Let’s do a deconstruction.

I found a post on blogging by a professional from the marketing-world. Funny enough I found it by searching for mp3’s of James Chance and the Contortions, namely here: http://somevelvetblog.blogspot.com/.

The piece originally was posted here: http://www.mpdailyfix.com/ and comes from here: http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/kintz/, exactly: http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/kintz/archive/0001/01/01/1120.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN.

I’d like to deconstruct some of the assumptions in this post to bring into perspective how much the view of the marketing-world, and their idea of corporate blogging is rooted in an idea of publishing that is superseded by blogging. The funny thing is that the conlusions of the research and the advises taken from it, do correspond quite well with my own view on/feeling about blogging. But I’d say those things should’ve been clear from the start…

I will quote the whole text Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore from Eric Kintz — in italics — and add my commentary.

“Thou shall post every day” is the most fundamental and most well known principle of blogging….

— It never was. Only marketeers who’d like to reach out to an audience and have that audience stay with their blog, want this. Why would you like an audience to stay? The only real reason I can think of is: Google-ad revenue. Power? Having people read what you scribbled? My god, there are millions like you… Conversation? That comes from putting up good content. Not from blogging daily.

Every new blogger is warned about “the” ultimate rule and is confronted with the pressure of a day going by with no new post. Every one has in mind the examples of successful bloggers, like Robert Scoble at Microsoft, who post several times a day. Daily posting shows that you are serious about blogging, generates traffic and drives reader loyalty, as readers come back daily to check your new posts. You cannot be successful if you do not go by the rule, right? RIGHT?

— No. See above. Who wants to be like Robert Scoble?

Wrong. Daily posts are a legacy of a Web 1.0 mindset and early Web 2.0 days (meaning 12 months ago!). The pressure around posting frequency will ultimately become a significant barrier to the maturity of blogging. Here are 10 reasons why.

— Well, you have my attention now.

#1- Traffic is generated by participating in the community; not daily posting – The blogosphere doubles in size every 6 months and cutting through the clutter will become ever more difficult with a new blog emerging every second. Daily posting deals with the clutter by adding more clutter.

— Who cares about traffic? Only the ones who have (Google-)ads going? Participating in a community is important, but not because it generates traffic. (Want traffic? Write a bot that visits). But the next sentence is really troubling, it actually states that the idea is that the ideal is that we should go through the whole blogosphere every day… As if there is one blogosphere where everybody talks about the same subjects, a blogosphere that one can keep an eye on, in its whole. That idea is wrong. At least since Bacon and Locke discovered that there were more books around than they could ever read in a whole lifetime, it has been impossible to keep track of everything going on. The fact that the amount of postings doubles in size every 6 months is meaningless in this respect. One can only follow a fracture of it — indeed a few “communities”-of-interests that one participates in. “Daily posting deals with the clutter by adding more clutter” is exactly what blogging is about, and has always been about. Is that a paradox? It is what writes have always done. Bacon and Locke dealt with “information overload” by adding to it: making summaries, indexes, their own notes and commentaries.

Although this strategy made sense 12 months ago and still makes sense for the top bloggers, its effectiveness diminishes with every new blog created. Traffic is generated by successful bloggers linking to you either in their posts or in their blogroll. Mack at Viral Garden has a series of great posts on the importance of joining the community.

— Again: who cares about traffic? 99,9% of bloggers will never receive links from the top-bloggers (who are not characteristic of blogging at all, I think). Blogging goes on, and blooms in the realm of 1 to 30 visitors a day.

#2 – Traffic is irrelevant to your blog’s success anyway– Unless you specifically target bloggers like Bruce, are a blogging consultant or blog about your latest book, traffic is irrelevant to you. What matters most is whether you are reaching your target audience (which may be narrow and focused), not necessarily how many people read your posts. Engaging with the audience you want to have a relationship with is a much smarter strategy than posting frequently.

— Ah, now we’re talking. “Traffic is irrelevant. Engage with your audience!” True. Better still would be “Traffic is irrelevant. Write about what you are passionate. Don’t think about an audience.” Actually that’s already what Rebecca Blood advised years ago.

#3- Loyal readers coming back daily to check your posts is so Web 1.0 – As the blogosphere matures, the number of new readers and bloggers will decrease and loyal readers are going to matter more. I have heard many bloggers tell me that they will lose reader loyalty if these readers come back daily and do not see any new posts. This perception is still very strong although irrelevant. Loyal readers subscribe to your blog via RSS feeds and have new content pushed to them. They will remain loyal because they have subscribed, not because you post frequently.

— Now it starts to be interesting. Loyal readers subscribe through RSS. (Is that true? I subscribe to over a hundred feeds, yet prefer to visit the blogs themselves. Going through feeds is what I do when I’m offline). Actually the whole idea of loyal readers is I think much more “under threat” because most internet-users will find a blog thanks to a Google-search, and then migth explore that particular niche by clicking a few links (for instance from the linkslist or blogroll of that blog.) Or they might — technorati-style — follow a certain subject (technically a ‘tag’), being fed with bits and pieces from different blogs that are ‘tagged’ as that subject. In that way people read much more through different blogs than follow the blogs they are loyal to.

#4 – Frequent posting is actually starting to have a negative impact on loyalty: Seth Godin (a frequent blogger) has a very interesting theory.According to him, RSS fatigue is already setting in. With too many posts, you run the risk of losing loyal readers, overwhelmed by the clutter you generate. Readers will start to tune off if your blog takes up too much of their time.

— Well, what is the problem there? The only rule is: write what you are passionate about even if that means putting up enormous amounts of texts daily. If your text is a good one, you will be read, maybe not today or tomorrow, but in a few weeks time, or even later on. Is there a problem with newspapers, thousands daily writing about sometimes the exact same subjects? (A good style of writing is often one that uses words economically, that is true, and something else).

#5: Frequent posting keeps key senior executives and thought leaders out of the blogosphere – My colleagues and industry peers cite bandwidth constraints as the number one reason for not blogging. They are absolutely right: frequent posting is not very compatible with a high pressure job. As an example, not one single blog is authored by a senior corporate marketing blogger in the top 25 marketing blogs listed by Mack. Not only does the blogosphere lose valuable thought leadership, it runs the risk of being overlooked by these very same marketers.

— Ha ha. Those marketeers, concerned about the senior executives and ‘thought leaders’ –, the thought leaders are publishing on the web. (Okay, this text is about corporate blogging). And yes, blogging is time consuming. Did anyone ever say something else? Did anyone ever say that everyone should blog? Of course the senior executives are not blogging. Of course we hardly have fulltime nurses blogging. Is that a problem? Is it a problem that senior executives are not writing novels, shooting movies, uploading their favorite recipes?

A recent study by Forrester found a reluctance among marketers to shift from more tried-and-true online channels like search and e-mail marketing. Just 13 percent reported using blogs or social networks in marketing, and 49 percent said they had no plans to do so in the next year. If the blogosphere wants to become more mainstream (vs. being the latest hype), frequent posting and required bandwidth are undoubtedly a major barrier to adoption.

— Good. The less marketeers use the blogosphere, the better; also blogging might be exactly the opposite of marketing. But this sentence is troublesome: ” If the blogosphere wants to become more mainstream (vs. being the latest hype)”. Hmm, if almost everybody is blogging — 75 year old retired managers, 15 year olds from the MySpace-generation, and everybody in between — how to become, well, more ‘mainstream’ than that? The problem is here: blogging (and the internet in general) has shown that there is exactly no reason whatsoever to know who Madonna is, it has shown that ‘mainstream’ is an invention of mass-media — or at least a mass-media-phenomenon.

#6: Frequent posting drives poor content quality – The pressure of daily posting drives many bloggers to re-purpose other bloggers’ content or give quick un-insightful comments on the news. Few bloggers have enough time (or expertise) to write daily thought leadership pieces, thus adding to the clutter. Ben at the Church of the Customer Blog explores the 1% rule and cites the Wikipedia example: 25 million readers visit Wikipedia every month, but the number of people who actually contribute content to Wikipedia is about 1-2 percent of total site visitors. I would argue that the same is valid for the blogosphere as a whole where most of the original high value content is driven by 1% of the bloggers. Some of the most insightful –and most quoted- marketing thought blogging leaders are actually infrequent posters, from Sam Decker to Charlene Li or Randi Baseler.

— Good. Point taken. I think this is largely true as long as bloggers think they have to write about ‘what goes on in the media’. But the 1% original content sounds too pessimistic. It does not take into account that a lot of blogging exactly consists — not of putting up ‘original content’ — but in constructing a distributed conversation on a certain subject. Bloggers who ‘live’ in the same niche, react to each other. That is blogging. What is original content anyway?

#7: Frequent posting threatens the credibility of the blogosphere – as many bloggers re-purpose existing content under the pressure of daily posting, they do not take the time to do any sort of due diligence and conduct effective research. Errors snowball in the blogosphere as they spread from one blogger to the other. The collective wisdom of user generated content was supposed to provide an alternative to biased traditional media content – it is instead echoing the thoughts and biases of a few.

— Blogging is not journalism. Yet I agree that, if one takes blogging seriously, one should try to check sources, give the right references, et cetera. But I know I do not always do that. It’s the ‘freedom’ of blogging — in opposition to journalism — to be inexact, and say “it is inexact, sorry, but that’s how I felt”. An important part of our media literacy should be our competence of checking sources, being able to ascertain the credibility of a text.

#8 – Frequent posting will push corporate bloggers into the hands of PR agencies – As they struggle with bandwidth constraints as well as peer pressure to join the blogosphere, more and more companies will resort to partnering with their PR agencies to create blogs. The blogosphere will in turn lose some of its effectiveness and value.

— Yes. I think that is true. But do I care? I do not read those blogs. They hardly exist in my world. Btw: PR and blogging are very closely connected, at least in the Netherlands, and at least ever since financial minister Gerrit Zalm started a blog. Again: we readers should be able to tell what the interests are that are represented by a certain blog.

#9 – Frequent posting creates the equivalent of a blogging landfill – According to Technorati, only 55% of bloggers post after 3 months of existence. The pressure of the first months to write frequently certainly contributes to people abandoning their blogs. Is that in the blogosphere’s best interest to have a third of its participants frustrated by their initial efforts?

— Does the blogosphere care? Again I do not see what the problem is. A third of the people who start a blog find out that it is quite an effort to blog. It is not everybodies idea of a pasttime, apparently not everybodies idea of a way of dealing with the sheer amount of interesting stuff available. I agree that nobody should say that one should blog every day. (Whoever said that to begin with?)

#10 – I love my family too much – Ann pointed out to me this cool blog that highlights the challenges of blogging addiction – Bloggers Anonymous. Very funny…..

If you want to be a top 50 Technorati blogger, you will most probably still need to post several times a day. But for the rest of us, we should think seriously about the added value of frequent blogging. Actually, according to Technorati, only 11% of all blogs update weekly or more. What will matter more and more is what you write and how you engage, not how often you write.

— If you want to become a top 50 Technorati-blogger you are either ultra-american (culturally speaking) or you have a very strange idea of the world. It is as if you take up cycling as a pasttime with the ambition to win the Tour of France. So I agree whole-hearted with “What will matter more and more is what you write and how you engage, not how often you write”. But I think it has never been different.

As the blogosphere matures, the measure of success will shift from traffic to reader loyalty. As Seth Godin says in his post, “blogging with restraint, selectivity, cogency and brevity (okay, that’s a long way of saying “making every word count”) will use attention more efficiently and ought to win.” As for me, I will continue to post only when I have something to say.

— Well, I on the contrary sometimes blabber on. Also because I never know what will turn out the be important… not beforehand.

Just now read Jodi Dean’s paper on blogging for Hyperpolis. Very good, makes quite a few points I would’ve liked to make. I hope it’s allright with her that I already ‘reblog’ & pick some quotes (btw, these quotes do not capture her main point really):

“To be sure, words beyond control are a noted feature of writing. Academics, journalists, and bookwriters have long been familiar with the ways our words take on a life of their own. Blogging accentuates this new life. It makes more people aware of the ways that their words are not theirs.”

“Bloggers imagine communities. In part, they mark this imagining with their link lists. Yet, these lists are as (if not more) changing, uncertain, and porous as any other border.”

“My experience with blogs is that they allow for slower reflection, the emergence of spaces of affinity through specialized writing, and the experience of a presentation and cultivation of a self. These three attributes of blogs—reflection, affinity, self-cultivation—necessarily traverse the old liberal division of the world into public and private spheres.”

“A critical theory of blogging cannot extend out of presumptions of journalism, punditry, and relations to mainstream media. Instead, it has to begin from the communicative practices specific to blogging, practices that install confrontations with difference, with otherness.”

From Jodi Dean, Blogging Difference, 2006, paper for Hyperpolis, see http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2006/10/blogging_differ.html.

With regard to the last point I cite here — basically Jodi Dean’s conclusion — I agree in principle that yes, a critical theory of blogging should start with looking at communicative practices that are specific to blogging. But there are various types of blogs: some are focussed on conversations, some (like that of Jodi Dean) are indeed confrontations with the other (but isn’t all talk, and all writing in a sense a confrontation with otherness?) And then there are also the blogs, (notably some early ones) that are not conversational at all, that do not even want the confrontation, or who prefer to not even look at comments, if there are any. (Hey, why do I write this here and not in the comments of Jodi Dean’s blog? That characterizes me…. — supposing that trackbacking does the job?). Two extremes: there’s the blog as ‘my turf’, ‘my voice’ — and there’s the blog as an invitation to chat. And on a lot of blogs there’s not much ‘otherness’ of ‘confrontation’ going on… I should say that Jodi Dean tackles this issue as well in her paper (and looks at how a blog is also ‘me talking’), yet she emphasises the confrontation with otherness where I’d put more emphasis on the ‘publish for no public’-aspect.

“Tech refuseniks will emerge as a cultural group characterized by their choice to live off the network. Some will do this as a benign way to limit information overload, while others will commit acts of violence and terror against technology-inspired change.”

Sez a study by PEW Internet Research: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/188/report_display.asp.

Also at PEW, the fairly extensive survey of (American) bloggers from last July — often referred to since then: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/186/report_display.asp. “A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers”. What is ‘funny’ though is that quite a few of the respondents stated they use MySpace for blogging, and none WordPress, MoveableType &c.

And just in: a small report on the buzzword web2.0: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/189/report_display.asp.

Wondering when (exactly) from all the aggregated clicking, tagging, writing &c. a ‘collective intelligence’ emerges, and wondering even more at what point we could speak of a community?

Look at the different, possible actions of a user — from low to high involvement:
– favoriting / bookmarking / clicking
– tagging
– commenting
– subscribing
– sharing
– networking
– writing
– refractoring (?) (criticizing, mirroring?)
– collaborating
– moderating
– leading
(copy-pasted from: http://ross.typepad.com/2006/04/power_law_of_pa.html.)

Blogging certainly comes with much less social pressures & social manners & sociality tout court, than for instance ‘hanging around’ on a forum taking part in a discussion. This is my ‘turf’. Every piece of software that facilitiates a link or a communiation comes with its own social script.

Hmm, I don’t seem to get beyond the truism tonight.

Sometimes I think advertising & marketing is so far in front of ‘us’ that we’ll never be able to catch up on what ‘they’ are doing. But a recent marketing-conference in Maastricht, http://www.marktpleindm.nl/, suggests that ‘they’ are not ahead. (Came across it through one weblog, http://ross.typepad.com/, referring to a social networking workshop for the CIA, led by a.o. David Weinberger, and checking Weinberger’s blog, http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/index.html, and finding out he’s in Maastricht at the moment). The whole conference is centered around the Cluetrain Manifesto, of 1999. Yes, that’s 7 years ago. ?!? So while the CIA is hiring ‘the big shots’ for a workshop to learn better how to use social networking tools and wiki’s, the marketeers are only now getting onto the idea that ‘markets are conversations’? Hmmm. I don’t believe it. Well, it’s a bussiness networking conference. That explains.

What strikes me more is that it takes me three clicks to go from literary theory to blogging theory, to software development, to the CIA, to marketing and back again.

Reading through about 20 papers composed for three Blogtalk conferences — some of which are very good, some of which I’m not interested in (the ones measuring & analyzing the ‘blogosphere’) — it becomes clear to me again, that my interest is in the perspective of the writer, the author. How does a writer/author use the tools of writing and publishing nowadays? I do not look at the whole blogosphere, I do not look at how we could design our tools better, or look at why certain tools are used and others are not. My question is: how does an author posit him/herself? By writer or author I do not, in this instance, refer to anybody publishing something, but to those one’s whose life depends on it — either economically or because it’s felt from ‘the soul’. This definition rules out, in a sense, those bloggers who blogs because he/she wants to join in, or start a conversation. What we see with blogging is that we get writing that is not dominantly ‘about’ something, or about itself (let’s say Jakobsons poetic function), but writing that is dominantly an invitation to chatter. (In that sense not all writing and publishing is aimed at starting or joining in a conversation). Open the channel and keep the channel open. ‘Let’s talk, it doesn’t matter about what, because I feel like talking’. Yet the boundary is very shady and will become shadier in the future. My questions concern exactly that boundary too.

Now browsing through Blogtalk-papers: http://blogtalk.net. (I’m not there, don’t ask why, earlier this year I thought about maybe going, then apparently decided not to, since I’m here, not there).

The blogtalk-presentations (happening now) are all online at Googlevideo: click from the program: http://blogtalk.net/pmwiki.php?n=Main.Program

Some links — very different btw — with somewhat web 2.0 related stuff:
http://sioc-project.org/
http://www.peopleaggregator.net/
http://structuredblogging.org/
http://www.newsvine.com/
http://www.blogdigger.com
http://itags.net/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.ourmedia.org/
http://www.digg.com/
http://www.techmeme.com/
http://wink.com/

And a very interesting small study of tagging here: http://itags.net/index.php/Study_of_tagging_with_bloggers”

I’ve been spending (losing?) time the last three days by looking at various projects that one could call ‘web 2.0’, or, more precise (?) websites & softwares that try to use (cash in?) on the power of social networking. Mostly it’s applications that provide users with some sort of wiki- blogging, FOAF-networking, and/or tagging functionality — a particular blend (melange) of it, plus a nice (?) interface designed to appeal to a certain userbase. Or hoping to find a user-base. Some of them, I’d say, are nice & will succeed to find that user-base, others come across to me as a commercial wager that can either succeed (like MySpace) or be forgotten. Some are closer to the idea of the Semantic Web, others hope that order (or usability) will emerge from the ‘multitude’.

On a personal level — speaking about this particular user: me — I haven’t seen a project that I would use regularly myself. I might sometimes use delicious, upload photos to Flickr and I have an account on Technorati (that I do not use) — but all three services are in no way necessary. I could do without. This probably posits myself as an old-skool internet-user, generation 1994. If I need wiki-functionality, I’ll use a wiki myself. (Btw my provider has set one up for every user). I can publish using ftp, html &c. Of course I enjoy the functionalities that are available now. Yet most on them strike me as ‘not designed for me’.

It’s not that I am content with whatever there is: I would really like to see a better (= more aesthetically appealing) interface for reading RSS-feeds. A better way of organizing the feeds. And I love to see better content, especially for news & background to the news.

(Not reading newspapers every day, and skipping a few days of newspaper reading last week I missed that the chess-match between Kramnik and Topalov had started! I was extremely annoyed: I like to follow that, but it’s below (or above) the radar of all the web-sources I’m bound to check. I wonder if social networking would have helped here. Chess won’t pop-up that easily in my profile.) (Just to say that — I think — there will always be a need for ‘general interest’-publications = newspapers, and for human editors next to software-channeled editors).

Software-channeled (software/computer/algorithm) newsservices like Digg and Newsvine can work. Mankind has been experimenting with these sort of concepts for ten years now (chuck a lot of stories in a database, let users vote, analyze the voting and the user-behavior & then deliver the personalized content to the user). But I’m utterly unimpressed with both Digg and Newsvine. Not enough content and no content that has my interest.

And wrt Technorati. I hardly feel tempted to explore all the different functionalities (though I’d say the search engine and the tags work quite well). I’m not interested in my ranking (don’t think I’m ranked, did I ‘claim’ my blog at all?) And what keeps me from using it, is the feeling/impression that every action I perform there is part of a huge datamining-experiment. It’s mostly a ‘feeling’ — though it is a huge datamining experiment, but Google is as well & I use Google without too many second thoughts. (We’re not going to escape datamining. The question is: who is doing it, on what grounds, what is done with the data).

I’m also not so much into social networking: I like to write & read. Let’s say — radically — : it’s the texts, the content, that weaves the web; not the functionalities of the software. I’m happy if I can give my attention to that.

Wrt to attention: I still have to order the (new) Richard Lanham book about the economy of attention. And it seems Roseanne Stone said some important things about this in her lecture at the crossmedia-week, referring that we live in a ‘partial attention’ state of mind. That’s not multitasking anymore: we’re continuously partially paying attention to lots of things. Research learns that this leads to enormous stress. We know that, but what captured my attention is the apparent difference between multitasking and partial attention. Found on http://www.uzy.nl/2006/09/28/picnic-06-dag-2/. Will check for a more elaborate reference.

Maybe the disappointed, irritated tone of this entry is to be traced back to ‘too much browsing around’ and too little concentration.

Just quickly read 2 articles that seemed interesting.

“Structure of Self-Organized Blogosphere” — (language: international english of the Chinese variety) — pdf here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/math.ST/0607361. Which is ‘one of those’ statistical analyses of linking in the blogosphere. Conclusions: ‘the blogging network has small-world property’ and the distribution of links-in and links-out follows a power-law. In other words: here’s a sort of statistical ‘proof’ of the common knowledge that a few celebrity blogs receive lots of incoming links, and most blogs hardly receive links. I’m not so interested in this kind of network-research, it seems to be more about (statistical/mathematical) network-theory, than about communication, flow of information &c. tho’ it’s possible that I miss the point.

“Copy and Paste Literacy: Literacy Practices in the Production of a MySpace Profile – An Overview” by Dan Perkel strikes me as more interesting: a simple and to the point analysis of how MySpace is used. He argues that one could see MySpace as an “informal learning environment that fosters the development of new literacies”. One could state that of a lot of similar enviroments and softwares, I’d say, yet this overview, accompanied by different theories about ‘literacy’ I found worthwhile reading. It is clear and straightforward in its approach — looking at how copy & pasting of code, links, images, music and video is used in MySpace. Although, again it does not go further than confirming what one (well, I) already believe(s). But that’s no so bad… Text is online here: http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~dperkel/media/dperkel_literacymyspace.pdf.

Found these papers thanks to http://jilltxt.net.

Perkel points to the ‘problem’, for theories of literacy, that copy&paste and remixing is generally not seen as ‘writing’. (Well, he writes: “However, the importance of copying and pasting code does not easily fit in the common conventions of reading and writing, consumption and production.”) But what if we’d go back to antique rhetorics, where learning to deal with the tropes and commonplaces, is part of learning to write & construct an argument. To really make that analogy would be stretching the point — yet I’d say that ‘writing’ is also learning to use “pre-fab elements” in a good way. (And then the question is: what is that good way?)

Nice (well, useful, quotable) quotes:

“Genre is the conceptual glue that binds social activity to technical activity. In order to understand what literacy might be, one must pay attention to the particularities of social activity, to the particularities of media, and also to the generic forms and competencies that groups share in their use of a media.” (p. 3)

“Bakhtin argues that, “genres must be fully mastered in order to be manipulated freely,” implying both a mastery of both recognizing generic forms and using them, or generic competencies (80).” (p. 6)

“HTML and CSS, like other programming languages, encourage a particular way of thinking about problems. For example, learning to use them requires learning how to think modularly. The rhetoric concerning the separation of content and style, however useful, embodies a certain way of understanding communication.” (p. 8)

“The idea that same message in different form is still the same message implies that social context of use, the specifics of the activity, and the specifics of the medium have little importance in determining meaning. Regardless of how one feels about this rhetoric, learning to think this way, uncritically, may have important consequences.” (p. 8)

“[H]ow good of a learning environment is MySpace for mastering the representational form and technical competency of web programming? Certainly, it provides an introduction to the medium, and some even may learn more about HTML and CSS as a part of trying to customize their profiles. However, the way in which the MySpace designers use CSS works completely against the point of style sheets.” (p. 8) (Hear me say: “right you are!”)

Now go on to read: Henry Jenkins, “Learning by Remixing”: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/07/learning_by_remixing.html.