hi all you can download the WritingCloudPost here - This is a newspaper containing the articles i produced during my research process:
I crowd-sourced questions in forums and yahooanswers and reorganized the answers into larger articles
http://www.writingcloud.co
I just thought it would be good also to ask them:
I just posted the questions on these websites
It is 9 o'clock and the experiment is now running for nearly 12 hours
I decided to leave this experiment run for 12 more hours, thus ending around 8 tonight after 24 hours.
I finally had the experiment running for 36h and here are the results
I thought it would be interresting to give here some data about the lenght of the average blog post.
Essentially, the distribution is a normal curve with positive skew - with half of all blogs having an average of 100-249 words per post.
Consistently shorter posts are rare - usually limited to blogs devoted to non-written content (pictures, videos, audio etc.), and with celebrity gossip blogs having a tendency to be more concise -Perez Hilton, for example.
On the other end of the spectrum, there's a distinct jump in word length for some blogs - in these cases it's usually a transition between writing for entertainment to writing for reference. With the transition comes the ability to post much longer articles, without the fear of losing interest. The articles over at A List Apart are a good example of this.
I just posted the last article. It took me about 2 hours in total to edit the 4 articles from the bits and pieces I collected on the 3 websites. I spent most of my time editing the one about second world war as it is the longest (about 3000 words). Nevertheless I mainly worked on articulating paragraph and didn t touch the body of the text that much. Strangely enough, people who were writing on different forums complement each others really well.
It has been about two weeks I didn’t do any other experiments due to work overload but I managed the last two days to do a new one which is pretty interesting.
Also I did film all my activities during the experiment so I will be able to post a video soon.
I bought the Financial Times from 1st of June and grabbed couple of articles. From the body of those articles I extracted material to build questions. These questions were a bit more documented than the ones from the former experiment.
Here they are:
Will MP’s expenses scandal influence the coming European elections?
The scandal continue to cause reactions as Alistair Darling, in charge of the UK’s finances seems to have claimed for six month the rent for a flat in south London while also claiming allowances for his free apartment in Downing street. With the European election coming, do you think this scandal will influence voters?
Cattle’s farming is destroying the rain forest in Brazil. How could we avoid that without damaging the Brazilian economy?
Cattle farming account for more than 7 billion dollar a year in Brazil’s exports. However, this practice is the most important cause of the tearing down of the rain forest. How could it be possible to solve this issue?
Is North Korea about to start World War 3 or is it only building tensions to attract attention toward itself?
Satellites spotted North Korean Long distance missile being transported by train this week. North Korea got a history of shifting equipment to attract attention and generate crisis, knowing that US spy satellites would detect those movement. However, North Korea fired last month a long-range missile over Japan. Where do you think this lead?
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What would be the best strategy to end the war in a responsible way in Afganistan ?
Last month the Obama administration announced its new strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A few days ago, Robert Gates, the defence secretary, said the US and its allies had a year in with to make meaningful progress. What these progresses should be?
Could teaching business be the solution to the 3rd world poverty issues ?
The French HEC management school is currently helping producers in Burkina Faso to become more business minded. If this measure was globalized, could it be the way for solving world’s poverty problems?
Instead of posting those questions in random/generic places like yahoo answer I looked after forums with focus into the questions. I failed to found a very relevant forum for the Brazilian cattle and teaching business in Africa.
Here are the forums/website I used from last time:
Yahoo answer
convinceme.net
Onlinedebate.com
And the new ones:
Politicalcrossfire.com
UKdebate.co.uk
debatepolitics.com
Politicsforum.co.uk
I was blocked by moderators on forum.greenpeace.org
The reasons for this blocking are unknown on the Greenpeace forum. I suspect that they just dislike political subject and want to keep a very strict “editorial” line that is directed toward the image they re promoting.
Anyway, it took me hell of a lot of time to navigate, register and understand how all these different forums worked, as they are all different from each other’s. Also navigating in the maze of categories and subcategories was very confusing. It took me about 2 hours post these five questions on theses 8 platforms.
I left the experiment running for 36 hours. From midnight the 1st of June to midday the 3 rd of June and the results were amazing. I did gather 8 129 words of relevant data (I didn’t copy the one line comments and jokes) and a lot of link to very relevant documents and videos.
I thought i d share with you some nice art project a came across during my research
Artist Aaron Koblin's phalanx of 10,000 sheep, all drawn by random strangers through Amazon's labor distribution mechanism, The Mechanical Turk. Koblin's goal was to raise questions about the emergence of new labor systems in the information age.
Murmur Study is a work-in-progress that examines the rise of micro-messaging technologies such as Twitter and Facebook Status Updates. One might describe these messages as a kind of digital small talk. But unlike water-cooler conversations, these fleeting thoughts are accumulated, archived and indexed digitally by corporations. While the future of these archives are still to be seen, the sheer volume of publicly accessible personal expression should give us pause.
These first studies presented at the 2009 Spark Festival and the Experimental and Media Arts Exhibitionconsider the absurdity of the physical archive by printing live Twitter message from the Minneapolis Metro area during the exhibition. Twenty thermal receipt printers continuously produce and endless waterfall of text, which accumulates in tangled piles at the bottom.
Murmur study is an ongoing collaboration with Márton András Juhász and the Kitchen Budapest.
Hi all this is the first post on the writingcloud blog.