Tom Roper's Weblog

A fine blog by Scott

Tipped off by a mutual friend, I discover T. Scott Plutchak has drawn his blogging pen. Hurrah!

Our Hidden Lives: Publishing everyday diaries

The Centre for Life History Research here at the University of Sussex are holding a diary event, Our Hidden Lives: Publishing everyday diaries, on 17 November 2004. I'm speaking, on the blog as diary, but don't let that put anyone off.

The Ouse, 745 am, Friday 15th October

I've just looked out of the train window to see the most gorgeous mist on the Ouse, as the train travels between Newhaven and Southease. I must find out where Virginia Woolf died.

Currently playing in iTunes

MarsEdit, which I've just started to use with the beta of version 2 of NetNewsWire, has many splendid features, but one that I'm using simply because it's there is a script which automtically generates a post to show the world what I'm playing in iTunes, thus Currently playing in iTunes: Psalmus: Nisi Dominus by Monteverdi

2004 Information Format Trends [OCLC - OCLC Reports]

2004 Information Format Trends [OCLC - OCLC Reports]A new OCLC report incudes a section on "social publishing": " indicators of further change in the information landscape that could lead to a new publishing paradigm", they say

The blog preservation society

An interesting article in RLG Diginews by Richard Entlich of Cornell, as far as I know the first to discuss archiving blogs

Holidays

I'm going to be in rural Norfolk and I think far from any sort of network connection unless some entrepreneurial soul has started a web cafe in Burnham Market, aka Fulham-sur-mer, or I can get anywhere near one of the People's Network PCs in the splendid new Norwich library (last summer they were clogged up with foreign language students e-mailing home)
So there will not be any posts here for a while, but I may pen some and put them up in a great big lump when I'm back

Blogging and the development of the productive forces

Struggling with maintaining my blog over a bad dial-up line and a crap modem, I started to wonder to what extent the development of blogging requires a certain level of development of productive forces, in this case that is to say relatively high-speed connectivity. This is true I think not only from the point of view of being able to post quickly, but also because blogging requires the ability to leap quickly from site to site. This is a convoluted way of saying I must get broadband.

Poll on usefulness of blogging

There's a poll on the Information World site about the usefulness of blogging. Not methodologically very sound, but worth a look and perhaps a vote?

Observer Review on googling ex-lovers

An interesting piece in the Observer Review, as far as I can see only in the print edition and not on http://observer.guardian.co.uk/ by Katha Pollitt on how, when abandoned by her lover, she obsessively pursued references to him in Google. It struck me that she was in a good position to do this for her lover, a New York academic, must have left a rich spoor across the web. Had her lover been a dustman she might have found his life, both with her and afterwards, less well-represented electronically. He had taken up with another academic , and I admire Ms Polllit's restraint in not posting anonymous derogatory reviews of her rival's work on Amazon: indeed I wish she had, for the review she never published,: "writes like a baton twirler with a PhD," is simply marvellous.