::scr Blogging

[jo walsh]

> > > I can see why this is attractive to a non-technical user, 
> > medium/culture they're entering in to.  or is that partly what you meant?
> who want to publish something on the web, or build a site, but
> knowledge of exactly what's being passed through their processor,

i'm sorry, i can't really engage in the dialectics ;)
i can't advocate the priesthood, but the perceived barrier to entry is/was
a good thing in that it gave the writer time to reflect on how they are
presenting themselves, whether it's justified to expend the energy to say
what they are saying; not garbage in, garbage out but effort in,
interest out, something the blog format doesnt really encourage. 

when i started my personal website i was inspired by
http://www.justin.org, an or perhaps The ur-blog. i tried though,
consciously or not, to write about ideas or personal experiences which
provoked ideas. though they would be compulsive, personal rants i'd hoped  
others would enjoy reading them. or i wouldnt have bothered.

i stopped putting much on my website a couple of years ago; mostly because
i was getting involved in other, more direct forms of online
communication, joining a lot of mailing lists and irc channels, some other
outlet, or spending more time reading. possibly also because blog-style
sites were becoming popular, and i'm some kind of information snob.
    
before i had a personal website, my web publishing efforts consisted in
archives of friends' party pictures and their pilled-up prosody. 
as microsoft and apple agitate our need for a panoply of digital devices
to enhance our lifestyles, future blogs will be rammed with images, sound
and video; it'll be a fuck of a lot harder to filter and find interest in
that, unless our pattern recognition tools are sharper and less
prescriptive.  
  
the validity there is in the thought that goes into it: while arp's
photographs and alex's pencam images are both personal, l find the
former much more pleasant to look at, because of the
presentation/navigation/selection care that has gone into them (sorry
alex, i know you're working on them, just a recent example of content
thrown up in batch without thought)      

> > "technological priesthood" should concentrate more on allowing people more
> > of that choice.
> think the web is the wrong medium for this kind of writing,

i don't think anyone can say what the web is for.
choice is available, tools to create careful things but do people want
them? education is necessary.

> certainly when it ends up in broad public indexes like google.

i do worry that the utility of broad public indexes is diminishing.
balkanisation again, and its desirableness or not. 
the world around you is full of shallow gloss - look at it!
i don't know what we can do about that, retreat, engage, adjust our
filters.

strange z.


--
In order to find the real artichoke, we divested it of its leaves