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To follow on from my recent post about “good” blogs<\/a>… I want to get down on blog-paper a few thoughts rattling around my brain about blogging…<\/p>\n Last year my friend Kirsten asked me about blogging – about how to go about making a “good” blog. She, of course, has a good blog of her own<\/a>, but seeing as I’ve done a couple of very intensive art projects which use blogs as their primary medium, I do have some thoughts about the nuts and bolts of making them work. On this blog, sometimes months go by between postings, sometimes I post twice in one week. I put no pressure on myself to blog with any regularity. I should add this – although this blog is primarily about art<\/em>, I don’t consider this blog to be a “work of art” in itself. Rather, it’s a like a notebook where I jot down my thoughts before I lose them. The blogs attached to the Teaching and Learning Cinema<\/a> site, and SquatSpace<\/a>, perform a similar function.<\/p>\n The other type of blog I make (eg Bilateral Kellerberrin<\/a>, The Sham<\/a>, and the Bon Scott Blog<\/a>) is what I call “blogging-as-art”. These blogs have a much narrower scope. They’re “project-blogs”. In other words, a new blog is created for a specific project, with the idea that it will have a (pre-determined) active period. During this active period, the blog becomes an intense site for collecting and cohering experiences related to the particular project. <\/p>\n So, for example, while I was doing my Petersham project (April\/May 2006), I would write every day about what happened to me in my suburb of Petersham. I would not, however, use this blog to write my thoughts about expanded cinema, unless that subject intersected in some clear way with Petersham. In this manner, these project blogs can carve out a lot of space for – and generate an enormous amount of new material about – the particular subject matter which is their focus. I treat these blogs not just as a place to record information about <\/em>an artwork, but as the site of art itself<\/em>.<\/p>\n With these two different types of blog, I have two different methods for “running” them, as their primary author. <\/p>\n The first type – the “blog as notebook” type – is pretty simple to run. I write something, I post it online, and I forget about it. Sometimes, it just sits up there for ages, perhaps nobody reads it. Sometimes, years go by, and then, by some miracle of google searching, a stranger knocks on the door and writes me a comment to say, “thanks for that, I was thinking along the same lines as you”. This reader-acknowledgement is gratifying, and perhaps it helps begin to build a readership-community, but it’s not really the main reason I make this blog. My motivation for keeping this blog is because it is useful as a way of tracing back my own development in thinking about a certain subject. It’s a way to keep my thoughts in order. However, ecently, a small supportive and intelligent community seems to have assembled around the subjects I’m posting on this blog, and so I am able to “use” this community to help me think through questions which are bugging me – like, say, “What makes a good blog?” or “Should I give up the internet for a year<\/a>?” And so the blog’s purpose is evolving.<\/p>\n Blogging – at least the first type I’m talking about – forces a certain level of formality, making me spell things out intelligibly enough so that IF someone else were to come along and read my post, it would make some sense to them. I think that is why I blog, rather than writing in a private journal, or an offline word document. However, the formality blogging encourages in my own writing should not be SO formal as to be intimidating or inhibiting to others. This is what differentiates it from, say, academic writing, which creates an expectation that everything needs to be “in perfect order” before you publish it (and which is static and immutable once published). <\/p>\n So much for the first kind of blogging.<\/p>\n The second kind (the project-blog, or the blog-as-art) is a bit more complex. In this kind of blog, what I actually think I am doing is a kind of interactive performance art. The blog-as-art usually has a speculative “proposition” with which it begins. For instance, in The Sham<\/a>, the proposition was – “I must not leave my suburb boundaries for two months. I must write a blog entry every day about what happens”. <\/p>\n
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\nThere are a few different kinds of blogs that I keep. The first kind is “occasional” in nature. An example is the one you are looking at right now