Today was the second day of the blogging workshop at SFAI led by BLDGBLOG‘s Goeff Manaugh.
We started by winding back through some of the financial implications of blogging on those trying to make a living by writing. Having worked for Getty Images a long time ago, I was interested in the comparison between the changes in the writing industry that are happening now and the way that the professional stock photography industry changed in the last 10 years. Geoff brought up the interesting concept of content rebar. When generic work done in content farms becomes good enough to generate advertising clickthroughs or sell widgets, why does anyone produce anything better? But of course, blogging (and photography for that matter) is just a format for content production. You can produce anything you want with it. It no more enforces content quality (or the lack thereof) than a particular style of notebook or brand of camera.
We also spent some time talking about using a blog as part of a general platform for your ideas. Geoff was recently asked to curate an exhibition on Landscape Futures at the Nevada Museum of Art. Geoff encouraged us to think about things like hosting events, exhibitions or even a lecture series based on the ideas in our blogs. Your meet your readers, your readers meet each other, and your ideas bridge out from the internet and into meatspace.
Our guest blogger today was David Gissen, an associate professor of architecture at CCA. Using his now mostly defunct blog, HTC Experiments, he’s approached blogging with more of an academic perspective than Geoff has. Several years ago, David saw blogging as a way of publishing the kind of work that would never see the light of day in traditional academic outlets. More recently, he’s treated his blog as a way to cross-post work that was also being published in other formats. Towards the end of the discussion, David mentioned that he was thinking about using blogging to tackle a current problem of his: how to teach the canon in an Architecture 101 class in more novel and meaningful ways.
Due to the Blue Angels, Fleet Week and the Columbus Day Parade, David couldn’t find a parking space. In a surreal twist, we had the second half of our discussion in the SFAI faculty parking lot where he could keep an eye on his car while the Blue Angels screamed overhead.
Books that came up this weekend:
- The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D by JG Ballard, inspired by San Francisco’s Fleet Week Blue Angel acrobatics and cloud formation
- Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño, also inspired by Blue Angels
- Subnature by David Gissen
- The BLDGBLOG Book by Geoff Manaugh
- I also spent a good part of the weekend thinking about Yochai Benkler, commons-based peer production, and The Wealth of Networks (which for the record I haven’t read)
Other topics of discussion:
- Geoff’s Feral City talk(s)
- Justin Bieber came up a lot
- 750 Words, an online tool for writing your morning pages
- Animal Superpowers, part of the Geoff’s Landscape Futures exhibit mentioned above. Absolutely stunningly cool use of technology to transform sensory input. Transformative, rather than augmented, reality.