Red IV
Thursday, September 19, 2002
Lay aside the garments that are stained with sin,
And be washed in the blood of the Lamb;
There’s a fountain flowing for the soul unclean,
O be washed in the blood of the Lamb!
*
Sparked by the weblogs and journalism panel discussion the other night at the
UCB School of Journalism: can a weblog have a limited life span? If it does,
is it still a weblog?
First, there's something more to the definition of a weblog (frequently updated, reverse chronological order, permalinks), something to
do with the way content is produced over time, perhaps in serial or iterative way, a process more like the writing process- prewrite, write,
rewrite, edit, and publish- in its truest, messiest form: not a narrow,
horizontal, sequential, beginning-to-end process, but involving much looping from
later steps back into earlier steps, maybe several times. (For example, I cranked this out as the last thing of the day in my office about 6:00 p.m., but knew that later in the evening I'd think about and then look at this and need to rewrite some of these sentences; it's now 10:40 p.m.)
Dan Gillmor writes three weekly columns. The third one comes out of that week's
blogging. He uses the weblogging process to produce his third column. That's
an interesting twist on how to produce a column. And it seems to me that that
process could be used to produce set pieces, say, a book. What if the purpose
of a weblog was to write a book, and when the book was done, in a weblog, the
weblog was ended? The book remains, it's static. But it was produced using
weblog technology and process. So, is it a book or a weblog? Does a weblog
have to be continual and ongoing? Or is it the process, too, that defines a weblog?
The loose definition of a weblog that emerged on the panel is that they are
regularly updated, reverse chronological order, with persistent links. At some
point later another criteria emerged, mostly because it wasn't really addressed,
that weblogs are continual, open-ended, ongoing, and endless, or at least go on as
long as someone wants to keep doing it. Weblogs end, it seems, when someone
runs out of time, or loses interest or access.
I would argue that there is a place for weblogs with an intentionally limited
life-span.
Isn't it possible that a weblog could be used for a specific content focus,
audience, and purpose over a specific period of time, and that the content created,
disseminated, and archived during that lifespan builds a body of work that is framed by its ending and the technology,
and then exists as an archive that is still accessible and useful? Can a weblog
transition from being an archive to an artifact?
This interests me because I have the desire to build small sets or series of
content objects, either text or image, that are then gathered and archived to
create a larger object (in the digital library world an object can also consist
of a number of individual objects), and so by doing this there is a kind of framing of
the object, which is still a part of of larger weblog archive but also becomes a standalone
object. For example, the nine drawings with writing I did recently, Nine, exist
in three ways: as nine individiuals pages (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9);
as a single page compilation;
and as an html
file stored in my filer.
Why might this be interesting or important? Off the top of my head, because
it's about different ways of thinking of how content is created and organized,
different approaches to the production process, different intentions and expectations,
different uses of the same technology, and different possiblities for users
and audiences.
Incidentally, JD Lasica reports on the panel, and he has links to other reporting bloggers. Scott Rosenberg links to some past Salon articles about blogging.
Say...
The opinions or statements
expressed herein should not be taken as a position of or endorsement
by the University of California, Berkeley. Nor should the
opinions or statements expressed herein be taken as a position
of or endorsement of the University of California, Berkeley.
Links on these pages to commercial sites do not represent
endorsement by the University of California or its affiliates.
|
