thoughtcrumbs

CACM special issue on the blogosphere

This month's Communications of the ACM focuses on the blogosphere (you'll need an ACM digital library subscription to read more than the TOC). Highlights include:

• A demographic study of blogger profiles harvested from livejournal stats. In perhaps the best table I've ever seen in an ACM publication, the authors show representative interests of various blogging age groups. Twenty- and thirty-somethings are into grad school, Tivo, and public radio, while those older than 57 are apparently focused on "death and cheese."
• Semantic blogging, using blogging tools and distributed ontologies for sharing and managing other kinds of data (such as bibliographies). It reminds me somewhat of Haystack, in that you can choose the most useful organization paradigm (inbox, blog, file explorer) for your data, depending on what you want to do with them.
• An eloquent article by Rebecca Blood on the way blogging tools shaped the evolution of blogs. Like some blogging pioneers, she still hand codes her HTML, but finds that the online community is increasingly influenced by the technology of trackbacks, blogrolls, and permalinks. She says, "Every element that I can't reproduce leaves me invisible."