Notes on the first lecture

So welcome to the class blog. Although we'll talk about the blog in more detail during the first tutorial, please don't feel you have to wait til then to start the conversation. Only the posts you select will be graded - so there's no risk in getting your toes wet straight away.

I want to begin with a follow-up to the first class yesterday. If you want to listen again to the word from Wordcamp on how to write for blogs—you know, the one that told us never to link by using "click here"—then, um, click here. It was great to hear some voices of dissent challenging this drive to streamline our language to the point of strangling it. What would be excellent is if others could share their views on what makes for good blog writing style either by replying to this post or posting anew.

Perhaps you want to relive the religiosity of the Very Reverend Steve Jobs launching the iPhone back in 2007 (sans my edits)? Thanks to Hugh for pointing out to me after the lecture that I had omitted to mention the resonances with the "Holy Trinity" (an ipod, a phone and an internet device; an ipod, a phone and an internet device; an ipod...)

The movie I showed the sequence from is Office Space (Mike Judge, 1999).

Finally, I highlighted some of the statistics in Technorati's State of the Blogosphere 2009 report. They organize their findings into Day 1, Day 2 etc. and you have to browse through these to see the kinds of stats I was pulling yesterday.

I have posted my ppt slides from the lecture on CECIL.

I'd like to encourage you to use this forum to discuss (and hopefully challenge and critique) the lectures, the readings and the debates in this class. I look forward to the conversation.