Writing and the Digital Life

WDL has moved to a new address

The WDL blog has moved to a new address. It is now on our server at DMU and will soon disappear from this site so please change your bookmarks and subscriptions asap. You will find that it looks rather different and is still being designed as we get used to Movable Type, so please bear with us.

The new url is http://www.hum.dmu.ac.uk/blogs/wdl/
Atom is http://www.hum.dmu.ac.uk/blogs/wdl/atom.xml
RSS still being set up.

Most of the current WDL writers have moved with us and we have two new writers - Randy Adams and Maria x. Look out for their first posts soon.

Meanwhile, to find out what a splog is, visit

http://www.hum.dmu.ac.uk/blogs/wdl/2006/04/splog_poetry_1.html

Myspace - creative space or Hobbesian morass?

The ever-interesting Nicholas Carr adds his $.02 to the increasing controversy over MySpace. He complains that:

When I look around MySpace I don't see much that's "strange and wonderful" - or "deeply disturbing," either. I wish I did. What I see is a dreary sameness, a vast assembly of interchangeable parts.

Of course this is not surprising - not everyone has the skills to express themselves in a creative and interesting fashion and if they don't, of course they will fall back on pre-digested tropes and the 'content' that requires the least effort for the largest potential effect - the display of their own bodies. But the interesting point I feel is that at least these people are being encouraged to try to express themselves and that this may at least encourage and enable a small minority of those that try to hone and refine their skills and become genuinely creative (or at least more self-aware).

English teachers have tried to encourage this sort of thing with diaries and self-reflective fiction for years but this arena (unlike the classroom) has peer pressure behind it and offers the producers the potential for peer reinforcement if they can produce something compelling.

Not to say that there aren't considerable dangers as well, of course!

More on writers and bloggers

No time yet to summarise yesterday's events, but I just want to follow up on my last post. This morning in the pool I met Halley Suitt who writes a blog called Halley's Comet and is doing some very interesting work . We had an intriguing conversation about the gulf between bloggers, who are writers often coming from non-literary backgrounds and with no involvement with the publishing world, and writers who may wish to become bloggers but may be weighed down by the very literary background which in the past has supported them. (well, we didn't actually say that, but that's how I am interpreting it.)

We were then joined by yet another escapee from the AWP conference, someone who has been attending it for years but finds it bogged down in ego and tradition, and who also wished she had gone to  SXSW instead. My first thought was that maybe we should take the news to next year's AWP and give it another whirl, but actually I think I'd rather organise something myself and bring everyone together. Spring 2007 seems a good slot to aim for.  Watch this space for 'when two worlds collide'!

Where writers and bloggers don't meet

I've arrived in Austin, Texas for SXSW Interactive and guess what - the Associated Writing Programs conference is going on right next door at the same time. I was just chatting with one of the AWP delegates and she told me there isn't much at all going on there about digital writing - maybe they should come over here :)  I did a panel on digital writing with trAce at AWP way back in around 1999/2000 and I know Web Del Sol and the ELO have also presented there, but maybe it has subsided back into print now. Was anyone there who can report on that? Anyway, at SXSW there's lots of discussion going on about new media and writing of all kinds. More on that soon, along with my final report on ETech, which has been somewhat delayed due to spending a day travelling from San Diego to Austin.

Is it me, or is it Movable Type?

Can anyone help on this? I have been using Six Apart's Typepad  for blogging for the past two years and have been very pleased with it, so I wrote a grant application to buy a copy of Movable Type   'the premiere choice for weblog power users', to install on our brand new Faculty webserver (purchased according to MT's spec). We were excited to get the grant and installed the new server and software in early January, since when we have been experiencing endless difficulties and now, almost 2 months later, we are no nearer to getting it up and running. The whole thing is hugely frustrating.

The development team includes myself, not a programmer but a very experienced Typepad user, plus our Systems Manager, who specialises in php and perl, and a web developer colleague with whom I have worked for several years on Cold Fusion based applications. No novices, I hear you say. So why can't we get any of it working properly? And why is it so difficult to get appropriate MT support? Their helpdesk people are friendly and prompt, but we seem to be going round in circles. And they will only allow one of us to have a helpdesk password, so either I hand over my private passwords to the team, or everything has to go through me.

My biggest grouse is that I had thought I was buying a product something like Typepad. Instead, I've got an empty shell which has to be customised with various bits and pieces from numerous different plugin designers, most of which bear little relationship to the  functions I liked so much in Typepad, such as Typelist, Design, Themes, Layout etc. Furthermore it seems to require a great deal of template design from the users themselves, and since we bought this in order to show colleagues and students how easy it is to blog, I'm somewhat depressed at the idea of having to train them all to use html templates. We have no  money to pay experts to disentangle the situation, and anyway we rather resent any idea that we should have to buy in expertise when we already have plenty of skills at our disposal. So what shall we do?

This was certainly not in my imaginings for our wonderful new faculty blogosphere :(

Yours, demoralised and fed up with Movable Type

Blog civility vs listserv civility

There's a row brewing in the blogosphere at the moment which might benefit from a look back to the listserv past, and since this blog grew out of a listserv and is still operating across those two worlds I'm curious to hear what you think about this issue. It all began with an argument between Mena Trott (co-founder of Six Apart software, upon which our blog sits) and Ben Metcalfe which occurred recently at Les Blogs, a blogging conference in Paris. Follow those links to read both sides.

As a result**, Nancy White is convening a panel at SXSW to discuss Blog Civility. Nancy and I both go back a long way and years ago when trAce first began I used to regularly visit Nancy's site to learn how to manage online community. She also interviewed me in 1999.

I'm very interested to see that the discussions going on then are now being revisited via new technologies with different kinds of functionalities such as those used at Les Blogs. if you have time, check out the Les Blogs incident and post a comment with your views on it, especially in relation to listserv issues. To be honest, it looks pretty calm compared with the flame wars of yore! Not to mention the Rape in Cyberspace at LambdaMOO and various other cyberconflicts. But then, the world is changing and civility is a much hotter public topic now than it was 5/10 years ago. What do you think?

**correction: as Nancy points out below, this panel was organised quite a while before Les Blogs.

The economics of non-commercial blogging

Has anyone come across any figures on what people can expect to make if they put ads on their weblogs via Google, Yahoo or others these days? I only have one data point - a blogger with several hundred readers a week made $25 over the period of a few months. Surely by now someone has produced some kind of chart or database (or academic article?)

I don't believe most bloggers do it for the money but it would be interesting to know whether they make any noticeable sums at all...

Dying and the Digital Life

Recently I was listening to a webcast of Hubert Dreyfus, professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley (Nihilism and the Internet). Dreyfus wonders if the anonymity of the Web leads to nihilism. We have discussed here, the pros and cons, and for that matter, the levels of anonymity in the use of email list vs. blogs. It seems clear that email, text messaging and blog posts have become much more popular and anonymous tools than telephones because they alleviate the need to actually communicate with another human being in person with all the accompanying anxiety and misinterpretation.

Not long ago, on another list, in another digital galaxy, a regular member revealed that he had had a stroke. He mentioned his sudden dizziness, headache, numbness and partial paralysis in his lower arm and hand. It appears that he has recovered and is past the incident.

It occurred to me . . .what would have happened if he had actually died of that stroke. In these virtual communities, with these anonymous relationships, there are infinitely more than six degrees of separation, there are no phone numbers to call, no relatives or neighbors to ask, no one on the list would have known, and the member would have disappeared in the cyber ether, never to be heard from again. Think of it. Now that is despairing!

As the use of a news aggregator protects us from news and information that we are not interested in, or simply do not want to confront, the inherent selective, discriminatory characteristics of digital life also protects us from the patently unsavory aspects of human to human contact, including death. Is the digital world then, a solipsistic construct, an elite heavily walled community peopled only with "safe" citizens and "acceptable" ideas? 

Talk at the Café Scientifique, Leicester, UK, Tue 8th Nov, 7.30pm

I'm giving a talk at the Café Scientifique in Leicester, UK, on Tuesday 8th November, at 7.30pm. Please do come along. I'll be talking about transliteracy, blogging, Web 2.0, and my book Hello World. More information at http://www.cafescientifiqueleicester.com/ Hope to see you there.

The Rebirth of the Author

An interesting piece on CTheory by Nicholas Rombes entitled The Rebirth of the Author which puts forward the idea that Blogging is very much living proof that the Author is far from dead. Not so long back some new media theory was championing hypertext as working proof of the truths of post-structuralism (Landow et al) and now it seems it can disprove it too!

http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=480

He also has some interesting things to say about academic writing and the nature of authorship and digital technology.

How do you choose which links to recommend?

Rob has drawn my attention to this post at plasticbag.org about responsible linklogging. Quote:

What interests me is that most people don't really seem to provide much context to their linking. Have they read and approved of the things they link to, or is it really just a linkdump full of 'toread's? How seriously can I take someone's linklog? Is it a personal guide to quality stuff that they find interesting or wish they could comment on, or do people treat it like oneupmanship - wanting to be first on the next meme?

Interesting point. How do you regard the status of links provided by others? How do you make your own decisions about which links you send or show to other people?

New Blog: Sporkworld the Community

Sporkworld.org is launching a new site, Sporkworld: The Community at www.sporkworld.org//index.php, to accompany the main Sporkworld site at www.sporkworld.org  Please come visit the site, add your comments to the articles, vote in the current poll (about poetry), and submit links for the links page.

The new site will feature articles, reviews, and commentary on the major themes addressed in the web works on Sporkworld.  There will also be regular contests and opportunities to participate in collaborative projects to be published on Sporkworld.  More interactive features will be added as the site matures.  For example news feeds and discussion fora are anticipated, if there is enough user interest.

Sporkworld: The Community eagerly seeks article submissions.

Blog censorship handbook released

A handbook that offers advice to bloggers who want to protect themselves from recrimination and censors has been released by Reporters Without Borders.

From the BBC - more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4271062.stm

Download booklet

Lifehacker’s guide to weblog comments

We've been talking lately about the formalities of posting comments in blogs so this article in Lifehacker rather caught my eye.

Aggregators, what is lost and what is gained?

For those of us who use aggregators, we've undoubtedly experienced a "streamlining" effect to some degree. All the information in one place, with one look, subjugated to our every organizational whim. It's fabulous and somewhat distressing to discover that what I really want to read seems to be less about politics or art than about toilet humor and absurdity--like the Onion or Overheard in NewYork. Those posts get read right away while the serious news of the day piles up ever higher in the tally of unread posts.

So there's something personal and revealing about using an aggregator. Something human, you might say. But there's also something insidious about the regimented lines of text delivered to my browser window. Stripped of context like font size and page placement, each article from the BBC marches past in a uniform row. On the one hand, I decide for myself what's worth reading. On the other hand, I miss out on a great deal of subtext. When CNN reveals that my government has ordered military action against someone somewhere in the world (can you guess where I'm from?), I am spared the accompanying photographs. Whether those photographs depict grateful, flag-waving citizens or decimated hospitals lying in ruins, I receive no help interpreting the words. Do I need exposure to subtext to become able to identify it? To correctly receive the message that someone else has carefully constructed for me? What happens when we strip away design and are left with only bare  naked words?

The Citizen Journalist

There's an event coming up at The Frontline Club on 29 September that those based in London might be interested in.  The Frontline Club:  it's about the role of the 'citizen journalist' - that's ordinary people - and the influence on mainstream media of their reporting of news and current affairs.  The recent bombings in London brought this to the attention of everyone here in the UK - the most arresting media images were made by people on their mobile phones.  Looks like an interesting cross-section of speakers.  I'll be there.

The Frontline Club is a club run for foreign correspondents and war correspondents; though the club itself is private, they run a series of screenings and talks that anyone can attend.

Kate

Me and my blogosphere

The posts from Millie and Lawrence about the difficulties they encounter in using the blog are interesting, and also reveal to me how differently we interact with the web. So I've decided to post a few notes about how I  operate in the blogosphere. Obviously this is not a better or worse use of the web, just different in some ways. And there's no room to tell all, so this is just a snippet.

It would be interesting to hear similar accounts from others who use aggregators. Since this is quite long I've created an extended post for it - click to continue...

List vs. Blog, reprise

I have to say that I totally agree with Lawrence who totally agreed with me (not through any planned joint assault on blogging; I haven't communicated with him about this).

One more usability example:  I just moved from where I had been for almost a year back to my other home. I took my hard disk with all my recent work home with me.  I arrived here at my old computer, which has been maintained in good health.

Arriving home, I quickly added a new mail rule to sort WDL list mail into a new email folder in Outlook Express.  This was very quick.  Then I received my mail, and Zappo! I could post to the WDL list without any further ado by replying to any list email and just changing the subject line.

Then I went to post on the blog.  I had to locate the address of the Typepad site for posting on the blog (luckily Google worked for this so I didn't have to  search through my old mail that was archived on my portable disk but not yet integrated into OE).  Then I had to remember my login and password, which of course my old computer did not know.  Then I posted.  I got to the blog itself from the useful link on the Typepad site, so I did not have to Google it and open that can of worms... 

Then I went to comment on Lawrence's post (and I had to click a bunch of times to read the previous post along with its comment by Sue and return to the main blog page first, while if the discussion were on list  I would have been able to see the comments as soon as they arrived).  To comment, I had to enter in all my personal information again even though I had just been posting to the list, because the comments system for the hoi polloi is separate from the posting system on Typepad for "authors."  Presumably now the old machine's browser will remember my info for commenting so I won't have to do this again...

In the net today, many people use multiple machines and share machines with others, so that web interfaces that rely on bookmarks and saved login/password combos on the browser don't work well. 

(Imagine having to go through this each time I wanted to post or comment and not just when I moved house because I was using a computer at an Internet Cafe or library...  It is my understanding that much of world accesses the web through public computers...  Of course each web site can save users' personal info at server side but that means you have to rely on each site you use to do it and still you have to tell the site who you are so it can get your info and there are privacy issues.  For example, most people find it easier to have browser bookmarks than to use a web service that stores people's web links along with advertising, with the risk of the whole world knowing about one's sexual proclivities, illnesses, political views, etc. if they can access the bookmark page on the web.)

This is not to say I dislike the blog (which I do like, especially as an author but I would read it if I weren't writing for it).  If the blog consisted only of permanently important posts (such as well-edited mini essays that deserve to stay online or things one would want to reference multiple times, such as calls for work, work announcements, and so forth) or more well-linked-together discussions, I would like it better.  I am enjoying the bad food thread on the list but I am glad it is not on the blog where it would be a waste of space.  On the other hand, I do not like chasing discussions from a blog post to that post's comments to another post.  It would be better if the discussion were all in one place, or at least if it were mechanically linkable, like emails with the same subject line.

I am grateful for Sue for starting both list and blog and I am glad to belatedly enter the blogosphere this way.  (I plan to launch my own blog soon.  I have already built most of it using geeklog but I haven't launched it yet.  This blogging experience has been helpful in contemplating my own blog.)

I am interested to know how Sue woulc compare this list vs. blog issue with the two forms of web publishing on the trAce site.  At trAce, there were polished articles by respected authors on the front page of the site, and forums where anyone could discuss the articles as well as many other topics.  That division made more sense to me because the articles were edited and selective and there were few of them,  so I always read them if I was at all interested in the topic (and I was on the email one-way announcement list to receive announcements when new articles were published).  I used the forums much less, because they were slow -- like a blog -- and also you wouldn't know if you were going to find what you wanted.  But the forums were at least threaded so that you could follow discussions.  The forums were useful if you wanted someone to answer your question or test your new work.  Moreover (I think the trAce forums have this feature-- some forum software has it) it could email you when someone posted to a thread you were interested in (that is true of the WDL blog as well).

Millie

P.S. I just realized that this is long and must be posted and not hidden in a comment, so I now go through more meshuggas.

The List vs The Blog

To clarify my meaning in reply to Sue's comment.

When I say of the blog : "it doesn't cut it for me in comparison with an email list in terms of usability and inclusivity", I am talking about the net now.

When I speak of usability, that is making a comparison between email browsers as they are now, mostly, OE for me and the typepad blog now

The latter is a lot more bothersome and takes more time, which on dialup also means money. With the fastest machine on earth, it would still be more fiddly

When I speak of inclusivity, there are two arms to it. There is the cost involved, yes, and it would deter me (pennies taking care of pounds) were I not committed to being part of the investigation

but there is also the aspect of there being two tiers, with some writing

But my emphasis was, by my choice of words, on inclusivity. It isnt quite the same thing. Exclusivity is a wide and important issue - and one that is important to raise because it is so easy to think everyone is on the web, a potentially dangerous delusion in a global world. Referring to inclusivity though doesnt raise the stakes in that way and I was only wanting to make the basic typed / email comparison

I was thinking that once one has signed on to an email list one is included, potentially - there is still the question of whether one posts or not - but there are no other obstacles

I don't see that this a matter the web then and now. Pardon me if this is obvious and I am missing it; but I don't see it, except that as the years have passed it becomes more and more practical to add _features_ because more people are buying the fast machines

But they seem to me to be bells and whistles - I could have said more on that but thought better of going into a full blown jeremiad

Now and then I make jokes about wanting the dos prompt and maybe I should stop doing that in case someone takes it literally. I would say Let's keep it simple. I would recommend repeatedly asking What is it I am trying to achieve?

what attracted me to wdl was the discussion; and it seems to me a lot easier to handle via email

i am *still open to persuasion!!!!

The list vs The blog

I'll endorse everything, including the doubts and qualifications, that Millie says about the experience of blogging

The slowness in particular is major for me, whereas however lousy my hardware is, it isnt an issue with email. I get there and I spend much less time on line

Just now when I posted, I clicked on multiple categories and apparently nothing happened, so I went for a single _conferences_ - then the multiple categories appeared... Sklow, slow

Then I thought I had overrridden my earlier decision, but no

I can go in and change it I suppose; but that's all time online... I like the speed of email, its interactivity between people

I too don't feel optimistic when I see that splash of yellow...

Apart from the underspec of my machines, the interface itself doesn't help - cluttered and illiterate to me - by sending so much stuff that isn't needed -

compare that to OE or similar - including one little gem about sharing your world with the people you care about

well I do that! I don't need a blog to do that

and then finally it offers me the login button

that's all I want; I have to wait for that!! while it's downloading all its features

& now the wind is in my sails, I dont like the glossy feel of the blog. i dont like the corporate feel and the slogans - "good looking"... really?

It doesn't seem to have the effects promised, hinted at

Pardon me if I have said this before. I am reminded of Pragmatometry. This fictional subject occurs in a good-bad book That Hideous Strength by C S Lewis, at least in the unabridged version. I wish I could quote it. You'll find some quotations at various points on www, where it is offered as a prediction of the web. I do not think it was offered in quite the tone that is read into it by some historians of prophecies of the web.

The way it's offered in the book is to emphasise the speed with which hoi polloi are notified of decisions, rather than whether decisions are any good etc etc; and it is met enthusiastically because it is new and complicated

I can see this software as being terribly useful to those who don't want to write websites and do want some interactivity; but it doesn't cut it for me in comparison with an email list in terms of usability and inclusivity.

Color and the digital Life

In "Interaction of Color", Josef Albers pointed out that the interpretation of any given color is dependant upon its environment. The bold yellow band marking the WDL blog is a splash of optimistic sunlight that is also said to enhance concentration and speed up metabolism.

 Personally, it is not one of my favorite colors. I remember deciding as a young man that my color preference lay in the blue/green spectrum, as I aged, I find I have migrated to hunter green, Burnt sienna, ochre, darker, more somber, more existential colors. The WDL list exists in a monochromatic space, even the absence of color, or perhaps in the color that saturates our individual minds.

 Perhaps the lure of the anonymity of virtual space extends to the ability to create the environment itself as well as the faceless avatars we are speaking to. I wonder if we must imagine a color space in the virtual world if none exists. I remember an early Osborne computer I was in love with that had a tiny 5" black/gray screen that smoldered glowed with an exquisitely indescribable neon blue/green glow. I liked to turn off all ambient light so that the room would fill with its presence, similar and just slightly more erotic than the mesmerizing monochrome of the early Philco or RCA TVs. What is the color of an email list? How does this presence or absence of color affect us psychologically and how do we interact with its colored space that is presumably different for each of us?

If a blog were a physical place, what kind of place would it be?

I started this as a reply to Jonathan's comment but switched to a separate blog entry when i realised it was becoming rather substantial,

Jonathan wrote:

Millie inadvertently raises another problem with this blog format – its two-tiered membership structure.

In fact, I don't think there is a 'two-tiered membership structure' because I don't think there is a membership structure at all. The notion of membership comes from a very different root to that of blogging, which is closer to publishing than it is to, say,  a club or community. A newspaper, for example, doesn't have a membership structure - it has writers and readers. People don't have to join a blog to access it, and they become writers if they have access to the admin end, which is not about joining either.

In Cliff Figallo's excellent pre-blog book Hosting Web Communities (1998), he describes what he calls three degrees of interactivity in web communities. I hadn't thought about this until today, but actually that model can be interestingly applied to our discussion:

1. cafes - where interactivity is everything. In a cafe the community *is* the interaction. This describes listservs and communities which often don't have any other manifestation but the list itself and the people who write to it.

2. shrines - where there is little interactivity between members but they come together around a common interest e.g. Elvis fans, or stamps, or politics etc. To some extent, the 'offerings' of visitors contribute to the content, with news and items of interest about the topic of the site.

3. theatres - have an attraction that stimulates member interaction but the actual information coming out of the site is mostly one way.  Site visitors interact around it. This might be, say, a healthcare information site.

It could be that blogs are basically more of a theatre model than a cafe, although some could of course more appropriately be called shrines. The software really does not lend itself to cafe, though, which is another good reason for having a list as well as a blog.

What do others think?  If a blog were a physical place, what kind of place would it be?

Google Blog Search

Google Blog Search launched today. I've tried looking for random parts of this blog and they come up very fast. Try it!

The List vs. The Blog

In keeping with Sue's suggestion that it is better to post a new message than comment on an old one, I will post my comment as a message.  (BTW: Is this really true?  Supposedly the reason is that posts are linkable and show up on search engines whereas comments don't.  But it does seem silly to organize one's data as a series of unlinked posts --- the text may reference other posts but there is nothing in the data structure to make a link between one post and the next one which comments on it -- rather than a linked list of messages with attached comments...)

So here is my answer to "what has it been like to have both a list and a blog"?

I still find it hard to remember to read and post on the blog (I am not a big consumer of blogs, though I have nothing against them), whereas the WDL list just comes to my email all packaged in its own folder, available to me whenever I check my email (which is often).  The list just seems much more natural.  Maybe this is merely because I have been reading email lists (and before that, USENET newsgroups in the early 90s) for many years but blogs are newer and especially new to me because I haven't participated much in the blogosphere.

The blog is also much slower than the list, because there are fewer posts.  And because there are fewer posts, I have less incentive to check the blog and, a fortiori, to post on it. Hence (if others are like me), there will always be fewer posts. 

Posting on a blog also seems so much more permanent than emailing a list (because even though lists have archives, list messages appear to be gone once they are read and deleted), so one doesn't want to do it too casually and post something stupid or silly.  Email lists, on the other hand, thrive on the occasional silly short post (these posts build a sense of community in which you feel like you are chatting with a bunch of friends), although list owners sometimes object to such posts.

Combined blog and list - how is it working?

It's almost 2 weeks since we added a blog to our email list.  I'm curious to known how it's working out for everyone. For me, reading and contributing to both, but in different ways, I'm finding the two halves of my brain being curiously stretched apart. Thoughts?

Public and Private virtual spaces

 

As Sue mentioned in a recent post, there was the seed of an interesting thread beginning on “How does Digital Life Affect Memory” that began a few days ago on the WDL list. She commented on why the thread was happening on the list and not on the blog.

I must admit, as I thought it over, I realized that I am more comfortable writing in the “private” space of an e-mail list as opposed to the “public” space of a blog. It occurs to me that the “you” persona that I am writing to is totally different in each case. Subconsciously I visualize the persona of a blog to be a group of readers (who I am not necessarily emotionally connected to) where on an e-mail list I have the sense of an almost one-on-one/personal experience where I can more easily and safely express myself (even though I am aware on some level that the list goes out to around 250 members). Watching myself, I see that I am more guarded and certainly feel more vulnerable in this space than I do sending e-mails out into the void.

This has also made me question who it is I am writing to here, in my word processing program. I guess this not only points to an “Author Function”, but also questions a “Reader/audience” function.

Even though this “Reader” here is the same as on the list, and on the blog also, I sense that I act differently in the virtual presence of each.

the beginning of life as a double entity

This blog has been noticed by Jeremy Douglass of UCSB, who has made some interesting observations about how things might work out in relation to our attempt to run a blog and a list simultaneously. I know Jeremy a bit, and he is something of an expert in this area so I'm particularly interested in his comments about functionality between the two platforms. We'll see what happens in the months to come - will there be a split between the list and the blog? Yesterday I got frustrated because a really interesting conversation was happening on the list and not on the blog, no doubt tomorrow it will be the other way around and still bug me!

What is a blog

I have been trying to work out the difference between a blog and an online journal.
It would help me if someone could tell me which of of the following  statements are true and which are false?

Blogs are interactive online journals
All blogs have to be collaborative.
The texts of all blogs can be altered by the readers.
All blogs allow comments on body text.
All blogs deal with impersonal subjects.
All blogs convey the character of the blogger(s)
Blogs can be on any subject that interests the blogger.
A random collection of personal hyper-linked html pages posted in chronological order do not constitute a blog.
An ordered collection of personal hyper-linked html pages posted in chronological order do not constitute a blog.
A blog is an application into which a journal can be input.

5 Blogs for BlogDay

Space and Culture
Weblog for the International Journal of Social Space. I love this blog because it regularly shows me something new about the physical world. Edited by Rob Shields and Anne Galloway, beautifully presented with wonderful images.

if:book
A project of The Institute for the Future of the Book founded by Bob Stein, of that early pioneer company Voyager. Remember it? if:book is inspiring, providng informative and intelligent news and views about 21st century publishing.

Tipmonkies
Tips for better, more productive computing. Ok, I admit it, I am addicted. So many tips and so little time. My bulging downloads folder is the result of taking too much notice of Tipmonkies' ever-flowing stream of new applications and things to do with them.

BBC Radio 
Not really a blog, but certainly RSS from top to toe. I am so proud of the BBC for grasping the internet in the early days when it could just have easily have run scared. And now look at it! Podcasts, Listen Again, programme downloads - and soon, they say, streaming TV. Fantastic, and free to the entire world!

Writing and the Digital Life
Cheating, I know, since I originated this site, but we have launched today for BlogDay, and our 25 international writers are limbering up and ready to go.  This is a collaborative transdisciplinary blog about the impact of digital technologies upon writing and lived experience. We talk about writing and reading in the context of 'new and old' media, transliteracy, craft, art, process and practice, social networks, cooperation and collaboration, narrative and memory, human computer interaction, imagination, nature, mind, body, and spirit. Read us!

technorati tag: BlogDay2005
also posted at Hello World

Welcome to the new Writing and the Digital Life blog

Welcome to the new Writing and the Digital Life blog, going live today on BlogDay 31st August 2005

Writing and the Digital Life began as an email list earlier this year, and quickly acquired a critical mass of around 250 users in many countries - currently Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Niue, Spain, Sweden, UK, USA, United Kingdom & Zimbabwe.

We are interested in the impact of digital technologies upon writing and lived experience within an interdisciplinary context. We talk about the relationship of writing and reading in the context of many subjects including 'new and old' media; craft, art, process and practice; social networks; cooperation and collaboration; narrative and memory; human computer interaction; imagination; nature; mind; body, and spirit. Contributions related to research, writing and teaching in the arts, sciences, and humanities are all welcome. The list is managed by Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media at De Montfort University, England.

This blog is an experiment. We discussed long and hard whether to switch to a blog, or stay as an email list, but when we voted on it the result was pretty well 50-50 so we have decided to try both at the same time. Some of us are old hands at blogging and some of us are completely new to it, so bear with us - there may be some small glitches as everyone gets up to speed. The luxurious Typepad software upon which we reside has been made available to us gratis by Alistair Shrimpton, the friendly UK Business Development Manager for Six Apart (thank you Alistair!).

Anyone is free to join us - just go to Participate at the top of the right-hand panel.

If you join, you get to discuss issues, share news and information, and vote each month to choose a discussion topic. But you don't need to join to read the list archives or this blog - although if you do join we guarantee a warm sense of togetherness and companionship ;)

Text, in whatever language or script, is the passport to digital life. Without it we cannot use email, web content, chat, discussion boards, or instant messaging. In the ecology of global connectedness it is vital we understand how writing and reading are being used, extended and changed.

We are 25 writers from several different countries including India, Africa, and South America - see the left-hand panel for details. We are interested in anything that addresses the impact of digital technologies upon writing and lived experience, from vague, barely expressible notions to passionate manifestos. This is the place for conjecture, imaginings, mappings and propositions. With luck we will birth some inventive projects, successful collaborations, and unusual networks. We hope you enjoy what you find here.

technorati tag: BlogDay2005