vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Stop

Semester has started stop First lecture in Integrated Media stop A subject about timebased media in the age of the noisy network stop Writing lectures in keynote stop Confirmed that weblinks in keynote survive exporting to QuickTime stop Keynote very nice lightweight tool for making video with links stop Particularly video found amongst video and text stop

Scale

Today I am starting to, what? Pull together all the bits and pieces? Make a whole from the parts? See if the whole is greater than the sum of the parts? Enough. Today I am starting to build a new corner of hypertext.rmit specifically orientated to vog research. This will include links to the vlogtheory wiki, my blog, Seth’s blog, essays on hypertext.rmit about vogs, a rhizome movie project, the subject I teach in second year which is basically all about this research, the software I’m trying to fix up for vogging, and anything else that I initiate.

Why? Because there is quite a bit of material being hosted or produced, and it is time to pull this together to frame it more productively as an ongoing research project. Time for it to grow up. I guess.

Bergen Masters

Bergen National Academy of the Arts (Kunsthogskolen) has announced a two year, free Masters in Visual Arts. I know Jeremy Welsh, who heads up some stuff over there. It will be a brilliant program, and the Norwegians, via all that North Sea oil and their commitment to equity, provide most university education for people for free. Bergen is a beautiful city, though famously wet.

Mark: At It Again

My friend Mark has invented yet another project, and more intriguing possibilities. Notes about notes. Dedicated to the discipline of the note.

Cocoalicious

Is my del.icio.us client of choice. Just realised there have been several updates.

Office

I am moving office. My current office is at the end of corridor, is small but not overly so, and has a window that looks straight to some stairs and a wall, about 30 metres away.

My new office is shared. We are on a top floor of a heritage building. I can see over the tops of buildings towards the dome of the Royal Exhibition Building.

I have a lot to pack. I have a lot that I did not unpack last time I moved offices, about 5 years ago. I intend to cleanse.

Blogs

From a recent conference presentation:

A blog is always several (it is always plural, there is no such thing as ‘a’ or ‘the’ blog — that would be a contradiction. They travel in packs, they form packs (and packs are very different to herds). Blogs chatter amongst themselves, endlessly because they don’t have ends (like soap opera). They exist in the play (some would call it a dialectic) between their internal and external aspects, a looking in combined with a looking out (if you don’t want to look out, and people looking in are the same thing then you don’t blog). They are a revenge of the word upon a twitch generation, though to those who still bow to the word they look and taste suspiciously like the revenge of the twitch generation upon the word.

Prat

Last Sunday I was one of the speakers on a panel at First Person. I was with Barbara Ganley (who is doing wonderful things with blogs and teaching) and Jean Burgess (who is writing the book on the intriguing question/problem of vernacular creativity). I got to go last. I was embarrassing.

Now conferences are microcommunities. A good conference is like a nomadic tribe. They come together, hang out intensely, basically talking, arguing, eating and drinking together, then disperse. During this, a culture develops. Each conference has its own culture, though as some tribes meet regularly, some standard totemic lines form. Unfortunately I could only attend for my one session on the last day. This means I have no sense of what has been spoken of, the tenor and culture of the conference. So I come in, and talk about my stuff, without the context of knowing what others have already said, have already discussed. That’s the first problem. You appear as full of yourself and only yourself. And I probably was.

The second problem was that I acted out the role of the speaker who comes in only to immediately leave. I have seen others do this. They are brash, rude, overly confident and glib. I managed all four. I imagine some in the audience may have had longer lists.

I was a prat. Was a good, though painful lesson.

Spam Catchup

Yes, I know I’m a slow adopter here. Had a beer with James the other night and he introduced me to Akismet. A WordPress dot comm spin off or accessory or something. It blocks spam, apparently brilliantly. To use you need a wordpress.com account, which gives you an API key, which you then use in your personal installation of WordPress. The depressing real time stats from their site, 82% of all comments are spam. Pernicious does not go nearly far enough in describing the pollution that spamming is (bandwidth pollution, time pollution, etc).

Endangered Species

Well, this blog is becoming an endangered species, isn’t it? So, why don’t I apparently have time to write here?

• Been on holidays (in Australia we get four weeks annual leave a year, and between Christmas and New Year is gifted by my university to us lay about academics)
• Am working through a very large interactive video essay for Artifact which was due yesterday
• Am preparing notes and slides for the Digital Storytelling Conference (I’m on a nice panel with nice people on Sunday)
• Am preparing two rather comprehensive sets of new curricula that begin in three weeks (not that I’m counting down or anything)
• Am trying to make a new portal (trying out Joomla) for the rhizome templates
• troubleshooting the first beta (not public) of the iVog tool
• writing documentation for same
• actually reading these really amazing things called books
• trying to help organise the new research studio-laboratory space I
  have been given for honours this year
• and just the usual administrative stuff you find on your desk (three, four committees, two workgroups, blahdeblah)
• and of course my kids, my partner, our dog…

So the blog, let alone reading other’s, has fallen by the wayside at the moment, but I do expect intermittent transmission to resume. One day.