Alejandro@Oxford » Blogging

Obama’s unlikely supporter…

Alejandro — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:50:35 +0000

Rupert Murdoch, the media magnate, appeared yesterday in All Things Digital, in an interview with Walt Mossberg. He is been a long-time supporter of conservative politics, W and Tony Blair through his newspapers and televisions (New York Post and Fox in the US (and now Wall Street Journal, sponsor of All Things Digital)). However, in the interview showed his admiration for the Democrat candidate Obama and was rather negative about McCain, who he defined as a friend! Watch by yourself:

New posts in Blog of Change

Alejandro — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:42:42 +0000

I am lately posting more often in my Blog of Change. Go and check my latest posts there about the food crisis, Spain’s lack of public transparency and Lawrence Lessig’s presentation skills.

Bye to Alejandro@World, Hello to a new Blog of Change

Alejandro — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:21:16 +0000

Lately, I’ve been thinking what would be the best way of organizing my blogging activity. Before coming to Oxford, I was posting on one blog – Blog of Change -, then I left it die slowly, while creating two new blogs – Alejandro@Oxford and Alejandro@World. The first, Alejandro@Oxford, was meant to develop issues related with the Internet and what I am doing at the OII; the second, Alejandro@World, was a personal blog that aggregated the posts of the former plus more personal or broader topics. However, I haven’t been entirely satisfied of this structure and Alejandro@World, though being having fancy looks (it incorporated an image gallery), it was slow to download and not very “readable”. Therefore, I am abandoning altogether Alejandro@World, keeping Alejandro@Oxford as it is and resuscitating Blog of Change with a bit more functionalities and some design changes (not much though). I will post Internet, research and OII topics on Alejandro@Oxford. Blog of Change will develop further on these, while taking a broader view: its motto is “Thoughts on mankind’s evolution”.

A BBC Radio series about bloggers

Alejandro — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:35:18 +0000

Today, I stumbled upon the website of a BBC Radio 4 series ‘Meet the bloggers’. It was made in September 2006, so in Internet times ages ago, however I think it is quite an interesting listening.

Blogging Ecosystem: Political Euroblogs

Alejandro — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:49:53 +0000

Jon Worth, a “web political communicator” friend of mine, wrote a couple of weeks ago about the ecosystem of political Euroblogs’. What’s an Euroblog? It is a blog about the EU, so a political euroblog is, obviously, about EU politics.

He basically divided all EU politics blogs in three existing levels:

What is the question mark at the top of this system? For Jon, this could be filled by a combination or a derivation of three types of sites: the PolitikPortal.eu type – a free daily news roundup – , the EuroBrussels type – having the information the people want – , the Bloggers4Labour type – bringing together several people writing about the same. He then asks…

is there anyone out there who wants to give me a hand to turn any of that into reality?

Jon places Euractiv’s Blogactiv in the category of Blog Platform, so putting it under the top-of-the-pyramid question mark, but the combination of Euractiv & Blogactiv is in fact the combination of those three websites – free daily news, information people wants (e.g. dossiers) and the gathering of people around a blog discussion on EU issues (look at the top “create your blog”). So, I am not completely sure there is a question mark there, I think he is making an artificial disaggregation of the Euractiv platform to fill the categories.

Is there a void to fill in? Perhaps not in categorical terms, but in quality terms, more websites doing it better with better integration of the information. I would even dare to say, that the void is not in Web 2.0, but in Web 3.0 (the semantic web), that is, in giving a meaning to the information aggregated. What is the point of having hundreds of contributors, thousands of news items that people are potentially interested in, if you are only using a tiny part of it, because the rest doesn’t have any meaning beyond a small contextual space. A website that gives meaning and broad context to all this information on EU politics and policy-making will indeed fill a very, very empty space.

My two cents.

UPDATE: If you are interested, follow the comments section of Jon’s post, the discussion is quite interesting.

1st OII Oxford Blogging Roundtable with Kevin Anderson…

Alejandro — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 02:01:28 +0000

On February 4, we inaugurated the OII Oxford Blogging Roundtable with Kevin Anderson, blogs editor of The Guardian, who talk very substantially about Blogging and US politics, with a focus on the US elections’08. It was very interesting and full of content. I was going to make a brief summary of it, but Kevin has quickly blogged about it and I made a podcast with recording and the slides of Kevin’s presentation.

FYI: The OII Oxford Blogging Roundtable at the Oxford Internet Institute is a series of informal meetings to talk about blogging. Once or twice a term – that is, more or less every three months -, the participants discuss around a guest speaker and a topic a variety of issues related with blogs and their ecosystem. These meetings are open to all.

NOTE: to listen to the podcast the ideal is to use iTunes or Quicktime, it will recognize the pictures and links included. You can also get the mp3 audio-only.

For notifications about the OII Blogging Roundtable, subscribe to the mailing list send an empty e-mail with no subject to blogging-roundtable-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.

You can also follow the OII events at the OII page or subscribe to the OII newsletter by visiting the mailing list web page of the OII.

Podcast:

Note on privacy: if any of the participants recorded on the podcast wishes to be removed from this recording or it to be removed altogether, please contact its author aribo@oii.ox.ac.uk