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Non-Tech : Internet Rhetoric -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ~digs who wrote (43)	7/24/2004 11:33:04 PM
From: ~digs	Respond to of 73

Visual Blogs, by Meredith Badger Different mediums evoke different ways of viewing. While we might gaze at a painting, we watch television and we see films. The Internet, however, we tend to glance[1] at; our eyes skim over the screen in a freefall of vision until something interests us enough to pause the plummet momentarily. It is therefore a medium that requires readily accessible information; lean news, pared-down narratives. Weblogs - or blogs - arrived[2], and filled this need. Native to the Internet and personal in approach, weblogs deliver bite-sized portions of information on a daily basis to an ever expanding audience. Weblogs are the conjunctions of the Internet: the ands, the buts the ors – they add to online conversations, refute them, or provide new perspectives altogether. They are such a successful medium that current figures estimate blog numbers to be in the millions[3]. This poses a dilemma: with so many blogs to choose from, how do we, as readers, know which ones to view? And as bloggers, how do we explain, as quickly as possible, who we are and what our blog is about? One way is through the use of imagery. If we think of weblogs as being “homepage[s] that we wear”[4] then it is the visual elements that tailor the garment to fit the individual. One blogger may add a title image to the top of their blog, or insert a photo of herself in the about page. Another may take an “off the rack” template from Blogger and replace it with a visual style of her own. It is often images that present the most immediately obvious point of difference between one blog and the next. This paper focuses on the use of figurative photography and illustration within the blogging medium. It examines the ways images shape and alter how we view blogs and how blogs shape and alter the way we view the images placed within them. . . . If blogging continues to develop as it currently is – with images becoming an increasingly common element, it seems reasonable to expect that visual blogging will evolve from being a subset of the phenomenon and will strike out on its own – a medium in its own right. It is already possible to see this happening with the development of the video weblog, or “vlog.” The vlog, which may require the viewer to get plug-ins and which work best with fast connections may appear to be a move away from the simplicity and accessibility that underpins the blogging ethos, but it should perhaps be considered as a way of subdividing the burgeoning possibilities offered by the medium, creating areas of speciality. cont'd @ blog.lib.umn.edu