i’m sure there’s an easier way
Posted by ungooglable on December 20, 2008 · 1 Comment
Running around and around the blogosphere, doing my darnedest not to get *too* caught up – that “speed sufficient to keep from crashing” thing again – I think I’m finally starting to get a sense of some of the key nodes in the cross-linked online comp-rhet scene. I had a slight level increase when I realized that I could treat blogrolls a little like Works Cited lists, and thereby glean some information from whose names come up repeatedly. It’s certainly a whole lot faster than trying to see who comments the most, and whose comments generate the most conversations. Still, I can’t help but suspect that tracking these kinds of interconnections / clusters / loops / whatever-you’d-call-them can now be done by a computer, and far faster than I’ve managed to do it…
Here’s what I’ve got so far:
- http://www.ydog.net/
- http://stevendkrause.com/
- http://collinvsblog.net/
- http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/
… and then my browser crashed. Any word on the new Google browser from those of you who’ve tried it?
Filed under course-related · Tagged with efficiency, experience, lists, methods
Ungooglable 
It takes a long time to make any sense of the blogs I have looked at. It seems like you need weeks (or even months) to know where some of the issues come from or even to crack the language and culture of these communities as you get to see only the short hand. If you remember 77 Sunset Strip, often “Kookie” would say things to people and they wouldn’t understand him, but sometimes he would say things and people wouldn’t even realize they weren’t getting him.
Anyway, I am viewing the process as a cognitive apprenticeship where I am at a pretty peripheral stage of participation.
BTW. I tried using the Google Blog search and got lost in there for a couple of hours–avoid this if you haven’t finished your papers–it is a little like the Cube movies.