This weekend we’re going to take futureofthebook.org down for repairs. It’s a good looking site (thanks Rebecca Mendez), but a second look will expose the visible marks of a system that hasn’t served our interests for a long time. So in the spirit of the housekeeping we’ve been doing since the beginning of the year (including the retreat), we’re doing a major clean-up of the site. More like an extreme makeover, actually. We’re not sure how long it will take, given the number of projects we’re still juggling.
Don’t worry! The blog is going to stay up and we’ll keep posting, and the Institute is going strong. In some ways we’re victims of our own success: we haven’t been able to keep up our own house due to the number of interesting things we’ve been putting out. We just know that it can’t be put off any longer. Things to look forward to: a site that does a better job of explaining our mission, exhibiting our projects, and highlighting our collected thoughts.
if:book
A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
I suggest that the blog or live journal is not an efficient discursive forum. A moderated listserv better manages concurrent threads and their engendered relationships and tangents.
i believe you’re correct about that, gary, but
i’m unsure argumentation is the object here.
it seems to me the object is the propagation
of the reputation of the institute of the book.
and although i don’t intend that as criticism…
-bowerbird
Our discussions about the website have centered, so far, on making the mission of the Institute clear, and highlighting our projects; it has steered pretty firmly away from making the site anything like experimental. That being said, we think it is important that our conversations on the blog be both better preserved, and more sensitive to the pace of conversation (not necessarily the tyranny of the timestamp). Whether that will be handled in a change of form is yet to be seen, but we’re taking suggestions into consideration.