Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers

The ease and appeal of blogging is inspiring a new group of writers and creators to share their voices with the world.

A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology. Blogs, the survey finds, are as individual as the people who keep them. However, most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression - documenting individual experiences, sharing practical knowledge, or just keeping in touch with friends and family.

http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/186/report_display.asp

From Pew Internet & American Life Project

StoryCorps

StoryCorps is a US national project to instruct and inspire people to record each others' stories in sound.

They are here to help you interview your grandmother, your uncle, the lady who's worked at the luncheonette down the block for as long as you can remember-anyone whose story you want to hear and preserve.

To start, they are building soundproof recording studios across the country, called StoryBooths. You can use these StoryBooths to record broadcast-quality interviews with the help of a trained facilitator. The first StoryBooth opened in New York City's Grand Central Terminal on
October 23, 2003. They also have two traveling recording studios, called MobileBooths

Interview are added to the StoryCorps Archive, housed at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, which we hope will become nothing less than an oral history of America.

StoryCorps is modeled -in spirit and in scope-after the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s, through which oral-history interviews with everyday Americans across the country were recorded. These recordings remain the single most important collection of American voices gathered to date. We hope that StoryCorps will build and expand on that work, becoming a WPA for the 21st Century.

http://www.storycorp.net/

Thoughts about blogging from the forum

A rambling thought on blogs.

I think the idea of blogging is fashionable at the moment but we haven't really determined how best to use them in an organisational environment and what effect the organisations limitations put on the actual use/ administration of blogs. Are blogs an organisational voice or an individual one?

Forum presenters did talk about empowering and valuing user content creation, but I'm struggling to recall any dialogue around the organsiation flavour side of the discussion.

Do you recall any of this?

Sebs Blog

Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Musuem in Sydney has a good overview of what went down on Fresh + New at http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2006/12/02/nz-national-digital-forum-2006-wellington-te-papa/

His powerpoint was a joy

Jim Spadaccini from Ideum has blogged about the NDF

Jim was the first speaker (after a somewhat droll/dull opening from the associate minister for a few things) of the first day and set the tone for the two days - web2.0 or museum 2.0.

His blogs are at http://www.ideum.com/blog/category/national-digital-forum/

Jim has a good list of Museum blogs as well.

It would be easy to forget there was a lot of web1.0 (or 0.9) going down as well...

ndf at nzlive.com

nzlive.com was one of the stories told. See the National Digital Forum entry there - http://www.nzlive.com/en/nzlive/national-digital-forum-2006.

More on nzlive.com later

Welcome

This blog is to capture thoughts and ideas from the 2006 National Digital Forum, from 5 participants from a library in the South Island of New Zealand.