E-tivity 2. A brief critique of other artist’s blogs.

I have found a number of artist blogs online, and can’t say I’ve been too impressed with many of them. I began searching on google with the term ‘artist blogs,’ and found there seemed to be a number of mediocre blogs that lacked real interest and professionalism and instead seemed like an extention of someone’s myspace social page.

For instance webring http://http://r.webring.com/hub?ring=artistsblogswebr was one site, that had some potentially interesting blogs but also some awful ones too such as:

 ”Dark blog that displays the HypnoGoddess as a Controlling and sometimes vampiric hypnomistress”

Can’t say it was much to do with the fine art world and discussion!

 However, I then began searching with the term ‘fine art blogs’ which seemed to act as a bit of a filter. Through this I found this site: http://findingblog.com/browse-fine_art-109-1.html which had a range of interesting blogs to look at.

My particular favourite was http://www.oilyfilms.com/blog/ which the site advertised with a 5 star rating. The blog itself contains alot of information and is very well presented. It is put together by an experimental film and video group called ‘Oilyfilm.’ From the blog there are numerous links including one to their website  http://www.oilyfilms.com/ which explains that:

“Oilyfilm is a film and video production company based in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

Led by producer/director Scott Amos, oilyfilms has created many short films and video pieces, which have screened at dozens of events in North & South America, Europe and Australia.

Oilyfilms was founded in 2003 by Scott Amos, Vincent Lombardi, Colin Hender, Michael Lee Macdonald and Mike Wolske. Since then, countless contributors, both creative and technical, have helped to create each and every piece in the growing oilyfilms library.”

The actual blog works as a working diary concerning the groups experiments with various forms of film and video. Each blog contains a crisp image and usually an link to a relevant site with similar information involved. What is more, there are also links in a side bar that take you to more specific examples of the groups work with the various technologies i.e. 16mm, 35mm, digital video….

There are also blogs and links to film and video festivals, which seem to be updated regularly and which also allow you to find out about other people’s work. They have also of course allowed any viewer of the site to leave comments on their blog for critical debate.

I feel this is more how I would want my own to blog to work. To be discursive, yet slightly academic and technically inclined. I get the feeling that this is an extention of their practice, rather than an excuse to put pictures of themselves and their work on line for people to look at and comment upon and to talk about unimportant nonsense about vampires! 

Filed under: blogging, e-tivity02-0708, jim

e-tivity01-continuation

Hi again, I really enjoyed our meeting and having the opportunity to go over some of the editing possibilities available when you write a post using firefox as your browser. You may download it from here, both for mac and pc

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html

So now that you are familiar with the way one can link to images and to text, i leave you here e-tivity 01 again.

purpose: to finalise your introductions to this blog, by adding images and links to your work.

task: search your images repository (in a folder in your computer’s hard drive) and/ or the internet for images that represent your work and follow the instructions in this tutorial to add them to your post.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/26911/wordpress_adding_images_to_your_post.html

If you haven’t introduced yourself yet, this is the time to do it, both through text and images. Please revisit e-tivity 01 for the full brief.

Use the categories:  e-tivity01 + your first name (noncapitalised)

respond: In this blog, follow your classmates posts and choose one to leave a comment about what they said. Be constructive and leave some proactive feedback about what has been said , discussing any similarities or differences between your practices.

Timeline:
Friday, October 27th (task),
Tuesday, October 30th (respond).

Filed under: blogging, e-tivity 01-07/08, paula

netiquette

As some of you are new to blogging, we should introduce here the topic of etiquette for blogging. The word etiquette implies “rules of conduct, courtesy, custom, convention, amongst the members of a group.” When applied to internet and networks, it is usual to call it netiquette.

Following the proper netiquette will help you to make friends and earn the respect of your peers. Below you will find some useful links along a few usual topics:

Blog Etiquette> Tips on how to behave in the blogosphere.

http://weblogs.about.com/od/blogethics/p/etiquette.htm
Linking Etiquette> How to link to other blogs, and vice versa.

http://weblogs.about.com/od/blogethics/p/linket.htm

Indiana University has a good article on “Some Simple Rules of Netiquette”

http://www.indiana.edu/~icy/netiquette.html
If you are into this topic you can find WWW version of the book Netiquette by Virginia Shea, published by Albion Books here

http://www.albion.com/netiquette/book
These are just a few resources. Most importantly I would like to ask each of you to offer a contribution to the netiquette of the group, that will help us to build a commonly agreed list of netiquette from all the contibutions. Please leave your recommendation as a comment to this post. Thanks.

paula

Filed under: blogging, paula

how to start blogging

hi , i thought i would leave you here a quick visual start guide to post your first message in wordpress.

1- after you followed the link in the email invitation to join the blog, you will have access to the wordpress (wp) dashboard. click the link ‘write a post’ to write your message; (click the images for larger view)

2- a new window opens where you can write your message. this is your opportunity to introduce yourself and tell us a bit more about your contribution to the unit.

3- you can also upload images from your computer, in this case, images from your artwork would be an interesting addon to your text.

finally, add 2 categories to your post: one woud be your first name (noncapitalised as in paula) and the e-tivity number (as in e-tivity01)

good luck!
paula

Filed under: blogging