web2.0

On July 24, the Chicago Tribune printed a mournful column, lamenting the death of the Ann Arbor News. Unlike many other cities, the death of the Ann Arbor News is the death of the only major news source in the area.

The News was not just a hometown paper for the 114,000 residents of this university town about 45 miles west of Detroit, it was the hometown paper. Ann Arbor has become the first American city of any size to lose its only full-time daily.

But perhaps understandably(less so for the many journalists sitting in the seats), they are starting from the ground up. The editors are trying a business model that has been semi-successful for other digital news outlets: small staff, small circulation, niche advertising (see AnnArbor.com--oh and the top story this morning is dead swans).  Read More »

I just wanted to take a quick moment to draw gnovis readers' attention to the EDUCAUSE 2007 Conference that has been taking place this week in Seattle. Covering a huge range of topics related to education and technology, the conference has been receiving fantastic coverage by the Chronicle of Higher Ed on their Wired Campus blog, plus a number of posts on the EDUCAUSE blog.

One of the most compelling stories from the conference is a huge challenge to the popular belief that Wikipedia is less rigorous than the Academy.  Read More »

In recent years, Web 2.0 has assimilated itself into our daily lives with a vengeance, and no other trend within this movement has made more of a statement than social networking websites. First were the general sites – Friendster, MySpace and Facebook – which by now we are all familiar with (unless, that is, you have chosen to live under a rock). In today’s world, however, you can also find the social networking site that not only lets you connect with old friends, but you can hone in on a very specific group of individuals. There are social networking communities for dog lovers (Dogster), flirts (Flirtomatic), Christian churches (MyChurch), car enthusiasts (CarDomain) and even Goths (Vampire Freaks), to name just a handful.  Read More »

This video may be a bit old, in "Web 2.0 Time," but I felt that it was an important piece to share with readers of the gnovis blog, because it relates to a concept that so many people in media studies are talking about, but which is often poorly understood: Web 2.0.  Read More »

"As long as we stay in our own spaces and write in a language which is arcane and inaccessible to the majority of society, we're not going to make the social difference that has been part of the political agenda of Cultural Studies from Day One."  Read More »