Our Very Own Blogosphere

Thanks to CampusTap, the Harvard blogosphere has evolved from a few isolated websites into a tight, well-oiled forum for students to debate campus issues, keep track of the local news, and just jabber around. CampusTap is the conscription of the guerrillas—a private ring of Harvard student bloggers with a consistent form, a unified index of topics, and an easily-searchable directory of names.

Even the Cambridge Common folks have moved their operation over to the new site. Thanks to CampusTap, no Harvard blogger is an island.



A BLOGOSPHERE IS BORN

Harvard’s blogging pioneers were students who maintained personal pages—online diaries of sorts—that floated alone in the vastness of cyberspace. While the arrival of CampusTap marks the emergence of a unified Harvard blogosphere, the first steps were taken by individual Harvard organizations.

Greg M. Schmidt ’06, former president of the Harvard Democrats, started a blog before the 2004-2005 UC presidential election that received 5,000 hits per day during the election.

Two of these Harvard-specific blogs have risen to the top of the heap over the past year. Cambridge Common, created in April 2005, has seven main contributors who regularly post with generally-liberal commentary on campus issues from Larry Summers to the Mission Hill After-School Program.

Team Zebra—which began as a chronicle of its founders’ quest to bring two zebras to Harvard Square—also gained popularity during the most recent UC election.

Andrew H. Golis ’06, one of the founders of Cambridge Common, says that “readership changed” in the wake of that election cycle. “The audience had specific interest in an issue and needed more than daily news provided,” he says.

But though anyone could comment on a Team Zebra or Cambridge Common post, reporting and writing was limited only to a select group of writers. Enter CampusTap.



TAP THAT CAMPUS

With a home page that looks swiped from a Harvard marketing brochure (two pictures of Harvard football!) and the motto “This is your campus,” CampusTap aims to create an online community that “is a virtual mirror of your physical campus,” according to the site’s mission statement.

The interface networks multiple blogs by name and keyword tags, and the “Blogcrastinate” button simply “takes you to a random-ass blog,” says Harry I. Ritter ’07, one of CampusTap’s founders (and also a member of the Crimson editorial board). With free registration to anyone with a Harvard e-mail address, the site has grown steadily since its launch earlier this month.

One of the site’s founders, Adam J. Katz ’07 (also a member of the Crimson editorial board), likens the CampusTap experience to an awesome late-night conversation with roommates. “Think of that with thousands of people,” he says.

Maybe not quite yet; but the number of CampusTap bloggers continues to grow by the day, with nearly 100 active writers and 300 regular users now registered, according to Katz and Ritter.

Golis sees great potential in this Harvard blog community, and he says that moving Cambridge Common off of the public blogspot.com server and onto CampusTap will give his site exposure and connect his writers to other bloggers. “CampusTap creates a network that makes people more inclined to [blog],” he says. “The space is more useful. There will be a distinct public sphere at Harvard.”

However, the site is not yet a “virtual mirror” of the brick-and-mortar Harvard community. In the end, whether the Harvard blogosphere eventually becomes a true campus commonwealth hinges on the contributions of its participants.

“The question is not how useful the program is, but how many people are willing to spend time to produce content,” Golis says. Without quality content and active readers, ambitious experiments like CampusTap will never compare to the vibrant House life of entry-ways and dining halls.

“In blogs, people express slightly different personas than in real space,” says Harvard Law School professor John G. Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Nevertheless, Palfrey is optimistic about Harvard’s blogging community. “Blogs represent a kind of learning that can be done in public and across communities,” he says. Palfrey believes that sites like CampusTap are using technology to break down the “social strata and different institutional barriers that are erected here.”