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Speaking of the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center reBlog, let's all watch Paddy Johnson put her feeds where her mouth is as she guest reBlogs for the next couple of weeks. No, that doesn't mean strapping on the feedbag. A while back she criticized the popular site for regurgitating too many frilly tech items, so they punished her by asking her to reBlog. Essentially what that means is she culls items from a pool of RSS blog "feeds" and posts them with as much text or as many pictures as she wants, in any order--an activity that as explained in the previous post combines blogging, curating, dj'ing and editing. It's different from "regular" blogging in that the material is all right there in the system, ready to be cut and pasted--no surfing around to find content is necessary. Paddy promises to put more art in the "art and technology"; naturally I hope she will consult my 10 Commandment-like "rules for reBlogging" as she invents her own set of guidelines. Here were a few, from '04:
1. reBlogging is definitely an art, somewhere between curating and editing. I believe the Eyebeam reBlog can be as important and genre-defining as any of the major umbrella tech sites, umbrella art sites (if those existed) or heaven forbid, regular news sources, as long as original material from a pool of steady dedicated bloggers is given equal weight to clips. The purely anecdotal has value, as does free lance reporting. Accordingly, I tried to emphasize unique, personal blog writing and research over news items recycled from big media sources. By and large I did not reBlog slashdot, boingboing or kottke, assuming that most people were looking at them anyway. I also avoided the major media feeds, such as NY Times, Yahoo, Wired, for the same reason.Go for it, Paddy!
2. I favored items with text or pictures over blind links with pithy 3-word captions.
3. I tried to keep a balance of tech and art writing.
4. I included a heftier dose of politics because the major media are failing us in that regard and we have to do what we can.
5. I added a few feeds where people are posting original art to the Web: Look, See; SCREENFULL; Wooster Collective.