infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

This semester I’m teaching an upper-division class I’ve titled “Making Alternative Media,” which takes a hands-on approach to learning about media activism. I’m assigning the students projects like making ‘zines and blogs in an effort to learn some low-cost media-making skills and historically situate personal publishing on the internet. (If you’re curious, the class blog is here.) I’m a little disappointed because I thought the class might attract some committed activists types or underground culture vultures, but the students started out largely indifferent to subject matter.

To jump-start discussion for today’s class, I told the students to spend 20-30 minutes looking at a non-commercial blog to find out who was behind the blog, the intentions behind the project, and what kinds of issues the blog treated. Most of the students did their homework, and we had a pretty good discussion today. One student, however, couldn’t remember what blog he browsed. Although I demonstrated Technorati on Friday and suggested using it as a tool for finding blogs, this student said he just queried Google for “blog” and looked at a result in the top ten results.

Out of sheer curiousity, I did a Google search for “blog” in front of the class to see what would be the top results. Unsurprisingly, the top result is Wikipedia’s entry for “blog,” followed by some blogging services like Blogger. What I was interested to know, however, was what was the top personal blog. It turns out it’s Larry Lessig’s blog, which I find a little surprising, since he’s not a particularly regular blogger. Obviously, he has a high profile among bloggers and cyber-hipsters, so I can see how he might have the highest PageRank. Mark Cuban comes in next, and he’s an even less prolific blogger. It’s interesting that these figures earned reputations for things outside of blogging, yet have the top results for “blog.” The blog the student examined, was Blog for America, which I wasn’t even aware of.