sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

While researching for my current paper (on symbolic exchange in open source software), I stumbled across this excellent blog by Erik Davis, a PhD candidate in History of Religions at the University of Chicago.

Probably the most uninteresting thing I wrote during my first semester at Georgetown was a short review of the Green Party's national website (www.GP.org). The assignment was pretty basic, and so the result was fairly bland... a blow by blow critique of the website, based on a set of criteria provided by the professor.

i'm sure it's pretty obvious at this point, but i guess i should formally announce that i've relaunched sleepcamel.net with a new look and a new backend. i haven't bothered to go through my old livejournal entries, nor have i moved any of my old content, but i really just wanted to get it back up so I could start blogging again. i'll probably do more migration later. or maybe not.

For my Intro to CCT midterm last semester, I wrote a paper titled "Podcasting and the Public Interest: Children's Programming on the Internet," which was a very feable attempt to discuss podcasting in terms of the historical debate over broadcast television and the public interest. It was possibly the worst paper I've ever written, so I wasn't horribly surprised that I was asked to rewrite it.

I just got out of my postmodernism course. I hadn't done the best job on the week's readings, and I was totally hopped up on coffee, so I said absolutely nothing during the discussion, but at the tail end my mind started making connections that I felt were worth recording...

For my class on Media & Political Engagement, during the first semester of my masters program, I wrote a very short paper called "The Internet News Effect?," which was an exploration of the effect of online news sources on political cynicism. This was partially a response to the article "The Daily Show Effect" (Baumgartner and Morris, 2006), which attributed cynicism among viewers of The Daily Show to the show itself.