments, Networked Media

Blogging

The word blog refers to both a medium and a practice, as explained in this week’s reading1.

From a technical standpoint, a blog is a collection of entries (called “posts”) presented on a website in reverse chronological order, with each post having a title, timestamp, author, permanent link and often complex taxonomies like categories and tags. Blogging as a medium builds on hypertext technology (the basis for the world wide web) to allow authors and publishers to link to, and be linked from, other blogs and websites, thus creating a series of interconnected, networked sites all engaged in the practice of blogging. Hypertext also enables authors to embed rich media like images and video into their posts.

Blogging as a practice evolved in the late-1990s era of the web, as an outgrowth of personal websites where authors would create diaries, autobiographies and interesting links for their friends to enjoy and comment on. Blogging is an ongoing, cumulative process which requires a blogger to periodically and regularly create new posts for their blog, as well as curate a theme, voice and style that makes their blog unique.

Within the blogging medium one can identify a number of unique genres: personal diaries, filter blogs (curated lists of links), political blog, etc. Politics is a common topic for blogging, as are culture, art and technology. The most common form of blog involves an author taking information from elsewhere on the web, quoting from it (or embedding media from it), and adding a short amount of text with context and their own opinion. Crucially, their post will include a link to whatever article or media is being discussed in the post, allowing readers to follow up and read the original source for themselves should they wish, creating a mesh of links and content that criss-crosses the web.

Content creation is central to the idea of using blogs in media education, according to Adrian Miles2. Blogs, and the practice of blogging, allow students to document their practice, reflect on their experiences, comment on each others’ work and collaborate on projects together. The public nature of blogs forces the student to think about how they present their work to an audience, and requires that they synthesise their learning in such a way that it can be “explained” to that audience (real or imagined).

Having used a blog in the context of media education for a year already, I have found that it has helped me immensely in consolidating my learning. It has also broken down barriers of ego and control: since a blog is more about the creative process and less about the finished product, I feel less self-conscious about posting unfinished or experimental work that might not be perfect. I’m looking forward to using this blog for the rest of my degree and building on what I’ve already created.

  1. Rettberg, J. W. (2008), Blogging, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 17-30. ↩
  2. Miles, A. (2006), “Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning”, Australian Screen, 41, pp. 66-69. ↩
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Thoughts

Terry Gross’s ground rules for interviewing

Terry Gross was on the Longform podcast this week, and she discussed the ground rules she lays down for her subjects before their interview:

  • This isn’t live and isn’t airing today, so avoid saying “yesterday”, “today”, “last week”, etc. Go for absolute dates and times if you can.
  • If you get half way through an answer and misspeak or think of a better way to get across what you mean, stop yourself and start the answer again. Just start with a full sentence for the purposes of editing.
  • If I get too personal, stop me and we can move on to something else.
  • If I get a fact wrong, feel free to interrupt and correct me. I can then fix the mistake and it won’t go to air.

She says that these ground rules aid in making the guest comfortable and alleviates some of the pressure they might feel, especially if they’re able to take do-overs.

Equally, it makes clear that the guest has no control over the edit or what happens to the audio after the interview is over.

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