You may have noticed that the blog hasn’t been updated much in the last few days. Right now several of us are in far flung places, traveling around the globe for various reasons. We’ll do our best to update you on networked publishing wherever we find it, but it might take just a little longer than normal for us to get to a computer.
Until then, I thought it’d be fun to revisit some old posts. Around the table at work we often feel burdened by the tyranny of the timely post. It’s something that doesn’t leave much room for reflection. I’ve felt that we should find ways to pull up some of the posts that have in some way impacted us and our community the most, so I’ve started with a simple numerical solution: most popular posts (via comment counts) from last year. Here’s a selection:
First, a post that deals with what people commonly think of when they hear electronic book (if they aren’t regularly reading this blog, anyway): first sighting of Sony ebook reader
And then two posts about what we are working towards when we talk about a networked book: defining the networked book: a few thoughts and a list, and small steps toward an n-dimensional reading/writing space.
And three posts on issues we think pertain to the ecology that surrounds networked books:
the evils of photoshop, who owns the network, and AAUP on open access / business as usual?
if:book
A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
re-runs?
um, no thanks.
not unless you move to a wiki format, and
we can really _build_ on those past posts.
but that would mean giving up your position
as the “expert voices” here, wouldn’t it?
so i don’t expect that to happen…
especially now that ben has started getting
the fan-mail comments… ;+)
-bowerbird
We’ve actually discussed a lot of new ways to handle the blog, because, as I mentioned, the daily churn of posts isn’t a good way to display a developing argument over time. Sometimes you need re-runs to give a sense of what’s changed in our approach and what hasn’t. We’re not so locked up in our positions that we can’t admit contradictions (which there surely are), or to second guess our own thoughts. It’s just that, as you allude, the form of the blog tends to priviledge our position as authors over yours as commenter. We get it. But we didn’t get it when we started using this technology, and we haven’t had the time to evaluate and move to a new platform.
A wiki would be one format that might better show the development of our thought over time, but we generally find the interface and navigational elements on wikis to be too garbled. Which means we’d want to invent some new improvements to a wiki platform. If anyone has any good suggestions or knows of a place where a good conversation about this is going on, please tell us!
well, that’s an excellent response to
a mildly antagonistic comment, i’d say.
color me very impressed… :+)
-bowerbird
What interests me is that this forum is so dissatified with its format, yet perseveres as if there is no need for experiment. Is this a classical discourse that cannot transend its structure? Let’s have more interruptions and more interreactions with archives and perhaps some collation of precepts over the history of the blog. Let’s have a book while we are at it. I need a copy.