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

[Beverley Hood <bhood@easynet.co.uk>]

Hello Jill,

can you send a quick intro to what exactly a blog is?  - haven't come across
them before. Sounds interesting and as I'm strapped for time in terms of
going off and researching would welcome a quick overview so I can follow the
discussion.

Also, tried to check out your noemata url as an example but there must be a
mistake in what you sent.

Best, Bev

> From: "empyre-admin" <empyre-admin@imap.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Reply-To: empyre@imap.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Date: Wed, 5 Jun 2002 13:19:27 +1000
> To: "empyre" <empyre@imap.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: [-empyre-] To start off  - from Jill Walker
> 
> 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
> 
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