Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

What a cyberculture class can look like

Hugh has blogged a great class plan.  It starts with a podcasting assignment, which then grounds discussion on other topics: Amazon-Google, APIs, and DRM.  What a class!

Blogs, the essay, and periodicals

Reading another bad article against blogs this morning, I was struck by the utility of one historical antecedent  While that author belabors a weird, ahistorical analogy, which undermines itself with manic intensity, I thought a better comparison is to a subset of eighteenth-century periodicals. 

A group of these journals offered observations and commentary from a personal perspective.  Addison and Steele's The Spectator is a good example, as is Johnson's The Adventurer (here's one issue), Steele's Tatler, and Crackenthorpe's initial run on The Female Tatler.  The persona was crucial, offering a character for readers to follow.  That character was grounded in reality about as much as a blogger's identity, as per eighteenth century authorial convention.  Steele, for example, created Isaac Bickerstaff to speak from.  Topics would vary, depending on what was (supposedly) glimpsed, read, heard, or simply thought about - again, much like the varied perspectival topicality of the blogosphere.  Concepts would sometimes find their way into other works. 

There were also multi-authored periodicals in this vein, such as the later run of The Female Tatler, or many of the issues of The Gentleman's Magazine.  Perhaps this is a good forerunner for group blogs, like Mefi, Slashdot, etc.

(via MeFi)

Darknet minibooks by blog

JD Lasica, one of the brains behind OurMedia, published a fine book on copyright and technology, called Darknet.  Now he's experimenting with posting pieces of that longer work to his blog, as minibooks.  Good idea - check it out.

Haunted Livejournal: a new game?

laylasweetie is a Livejournal blog, which describes a haunting. There are many classic ghost story tropes. It also takes advantage of the blog form, using it primarily as a diary; additionally, the comments are becoming an important piece.
There are also some game-style puzzles.  The mysterious text file implanted on the desktop, for example, is a simple cipher, revealing two lines, which are the conclusion of a Robert Frost poem. One comment was loaded with many number 5s, which, removed, revealed a few sentences. The key for this was inserted into a blog post, putatively to the surprise of the author.

An alternate, Gothic etymology for "blog"

M. Valdemar offers this alternative, Gothic etymology for the term "blog":

...all along I thought "blog" was a portmanteau of "blood" and "fog." ("Mind where you step," he said. "The moors are shrouded in blog.") ;-[)

Virginia Infocult, continued

After yesterday's sessions at Mary Washington, this morning I presented on pervasive computing and education this morning.  (Gardner catches me showing off a nifty Vermont grave.)

Some notes on blogging a novel

Blogging Dracula has been a fast and wild ride so far.  I'm impressed by and thankful for the swarm of feedback, reflection, comments, and notice.
Some quick observations on the experience of blog-publishing a novel so far -

The blog helps me think about the novel.  Immersion into the novel's serial structure reshapes my sense of the story's timing.  The gaps without dated material attentuate into suspense and frustration, feelings missing when one reads a unified text.

Blog comments set up a tentative global semi-seminar.  Comments have been fascinating and exciting.  Some are informative, showing the networked power of the Web to aggregate information.  Others disagree with each other.  Several consider the novel or project as a whole.  Taken together, it's a world-wide reading, like a distributed discussion section.  There's no syllabus but the novel itself, as blogged.

Tracking this blog's presence on the Web is interesting.  Daypop and del.icio.us have both picked this up for popularity ranking.  The Daypop Top 40's attention points me to the blogosphere.  Some posts I find there return me to earlier notices, describing a network effect.  Another blogger references one of his own posts from 2002, where he considers Web journals as fiction (something we wondered about last year).

del.icio.us' "popular" tag points out a different brace of people, along with this fascinating first sketch of a folksonomy for the project:

10 blog
9 dracula
5 literature
5 books
3 cool
3 blogs
2 horror
2 novel
2 gothic

MSNBC offers an inevitable slogan.

Infocult in Virginia

I'm attending and presenting at a fine teaching and technology event at the University of Mary Washington.  Brian Lamb has presented, as has Diana Oblinger.

I'll be talking tomorrow, and am experimenting with blogging my presentation materials.  Feel free to post comments, or email me.  The blog entries are a bit cryptic and telegraphic, as I'm warding off the PowerPoint disease of reading entire slides as if the audience were infants.

More Draculablogblogging

Still more blogging of the Draculablog - GreenCine notes us (thanks to Mindjack, who also did).  And greetings to Reason readers.  I have some intro posts about the project over in that blog's "about" category.

Edited to add: and LinkMachineGo, StumbleUpon, and, most gratifyingly, from Phil Gyford, a leading inspiration for the project.

A history of GUIs

Ars Technica has published a fine history of the graphic user interface, from the Engelbart demo onwards.

The Wikipedia GUI history is also fine, and complementary.