digitaldust

Art is the proper task of life.

Art and nothing but art!

(more…)

Over the last couple of days I’ve had the strange experience of people (who are not Heather) talking to me about my blog posts. Mostly about the cats, even someone on the other side of the world coming up and asking me if we had a name for Burton. Yep, we do, he’s an explorer, named for Richard Francis Burton. And it’s quite apparent that no one comments on or talks to me about the turgid attempts at high brow posts I put up… those just seems to scare people. Just goes to show it’s the human angle every time, reality TV, not docs. Also, I’ve put some a couple of posts up in a bit of an un-reflective and unprofessional way, without thinking how they might be read from other points of view and in my new context as a lecturer. I took them down. So I’ve become painfully aware of the public nature of my blog. Only a very small public, I’m not claiming fame, just unfortunate recognition. I suppose that’s what one wants when blogging, but I had always sort of assumed that the only people who read my blog were Heather, Ed and my Mum… Hi Mum.

On top of that has been some discussion with a couple of people about what I would use Facebook for. Facebook (as well as many other social networking or social blogging tools) allows selective privacy/publicity. So I could limit my audience to people who might get obtuse jokes or forgive me for obsessive cat postings. However I consciously chose to join Facebook as a tool I could use to connect with students, not as something to keep up networks with friends.

But all of this raised again for me the whole social construction of knowledge thing. How meaning is constructed in a social context, and with very little to do with the content of the message. I’ve been thinking about both Facebook and the blogosphere in these terms over the last day.

Profile/Social Networking sites, like Facebook, run on this concept of social constructivism. The so called content is light, but they are not about that, they are about links to other people or saying what movies one likes. From the constructivist angle these profiles, when filled out, become very rich nodes in the framework due to their relationships, but not because of any unique or creative content. And from that point of view you cannot treat the individual nodes separately, you must always be addressing the whole. Or addressing big chunks, which is inherently difficult as there are no logical boundaries in these networks.

The same goes for the blogosphere. Most of which is not filled up with unique, new, creative content. Much of it is links other posts, which again are links to further posts, which might end up in some unique content.

So to me both these experiments in closed social networks and the open knowledge networks out there on the web seem to prove and should be read as socially constructed and intrinsically hermeneutic knowledge.

Mindlessly meta, but I’ve been messing around with wordpress skins over the last couple of days. Just trying to see what layouts suit me and what looks like a good start for something to mess with. I was quite impressed with K2, but I just dont have the time to make it do what I want it to do. So I’ve found this theme by Glued Ideas. It seems like a good place to start from.

Update: Which I’ve done again. I’m trying to get my photography more in there, but I’m too lazy to do it from scratch. I did that once a few years back… then I luckily had a quiet week at the beeb and so had the time to hack blog templates.

I’m messing around with the templates again. I know I shouldn’t but the temptation is too great.

I’ve sort of settled into using the new K2 with Wordpress 2.0. I think this will give me the most flexibility as well as keeping in with people who are treating their templates as an application.

I’ve just swithced RSS-stylee feedreaders from FeedReader to Bloglines… all in all a much less painful experience than I was expecting.

FeedReader was desktop based and Bloglines is all web based, but from my quick play, quick and very usable. The other funny bit is the recommendations, I scrolled through the list bloglines presented me with and found bunches of people I work with. No doubt it must compare my list of feeds and do a comparison with other lists (possibly statistically, possibly collaborative filtering) to give me it’s recommendations. People who read what I read also read those colleagues and friends who I’ve not added yet.

Am now going to remedy and then see what else I get.

Weelll, I’ve just managed to install MTAmazon and MT-Bookqueue and it’s all going well. This Amazon web-api is pretty cool. The flexibility of their XML API is nice. I took MTAmazon and hacked it to use amazon.co.uk data instead of US data, handy as I’m in the UK and most of the books I buy are from amazon.co.uk. There were a few tricky bits as the docs on amazon and their xml error messages were at time a little misleading. Go to amazon.co.uk/webservices and it redirects you to amazon.com, then the localisation options they give you on .com dont work properly. Simple enough though all you need is to use the amazon.co.uk URL with a locale=uk tacked on the end (if you dont use this extra parameter then it defaults to US and throws an error, duh!).

It seems endemic at the moment redesigning one’s blog and I’ve been forced into it now. Fucked up my templates a bit when moving servers and I’ve just implemented the plain style from moveabletype with some stuff hacked out.

Seems that even though the back end of my blog now runs like greased lightning the templates somewhere along the line got a bit stuffed up. I can’t find any up to date offline versions of the old template and this half finished clanster style template has overwritten my index template.

Long story about renaming paths, and for the life of me I dont know why it’s reverted to this particular version. Must have been the last version since I started using file based templates. Well, I’ve been meaning to get around to a redesign, maybe this will be the impetus.