Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Hi Leila,

Blog is short for weblog. The term was first coined in 1997. An easy definition of blog is that it’s a frequently updated web site that, depending on content, can take on the feel of any number of things: online diary, newspaper, even cookbook.

I would imagine that at first blush, a blog can look pretty bewildering. Some of them are stream-lined in appearance, but most are elaborate and tend to get more so over time.

Still, they generally have certain traits in common.

First, the convention is for blog posts (or entries) to appear in reverse order, with the most recent one on top.

Second, each post somewhere has a permalink — a unique web address to that specific post. Often these are found at the bottom of the post. On this blog, they are embedded in the post’s title. If you happen to click on a permalink you will see only the specific post, together with any comments. To return to the main blog, you can use the “go back one page” feature on your web browser. Frequently you can get the same result by clicking on the title of the blog — in this case, Blog Them Out of the Stone Age.

Third, most blogs permit readers to comment on a given post. Sometimes comments appear as soon as they’re submitted. Sometimes bloggers prefer to moderate comments; that is to say, read them over and approve them before allowing them to go on the blog. That’s because, inevitably, some people make abusive or grossly inappropriate comments. It’s also because blogs are targets of spam in the same way that emails are. In my case, I have installed a spam filter that holds questionable comments for moderation, using a complicated algorithm to determine what is questionable.

Fourth, blogs typically have a sidebar on either the right or left side and sometimes both. The sidebars are where things get most elaborate, since they contain all sorts of links and even advertisements. There’s no standard format, so I’ll just walk you through my own sidebar.

At the top is the WarHistorian.org logo. If you click on that, it takes you to an animated presentation (created using Macromedia Flash, which anyone can learn) that explains the logo’s meaning. At the end of the presentation you’re asked to enter the web site that is a companion to this blog.

Next comes my Cliopatria Award for Best Individual Blog, 2005. Blog readers nominated candidates in this and other categories; a jury reviewed the various submissions, and the results were announced at a session of the American Historical Association annual meeting in Philadelphia this past January. I’m very proud of the award, but at the same time I realize that most academics still have no understanding of the achievement it represents, since most know little or nothing about blogging. That’s true even for regular users of the Internet. A March 2005 poll found that 62 percent of such users had never read even a single blog.

Below is the testimonial from the jury that awarded the prize, followed by  “About WarHistorian.org.” If you click the latter, it leads to a separate, permanent web page that introduces me and explains the purpose of the web site and blog. Most blogs have something analogous. Some are quite extensive and informative. Many — too many, really — are rather perfunctory.

Next comes “A Few Good Blogs.” On most blogs, this would be called a blogroll. It’s a list of other blogs that the person(s) maintaining the current blog either reads or endorses. If you click on one of them, it takes you to that particular blog. For instance, if you clicked on Air-Minded, you’d find yourself on the blog of a grad student in Australia who uses his blog to help organize research on his dissertation, which concerns the impact of airpower propaganda on the British people between 1908 and 1939.

Most blogrolls are quite lengthy and, in my view, not terribly helpful because the tendency is to link to any blog that links to yours. There are various rationales for the practice that I’ll defer to another time. I have always limited A Few Good Blogs to 12 or 13 blogs that in one way or another relate to the main purpose of my blog, the advancement of military history as an academic field. I figure a selective blogroll is more helpful to my readers.

Sometimes people wish to contact me through email, so the next item on the sidebar gives them an email address. It’s written in slightly unconventional form to help foil spammers.

Next comes a list of links to various (non-blog) web sites that address military history.

This is followed by links to sites that maintain very elaborate lists of links to sites useful to military historians: why reinvent the wheel?

For the benefit of anyone interested, I next offer links to two other blogs with which I’m involved. The first, Radical Civility, concerns matters of faith and spirituality; the other, Civil Warriors, is a group blog in which two other Civil War historians also contribute posts. (Group blogs are fairly common and, I think, have a lot of potential as ways by which scholars with similar interests can interact.) In theory I could use one blog for all these enterprises, but it’s best for a blog to stick to a single theme that can be broad but must still be coherent.

Although strictly speaking it isn’t necessary, I find it convenient to have a set of links to various newspapers, magazines of opinion, etc. Those are filed under “News and Opinion.” My policy — and this holds true of “A Few Good Blogs” — is to maintain access to a broad range of perspectives. Most blogs, particularly those devoted to politics, tend to list only blogs, newspapers, and op/ed links congenial to their worldview. This tends to generate an unhealthy “echo chamber” effect that, in my view, is one of the few really serious negative aspects of the blogging medium.

The “Predecessor Blog” is a temporary expedient. Until recently I used a different kind of software to power my blogging efforts, and ultimately it proved too problematic, for technical reasons, to keep using. If you link to “old blog,” etc., you can still read those posts, but you can no longer add comments. I’ve been trying to transfer the old posts to the blog you have before your eyes, but it’s time-consuming. In retrospect I wish I had earlier used a more popular brand of software, because WordPress — the software that powers this blog — can automatically transfer posts and comments from several kinds of software, and do it within seconds.

Next are Categories, which make a convenient way to summon up posts on only a given subject. Thus, if you clicked “War and Gender” you’d get only my posts on that particular subject. Most bloggers will tag each post with as many category labels as seem relevant. I stick to just one because most of these categories are really chapters in a book I’m writing using the blog as my medium. (More on blogs as aids to productivity another time.)

Then comes a search feature. Plug in a word or phrase and, if it’s anywhere in the blog, the search engine will find it. This is in some ways much more helpful than a book index and in other ways much less so. One of my thoughts is that we need to develop blog indexes so that new users can quickly determine which specific subjects receive coverage, and where.

The Archive simply organizes and presents blog posts by month, just as Categories do by assigned subject matter.

We can overlook Meta for the time being. It’s just technical stuff of use mainly to the person(s) who maintain the blog.

Next you’ll see a string of links to some of my books. If you click on one of them, it takes you to the place where the book is found on Amazon.com. If you buy the book, Amazon.com gives me roughly a 5 percent sales commission. That’s true if you purchase any book by using the Search Amazon link at the bottom, too. So far I’ve accumulated about $25 in Amazon gift certificates. When the total reaches $100, I’ll donate it to the Military History discretionary fund of the OSU history department, since this is a non-profit venture.

Next is a statement that currently reads, “I’m a Crawly Amphibian in the TTLB Ecosystem.” I’ll explain that in more detail some other time, but basically it’s just a cute conceit by which a blog that monitors other blogs tries to estimate the relative size and importance of any given blog. Blogs start out as “Insignificant Microbes.” As they attract a larger readership, measured principally by people who link to the blog rather than by the number of visits to the blog, they “evolve” into higher forms of life: Slimy Molluscs, Flippery Fish, Adorable Rodents, Large Mammals, Mortal Humans, and ultimately Higher Beings, which are hugely influential and often generate significant revenue and notoriety for the people who maintain them. My personal best was “Flappy Bird” until the fellow who created the ecosystem tweaked the algorithms that determine one’s evolutionary niche.

Then comes the Site Meter. This is a way to measure not just the number of visits to the blog, but also where those visitors come from and, often, which blog referred them to mine. Some Site Meters are password-protected, but most bloggers leave theirs available to public inspection. I’ll click on mine right now. It says I have a cumulative total of 48,087 hits (plus 6,702 hits I transferred from an earlier incarnation of the blog.) Right now I’m averaging 163 hits per day. The average visit length is currently 2 minutes and 4 seconds. I received three visits last hour (I’m composing this very early in the morning; by mid-day this figure will be six or seven times that number), with eighteen hits since midnight and 1,141 in the past week. It further shows that of my last 100 visitors, most have been from the United States, but some have been from western Europe, and one each has come from Cyprus and New Zealand.

The last thing you see is a Creative Commons license, which is an attempt to protect my intellectual property rights while still giving others some flexibility in using my work. Different sorts of licenses are available. Mine says people can use my work on this blog so long as they provide attribution, use it for non-commercial purposes only, and don’t alter, transform, or build upon my work.

I hope this all makes sense. I know you’re away from your email for a while, so I’ll try to anticipate the next likely question(s) you may have. Thanks again for being a participant in this project. I think it may well be a good first cut at making the academic blogging medium more widely comprehensible.