In the latest installment of his “Alertbox Newsletter, Jakob Nielsen declares “much of the Web is like an anthill built by ants on LSD: many sites don’t fit into the big picture, and are too difficult to use because they deviate from expected norms.” He goes on to complain about how many web sites don’t follow any of the design conventions established on the web.

In several realms of my life (teaching and research), I’ve been trying to define what exactly makes a weblog. I’ve started off on a web search to try to help me find some authoritative resources on this.

One of the best articles that I’ve ran across on this subect is entitled “What makes a weblog a weblog?” by Dave Winer. Winer is currently associated with Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, but he is a blog pioneer founding early blog software company Radio UserLand and part of the team that came up with the RSS specification for syndicating blogs (and all sorts of other things) on the Internet.

According to a post in Poynter Online’s E-Media Tidbits pastor’s may soon start encouraging church members to bring their cell phones to church. Instead of passing the plate, a group of church’s in Denmark have set-up where members can give via a SMS system on their cell phones.

We’ve all seen how blogs can be used to inform and persuade, but another nice use for them is to educate. Educause, a higher ed technology consortium, published an article in their September/October magazine on Educational Blogging. They profile one school in Canada who is encouraging classes to set up their blogs and opening up for the whole world to read. The principal for this school wrote in his own blog, ““The school administration’s objective with this weblog initiative was to offer students and teachers a support tool to promote reflective analysis and the emergence of a learning community that goes beyond the school walls.”

At first glance, I really wasn’t impressed with Apple’s new iMac G5 deisign. As I took a deeper look, I decided that I just had to have one. Unfortunately, that decision comes down to food for my kids or the new iMac and my kids will always win that one.

The New York Times has written a great story about the technical needs of the Democratic National Convention. They even have a wireless SWAT team to lookout for people operating unauthorized wireless devices that may interfere with authorized wireless devices.

I made a big deal of whether bloggers should receive credentials to the political conventions. I was specifically speaking of bloggers who aren’t mainstream journalists. Well there are a lot of mainstream journalists who are blogging the Democratic National Convention this week. Poyter.org has a great list of blogs at the convention including Dave Barry.

After much debate and arguments, some bloggers are receiving credentials to the national political conventions.

I think there are more than a few mainstream journalists who are dismayed at the conventions recognition of the bloggers. Primarily, because of the publics tendency to confuse websites expressing personal opinions, like blogs, and journalistic websites who try to be objective. Tom McPhail, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri agrees with these sentiments. ”They’re certainly not committed to being objective. They thrive on rumor and innuendo,” McPhail says. Bloggers ‘’should be put in a different category, like ‘pretend’ journalists.”

Although, independent bloggers aren’t welcome at the national political conventions this summer, the AP plans to to launch its own blogs at the convention. Although this is a very smart move by AP, I really don’t expect anything out of the ordinary that you wouldn’t later see in a wire summary of the convention happenings.

I wrote a few weeks ago about the appearance of Google’s Gmail offering a gigabyte of email space. Apparently, having a gmail account has become a status symbol among nerds and techies as you can only have a Gmail account if someone who has an account sends you an invitation for one. Now, some gmail accounts are selling on Ebay and there is even a website dedicated to swapping things for a Gmail invite.