A Blog/Blogject [my blog dreams]
A Blog/Blogject [my blog dreams]
You know what a blog is, shorthand for a weB LOG. A blogject is one of those things that has a certain kind of blogger thinking about. Literally they are inorganic object that blog, but that definition does not cover one important part of what makes a blog. A blog needs a mind to write it, while a sensor that publishes its data online writes but lacks in a self.
This blog/blogject is a Janus head, 2 faced web0.0 monster sharing a memory-system styled on a palimpsest. When the limited memory it has is filled to maximum capacity it needs to reorganise it to make space otherwise it can’t store any more new blog entries. In doing this it has to try not to forget the old ones, but this is not always done with much success as memories confabulated over time become increasingly unrecognisable. This making space is done by the blogject and its functioning is modelled on how our brains interleave our memories: by dreaming. The resulting dreams are what the blogject publishes online.
The relationship between blog (and someone using it) and the blog-ejects rendered from/within this input is symbiotic. The blogject only starts functioning when memory reached a tipping point (being full), the blog can continue to accept new entries for as long as the blogject succeeds in freeing space, to which again there is an upper limit.
As an experiment in writing by a selfless-self (adjacent to automatic writing and the cut-up) there are two angles to this system: the blogject’s output and the stuff stored in the blog as its increasingly looses its integrity, are both written by a non-self. The purpose or meaning of this writing is not in the writing itself but in the interpretation of it by the ones submitting writing to its memory. This property too it shares with dreams.
Follow the system as it ages here:
http://socialfiction.org/palimpsest.
More soon……
Three notes about some aspects of this project (there is a lot more to imagine from it though!): 1. it is presented as an echo of the immediate history of software and discourse about software (”A blogject is one of those things that has a certain kind of blogger thinking about.”), into the author’s own non-conventional ideas and references. grassroots AI and applied software criticism.
2. where does a website start and end? how notions like “being inside” and “being outside” works on websites? There are obvious external limits to a website, a link to a different domain leads “outside” of a given website. A website can also be identified as a unique set of similar page thanks to a certain similarity of style, this gives a senses a being inside a website and going “outside” of it when you see pages with different templates.
3. being a software writing tool, it defines its basic units of writing (”text is stored as a chain of segments”) and test rules for semi-automatic editing.
Using a “limited memory” could be a way to create an internal definition of the extension of a website: we would reach its limits not only because we step inside something else, but because there is no more of its own space.
(Via pierre.reblog.)
Table of contents for Visualisation
- Aaron Koblin’s visualizations of commercial air traffic
- Google News Visualizations
- 100 Reasons You Should Be Interested in, Want to Share, and Get Excited About Data
- interactive Sankey diagrams
- map of science
- world history timeline poster
- open-source spying
- image search result tracer
- moodjam mood visualization
- shop opening hours
- interpretation vs. representation
- A Blog/Blogject [my blog dreams]
- web 2 dna
- bio & emotion mapping
- DOM mapping / websites as graph
- collision detection: Using statistics to beat traffic
- turntablism & visualization, v-scratch
- A visual exploration on mapping complex networks
- Field Works: landscape + activity visualizations
- Blogviz
- [Research] Blogposts visualization: semantic distance and cluster
- visualization of density in architecture
- Wikipedia heals in 5 minutes
