communal blog challenge?
So the experiment in communal blogging at Urban Abhaya was without its designer's intention - a delicious instance of the machinery running right past the creator's intentions, a la Blade Runner, well, a la a lot of cyberfiction.
But i thought it was a great idea - and i want to know who else thinks a communal blog might work.
Lets face it, a blog tends towards certain, identifiable forms: journal, reporter's log, scrapbook, notebook, or diary. There are exceptions, but one encounters them as exceptions. To keep any of these forms up - exceptions included - as the sole propriety, with any sense of continuity ( i.e. reliably updated posting) is quite the practice. And the form itself limits the interactivity with the whole post/comment hierarchy, pushing the audience to the tributary edge - on this blog, to another pop-up screen.
I'm not saying i want to throw in the werdenfield towel for some utopic collectivity, but the idea, which Chris briefly - and accidentally - championed, of a gathering in cyberspace, with some evolving thematic strand, and with numerous members commenting and posting freely: that felt like a real, live, untested practice, it felt like mixing it up.
I particularly like how different members can bring in a refreshing mix of difference - and I liked my imagined occasional participation/visitation. A room somewhere where the party/salon is always going on. How's the Cheers theme go: "Where everyone knows your blogger tag."
Its 12:21. My enthusiasm outruns my lucidity. And outruns my bedtime. Drop a line if interested, we could easily launch one of these...
But i thought it was a great idea - and i want to know who else thinks a communal blog might work.
Lets face it, a blog tends towards certain, identifiable forms: journal, reporter's log, scrapbook, notebook, or diary. There are exceptions, but one encounters them as exceptions. To keep any of these forms up - exceptions included - as the sole propriety, with any sense of continuity ( i.e. reliably updated posting) is quite the practice. And the form itself limits the interactivity with the whole post/comment hierarchy, pushing the audience to the tributary edge - on this blog, to another pop-up screen.
I'm not saying i want to throw in the werdenfield towel for some utopic collectivity, but the idea, which Chris briefly - and accidentally - championed, of a gathering in cyberspace, with some evolving thematic strand, and with numerous members commenting and posting freely: that felt like a real, live, untested practice, it felt like mixing it up.
I particularly like how different members can bring in a refreshing mix of difference - and I liked my imagined occasional participation/visitation. A room somewhere where the party/salon is always going on. How's the Cheers theme go: "Where everyone knows your blogger tag."
Its 12:21. My enthusiasm outruns my lucidity. And outruns my bedtime. Drop a line if interested, we could easily launch one of these...
posted by Kyle at 12:12 AM
3 Comments:
yes! - john, you were so far ahead of me on this one that i lost site of it. i hope to visit soon. anyone else interested in shaking off some of the corduroy shackles of american intellectual and aesthetic individualism? don't worry, no "drink the langpo/newformlists cool-aid before the spaceships come" groupthink yet..
hey kyle, the group blog is an interesting idea that i've been thinking about for a while. one of the roadblocks, for instance, in the case of a little blog greg and i started called citymousecountrymouse (http://www.citymousecountrymouse.blogspot.com/)is that most people do not have time to post to multiple blogs. and one when abandons one's own blog one risks losing one's thread of consciousness among all the other voices present (though this could be resolved by providing for a function allowing one to read only posts by one person; there is probably also a way to make comments visible on the index page to reduce that hierarchy).
i know one group of about four friends here in baltimore use a common blog: http://www.geekpunk.org/
the wiki idea is cool, but i went to the address and it just asked for a user name and password. at the host set, wsullivan.net or whatever, there did not seem to be a link to the wiki.
very interesting post on the peruvian shaman. does she use the yage root?
also, the more we link to each other's blog posts, the more we create that conversation you're looking for without reconfiguring the current blog paradigm
carlo
you know carl, you're right. this is, for most of us, limnal work. all the hopping from blog to blog, that does create an intertextuality, but its limits are apparent, and the foreground is the individual writer, rather than subject (or place - as a stream of posts on a listserve defines a place...). yet i'm in that ideology soup too - first the individual, his vision, then into the social. but on a given day, its rare i pay a balanced attn to both. and, in writing, to go out and play and work in a communal blog - its simultaneously a strong desire and one of those maybe never gonna happens. which i'm sick of, so its gonna happen.
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