Random notes on blogging - It seems that blogs have replaced (in this particular historical sequence) newsgroups, mailing lists and homepages as the mainstream format of independent Internet publishing. The same seems to be true for net-based art and literature if you consider, for example, the entries of the "Bachelor Prize for Net Literature": http://www.junggesellenpreis.de/beitraege.html - Like most publishing formats of the Internet, blogs originate in system functions and nomenclatures of network server operating systems. E-Mail, for example, goes back to the mainframe and Unix command "mail", documents in markup languages to Unix manpages and the "troff" text formatter. The word "Weblog" goes back to Jorn Barger, a Joyce and AI nerd. In the mid-1990s, he recorded each web site that he had visited in a day in a chronological register on his homepage, modelled after a system log file. In Unix, these files are stored in the /var/log directory. They are written by server processes ("daemons") without interactive user control that can report events and errors through their standard output ("stdout") redirected into files. Barger's term "web log" later transmuted into "we blog" and finally "blog". (The "finger" Internet protocol with its user-writable ".plan" files was another precursor of blogs. Designed to display information on users of a particular login system, it was largely deinstalled from servers in the 1990s out of security and privacy concerns.) - Mailing lists like Nettime increasingly resemble blogs, and losing significance in the process, since they're used to dispatch ready-made papers or writing from other news sources, followed by only sporadic commentaries. Or, an observation from other lists: mailing lists turn into mere distribution channels for announcements which then are taken up and commented upon in blogs. - The unwritten law of all blogs: to be subjective, individual, personal, also in their language. In 1998, the online diary of German novelist Rainald Goetz "Abfall fuer Alle" ("Garbage for All") was largely dismissed in the hypertext- and multimedia-oriented net literature community as too conventional, and didn't even receive an honorary mention at a large national net literature award. Who would have thought back then that this work would anticipate the future of net literature and be its formal avant-garde? - Because of the law of subjectivity, blogs do work and the Slashdot.org clones (based on Slashcode, PHP Nuke etc.) don't - although they are technically almost the same. Blogs are based on individuality and the entries, not the discussions. The Slashdot clones however rely on mass participation, with entries being only "scoobs" to set off debates. For this reason, and a lack of critical mass, ambitious projects like technocrat.net and discordia.us failed. - No law without its parody and subversion: http://freshmeat.net/projects/blogdrone/ http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/blog.shtml - What does it mean when discourses and debates migrate from mailing lists to blogs? A monadic retreat from group discussion, their trolls, flame wars, their announcement spam etc. Networking shifts from direct mail exchange to a more formalized technical layer, RSS and backtrack links. Third-party replies and comments are no longer equal, but delegated to smaller print on separate pages. Which is another indication of the auctorial structure of blogs. [I intend this to be a simple description, not a critique.] - Mailing list are often international. Faulty English is being tolerated. The same is true for Usenet newsgroups, Slashdot and Slashdot clones. Blogs are mostly written in people's native language, including the blogs of people who otherwise publish in English - probably because of the law of subjectivity. Especially in the German-language and francophone culture, their are a sign and expression of an Internet that has become, almost as a whole, a native language medium. - This happen to me three times (but only in Germany and most probably a symptom of German-language net culture): Somebody lurks in a mailing list, reads one of my contributions, doesn't reply on the list, but harshly flames the posting on his/her anonymous or pseudonymous blog, including personal attacks. Even people whom I never met in my life do this. - Monadic retreat and cocooning inscribe themselves into blogger language, too: "blogging", "blogosphere", "blogroll", "watchblog" etc. Above all, "blogging" is more a self-chosen socio-terminological distinction than a technical format. After all, it simply used be called "web journal" in earlier times. - More German blogging culture exotica and dogmatic details: Featured on many blogs, there is a strange linguistic crusade for identifying the word "blog" with neutral gender in German, supposedly because it goes to "log book", "Buch" ("book") is a neutral noun. With the origin of blogging in log files, one could equally argue for the female gender because "Datei" ("file") is female. Actually, the correct etymological root is the greek word "logos", which is masculine. - Perhaps this is only a German thing, too: The stylistic continuity of 1970s "new journalism", 1980s/1990s pop journalism and many blogs with their particular combination of narcissicism and demonstrative sarcasm. - Compared to traditional homepages and thanks to the software they are running on, most blogs sport standard-compliant, browser-independent XHTML and separation of logical and visual markup through CSS. It seems as if blogs helped those standards to finally break through. - User statistics of my own blog "Netzweltspiegel" (a "watchblog" for the computer culture journalism of the large German news site SPIEGEL ONLINE): 75% Windows, 15% Linux, 10% MacOS, but, remarkably: 65% Mozilla and only 15% Internet Explorer. - Blogs are, among others, a manifestation of cheaper and speedier internet access. Only a couple of years ago, it would have been a luxury to remain online when writing texts, and not accessing them offline either. Is there a correspondence between (a) a retreat from cultural centers, institutions, festivals, shared office and work spaces (once needed for high speed Internet access) into people's homes with cheap DSL/cable flatrates and (b) the personal style and subjectivity law of blogging? Is it a coincidence that bloggers I know personally are former new economy workers who nowadays live in precarious states between freelancing and unemployment? - A downside of blogs, related to more demanding Internet access requirements: Each of them is centralized on one particular server. It's foreseeable that many if not most of them will vanish and be lost soon, much more so than E-Mail that gets multiplied over mailing lists and stored on individual computers. A project: To collect individual archives (rather not complete, but personally filtered ones) of mailing lists, publish and compare them. What does the Nettime archive of John/Jane Doe look like? - And how could the same be done for blogs? In other words: How could blogs express not merely the subjectivity of their bloggers, but also the subjectivity of their readers? -F