Blog format changes

Changes have been made to the way this blog is organized.

First of all, I’ve been think­ing quite a lot about the whole con­cept of “low thresh­old”. The side­blog just added to this site is exactly such a thing; a run­ning list of links worth men­tion­ing but not worth a reg­u­lar post. In a way they’re what blogs used to be, com­mented links in a steady stream. I also like the idea, that dif­fer­ent types of con­tent is now some­what seper­ated, mak­ing it eas­ier to know where to look for what. Hope­fully it will help get a more tight feel to the rest of the blog. At the same time I’m look­ing for­ward to see, how this divide will effect blog­ging. But back to “low thresh­old”. I’ve been cam­blog­ging for quite a while now and find the “moblog” con­cept a bit mis­lead­ing. Cause while mobile, my moblog posts are not just that. They’re visual, low thresh­old posts capa­ble of mon­i­tor­ing life as it hap­pens around me, rang­ing from “because I can” live con­cert posts over live, mobile cov­er­age of the city I live in to posts which holds some sort of visual idea. What if I did mobile blog posts with­out pic­tures — or did a series of pic­tures with a lot of thought in com­posit­ing, light­ing etc.?

As it is now, the idea of moblogs reflects the tech­nol­ogy just a tad too much. So what am I gonna do about it? Not a damn thing, I’m still exper­i­ment­ing. The true inter­est­ing con­cepts here, though, are really “mobile”, “visual” etc. Com­bi­na­tions with regard to spe­cific projects will hope­fully be the way we will see these tech­nolo­gies applied in the time to come. For a start, I’ve added the newest moblog/pictureblog images to the right col­umn of my reg­u­lar blog, along­side the side­blog — it’s all low thresh­old, a sup­ple­ment to the writ­ten word, an oppor­tu­nity to freeze and doc­u­ment the city, peo­ple I meet, strange sit­u­a­tions. I tend to do a lot of cam posts that wouldn’t oth­er­wise have made it to the blog, “friend drink­ing bear”, “funny sticker on police car”, “nice sun­set”. And that holds a cer­tain beauty, actu­ally; leave things uncom­mented but with a small visual hint to what’s going on.

I’ll keep think­ing (please help me) — I’d like to see true, mobile trav­ellers blogs, proper blog jour­nal­ism, more visual blogs. There’s a lot of value in the idea of blog­ging and a lot of tech­nol­ogy to back it up if applied right — and interestingly.

As far as this site goes, I guess I’ll have to do some­thing about the way the xml feeds are orga­nized, how the dif­fer­ent infor­ma­tion scat­tered around the site is orga­nized etc. Over­haul ahead…