July 2005 Archives
An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."
The contest began in 1982 as a quiet campus affair, attracting only three submissions. This response being a thunderous success by academic standards, the contest went public the following year and ever since has attracted thousands of annual entries from all over the world.
How many people out there think that the blog you are reading now looks a little... um, bland? Yes... after almost three years, the NMJ blog looks exactly the same. I have proposed to Dr. Jerz a design concept--because I have waaaaay too much time on my hands! =') A working prototype is available for critiquing. Just follow this link and leave any complaints, suggestions, or stark-raving praises as comments in this entry.
Thank you,
Update: The new homepage is on index.php.
After reading a recent essay written by an employer who didn't like what her nanny was blogging, and fired her (here's the nanny's response), I thought it would be worthwhile to blog this introduction to the concept of professional networking via the internet.
The article is written for grad students, and the subject isn't specific to weblogs. But the basic principles also apply to college students, or anyone seeking to develop a professional identity.
Networking on the NetworkThe first thing to realize is that Internet-world is part of reality. The people you correspond with on the network are real people with lives and careers and habits and feelings of their own. Things you say on the net can make you friends or enemies, famous or notorious, included or ostracized. You need to take the electronic part of your life seriously. In particular, you need to think about and consciously choose how you wish to use the network. Regard electronic mail as part of a larger ecology of communication media and genres -- telephone conversations, archival journals and newsletters, professional meetings, paper mail, voice mail, chatting in the hallway, lectures and colloquia, job interviews, visits to other research sites, and so forth -- each with its own attributes and strengths. The relationships among media will probably change and new genres will probably emerge as the technologies evolve, but make sure that you don't harbor the all-too-common fantasy that someday we will live our lives entirely through electronic channels. It's not true.
One might engage in many forms of communication on the net -- one-to-one electronic correspondence, network discussion groups, Web publishing, and so forth. And these interactions might be employed as part of a wide variety of professional activities: sharing raw data, arguing about technical standards, collaborating on research projects, chasing down references, commenting on drafts of papers, editing journals, planning meetings and trips, and so on. Underlying all of these disparate activities, though, is the activity of building and maintaining professional relationships. Electronic communication is wasted unless we use it to seek out, cultivate, and nurture relationships with other human beings. Unfortunately the existing mechanisms for electronic interactions, by reducing people to abstract codes (like "c2nxq@loco.blort.com"), make it difficult to keep this deeper dimension of interaction in mind. Still, there's no escaping it: if you aren't consciously building relationships, you're probably getting lost.
At the most fundamental level, then, most of my advice has nothing intrinsically to do with electronic communication at all. My real topic is not (technological) networks but (professional) networking. Therefore I'll discuss networking in a general way before describing how electronic mail can accelerate it.
How many of these internet fads did you know about? How many did you blog about? If you gave yourself a half a point for each that you knew about, and one point for each that you've actually blogged, what would be your score?
Top 10 Web fads - CNET.comInternet phenomena. Memes. Grist for the e-mail forwarding mill. Whatever you call them, Web fads are entertaining, unintended consequences of life on the World Wide Web. Once the masses could put anything online easily, they turned up weird fetishes, hilarious parody, jaw-dropping narcissism, and moments of brilliance. And over the past 10 years, some of these ideas broke through to the mainstream. Whether it was dancing hamsters, a kid enjoying his day as a Jedi Knight, or the sudden ability to publish your thoughts online with just a few simple clicks, the following 10 Web fads still make us laugh, make us wonder, or make us feel guilty enough to update our blogs.
Journalism major Amanda Cochran, who's interning at the Tribune-Review this summer, wrote this entertaining and informative historical treatment of Ligonier Beach. Good work, Amanda!
Life's a beach - PittsburghLIVE.comWhen 7-year-old Cono "Nick" Gallo sailed from Italy to America at the turn of the 20th century, he developed a love for water that stayed with him after he stepped onto America's Atlantic shore.
Later, after years working as a steel worker and barber in Western Pennsylvania, he finally returned to the shore -- one of his own making. On July 4, 1925, Gallo opened Ligonier Beach along Route 30, then touted as the largest swimming pool in Pennsylvania.
