My "Like" Links - Post#1

It's been 10 months (!) since I published my first blog post with the everlasting question: "To blog or not to blog?"… Now I have decided that the answer must be: "To blog"!

When I thought about what I wanted to contribute to the world using this modest platform, I realized that during the day, every day, I read a lot (everything from news articles to academic studies). So, I decided to create a new section of posts called: links with my "Like."

I'll focus more on the news coverage and less on the academic publications in order to maintain a wide variety of topics (unlike the narrow ones that are included in my Ph.D. research). I'm hoping to post a new piece every two weeks or so, collecting the articles I liked the most.
This first post is exceptional because I have accumulated several links in the past months (the links are sorted from the newest to the oldest. HEB = in Hebrew).

Hope you'll like my posts & find some interesting topics to think about :-)

• Six degrees of aggregation: How The Huffington Post ate the Internet. Columbia Journalism Review- Michael Shapiro (May12)

• The Science of civil war: What makes heroic strife- Computer models that can predict the outbreak and spread of civil conflict are being developed. The Economist (21Apr12)

• Behind the scene of the Internet hits: Why is everybody talking about KONY? Calcalist- Omer Kabir (4Apr12)- HEB

• Many Voices, but Still One Times- The tension between individual journalists' social media expressions and their employers' established standards. The New York Times- Arthur S. Brisbane (18Feb12) 

• A Newspaper, and a Legacy, Reordered: The Washington Post Recast for a Digital Future. The New York Times- Jeremy W. Peters (11Feb12) 

• Are Silicon Valley tech bloggers truly objective? Los Angeles Times- Michael Hiltzik (22Feb12) 

• Twitter- Year in review. Especially- Hot topics (Jan12)

• My 10 years of blogging: Reflections, Lessons & Some Stats Too. GigaOm- Om Malik (26Nov11)

• Separating You and Me? 4.74 Degrees. The world is even smaller than you thought. The New York Times- John Markoff (21Nov11)

• Study shows that 50 percent of consumed tweets come from one of 20k influential users. TNW- Sherilynn Macale (3Oct11)

• Audience Analysis of Major News Accounts on Twitter- Comparing @AJEnglish/@BBCNews/@CNN/@TheEconomist/@FoxNews/@NYTimes. SocialFlow- Gilad Lotan, Devin Gaffney, Cherie Meyaer (Aug11)

• Israel: The Start-Up Nation taking on Silicon Valley. The Telegraph- Emma Barnett (21Jul11)  

• Newspaper Extinction Timeline- Further explanation. Trends in the Living Networks- Ross Dawson (18Nov10)

"To Blog or Not to Blog?"

For Years, I have been following blogs on a daily basis, examining the phenomenon with great interest… as expected from someone who researches the field.

The question that I've been asking myself & have been asked by others was: "Why don't you open your own blog?"

My answer always was: "Since I'm a prolific writer and lean to perfectionism and obsessively following the 'beat of the net,' I can do blogging, but then I'll have no life. Instead of dealing with my Ph.D. research, I'll only operate the blog".

And then, I got this task in the framework of the course "Information Technologies": Build yourself a website using HTML. Well, I did it.

For a not so technical person like me, it was a challenge… so I sat down and read explanations on the web and developed, step-by-step, not an impressive design, but it ultimately came out nice and modest. The experience led to my decision: to start a "real" blog.

Here comes the first post… and I'm still struggling with Shakespeare's question:

Shakespeare

Let's wait and see…