First of all John Barger screams winning documentary short to me; someone in Chicago is looking at a Sundance slot for sure if they make it well. I'd certainly watch it; he's a fascinating person whose life seems a little off kilter, and as Dibbel has already demonstrated, he's a great jumping off point to examine not only blogging but the larger issue of how interaction with an enormous compendium of data and thus abstraction affect the human condition.

It took me a little bit of time to figure out why anyone really cared about the whole blogging phenomenon. In a world where subcultures full of rite and ritual rise and fade into obscurity every few months without most of the world ever knowing, it is impossible to avoid looking upon anything new and supposedly "important" in the internet world without something of a jaundiced eye. Blogs, sure, seem to be making waves, and we seem to all interact with them frequently. But even if Blogging in itself hasn't yet had the impact upon our society that something like television or the atom bomb has for whatever reason, it is nonetheless a point of solid ground from which to start exploring larger issues of human interaction in the age of the mature internet. That's kind of how I feel about it right now; maybe later I'll see the light and realize just how ridiculously important the rise of blogging is, but at this point I'm much more interested in the larger ideas/movements from which blogging stems, and of which it is a result.

Certainly blogs have changed the way I interact with the internet. Both authors mention the role of blogs as "filters" for the overwhelmingly vast amount of information in the world wide web and this squares soundly with my own experience. I use several film production/post/distribution blogs to stay on top of advances in each of those fields, each one giving me access immediately to information I might never be able to entirely round up, much like a trade magazine. Every now and then I'll read Boing-Boing or The Sneeze for laughs, but that's about as personal as my interaction with the blogosphere gets. I am used to a traditional public/private life split, and while I don't quite understand the motivation for making what I would consider a public life more private, it's nonetheless very interesting to me that someone might do so. So yeah. Time to read for other classes. Here are some goodies:
"Everything is Toy" Not a blog. But it comes from this one. which is an awesome way to get in touch with the conceptual art/interactive art scene. These are the people who will be throwing the best parties ever.
This blog is also interactive art/design and it used to be good but they're slacking hard. Oh well, it's still at The Protein Feed .
This is one music blog that I tend to like.