[-empyre-] To start off - from Jill Walker

["empyre-admin" <empyre-admin@imap.cofa.unsw.edu.au>]

Hi everyone, and thanks, Melinda, for the introduction. I'm both 
honoured to be invited to be a guest here, and thrilled to have a 
chance to talk about blogs - I'm rather passionate about them ;) 
Sorry too, that I didn't post anything yesterday - I'm subscribed to 
the digest, so I didn't see Melinda's intro till today... I'll be 
here lots for the next couple of weeks, anyway, so we've got lots of 
time.

What I'd really like to discuss with you is how weblogs can be part 
of a *practice* rather than just chatting. I'm a researcher, and so I 
blog as part of my research practice. It could just as well be seen 
as an artistic practice, as at http://noemata.no.

I'm fascinated by the way blogs are about connections and networks. 
Start a blog, link to something or someone, and people will hear your 
links. They'll follow their referrers back to your blog, or they'll 
see from Blogdex (http://blogdex.media.mit.edu) that you linked to 
the same thing they did. Perhaps they'll blog your comment, and when 
you read that you're drawn into a conversation. You're becoming part 
of an emergent community, a cluster of blogs, nodes of ideas or nodes 
of opinions on the web.

The emergence of connections is where this is different to email 
lists and usenet and all those spaces, though there are heaps of 
similarities of course. When I post this message to the list, I have 
a vague idea of who it'll go to, based on the tone of the discussion 
this far and on the theme of the list. There's a clear theme: "an 
arena for the discussion of media arts practice" says the welcome 
message I got when I subscribed. I can probably get a list of 
subscribers from the listserv, at least, I could on many lists.

When you blog, anyone can read it. Really, of course, your audience 
is quite limited. People self-select really fast - I certainly don't 
stick around a blog I find boring. Over time, clusters of blogs grow 
as people link to each other. I find this kind of emergent audience 
fascinating, especially because of the way that readers - and writers 
- find each other rather than signing up for something or being 
brought into something from the start. You might want to have a look 
at Mark Bernstein's a-life experiments of how blog clusters grow - 
this is with simulated blogs. http://markBernstein.org/alife2.html I 
love this stuff.

Do any of you read or write blogs? Any directions you'd like the 
discussion to take?

More later,
Jill
-- 

Jill Walker / Dept of Humanistic Informatics / University of Bergen / 
5020 Bergen / Norway
http://cmc.uib.no/jill
jill.walker@uib.no