Dear Sir,

My blog has more recent entries than yours.

Yours truly,

RJ Mottram

The shame of being outblogged by a silver surfer!

To make up for my long silence, I will be weblogging seven shades of shit out of the Edinburgh Art Festival, which opens tomorrow.

Update: I did, if one can define ‘weblogging’ as ‘writing articles in the newspaper’. See here.

Hammersly is reporting on the run up to Turkey’s general election in July for the BBC, but rather than just filing copy for the web, audio for the World Service and video for News 24, he’s using a raft of web services to augment the more traditional media.

There are Flickr photographs, links on del.icio.us, status updates on Twitter, routes on Google Maps and, of course, a weblog. You can even add Hammersly as a friend on Facebook.

It’s an interesting experiment in newsgathering and alternative modes of broadcasting, but what’s really grabbed me is that Hammersly is not only providing new ways to follow a news story, but also revealing the processes which usually remain hidden from viewers or listeners, the nuts and bolts of producing a news item:

I probably shouldn’t talk about it in any detail yet, but by the looks of things I’ll soon be involved in a new web project that could learn a lot from the Turkish Journey experiment when it comes to arts reporting and reviewing, rather than news. More on that next month.

• 1+1=3
• artFUTURE
• BLDG BLOG
• FunFurde
• Organism
• Re.
• Sensory Impact

Some weblogs I have been reading for a relatively long time which focus on art, design, technology and the spaces inbetween:

• angermann2
• RFID In Japan
• We Make Money Not Art

Enjoy!

Way back in the year 2001, when I signed up for a Blogspot-hosted Blogger account, the plan was to make a community weblog for folk posting to Optimo Echatio, the message board for the famous and fabulous Optimo nightclub. Since we were all already trading links to cool stuff on the web, and discussing them, and I’d been reading weblogs for a year or two, it seemed like a fantastic plan. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) none of my internet gang agreed, and after a flurry of posts from a couple of Echatio users, this place settled down to being a three-person weblog, with XXX, Leon and myself posting for each other’s benefit. Over time, XXX drifted off, briefly keeping a weblog of her own, and then, a year or so ago, Leon found himself in full-time employment with no desire to write words here after a hard day of writing words at work. (Oh, and at some point along the line Donny joined us, for one post only!)

So, after a time, it felt to me - and most readers, I suspect - that for better or worse Submit Response had become my weblog (mine I tells you, all mine!).

With that in mind, I’ve set Leon up with a place of his own. (It has a silly name for now, while Leon wracks his brains for a snappy title.)

To Leon: Get your blog on! To everyone else, get reading, or subscribe - as you can see from the two entries I’ve cross-posted from this site, it might just be that high-quality, UK-based left-wing political weblog we’ve all been waiting for. Or it might be something completely different. You never know how these weblog things will turn out, as the above demonstrates.

Oh, and this should be the kick up the arse I needed to get on with migrating to WordPress, reorganising the sprawling mess this site has become, and having a crack at making the place look, in the words of one loyal reader, ‘less like a fucking till receipt’!

It was: you can watch me wrangling with WordPress and a new design here

First, Things:

The plan form of the NatWest building famously reproduces the bank’s interlocking logo, but are there other buildings designed with such graphic simplicification in mind, so they can be easily distilled into a logotype? The Gherkin lends itself well to this approach, but there must be many more.

This spurred a question at Rodcorp:

“How simply (or in how few lines) and recognisably can we draw buildings?”. The question tends to privilege strong silhouettes and bridges, but so be it. Here’s a list… and some drawings from unreliable memory.

Next, Dan Hill shares his rather beautiful sketches of the Guggenheim in Bilbao at City Of Sound:

I’m not going to apologise for the hasty, impressionistic style of the sketches. Having tried and failed to draw the thing vaguely accurately, I decided the only possible response was to let go.

Dan’s post was in part following the discussion on buildings as logotypes, and the drawing of them, but also responds to Peter Lindberg’s thoughts on the contextual nature, or otherwise, of the Guggenheim at Tesugen:

Salingaros has claimed that Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao completely ignores context, and yet Gehry himself calls it very contextual. And my impression… is that this building has meant a lot for the city of Bilbao, and that people living in Bilbao feels it has given the city a boost in self-confidence. But Salingaros says it’s nothing more than a tourist attraction.

Seeing loose discussions like this unfold (and fold back on themselves - Peter’s post is in response to an earlier post of Dan’s about Peter’s writing) more than make up for having to scroll infuriated past a hundred ‘Me too!’ entries in my aggregator.

Of course, this post is itself a little echo slapping off the back wall of the webloggers’ cave. Sorry about that, but I know sod all about architecture and can’t draw for toffee.

Update: Peter just dropped me a line to point to another response, this time from Deconstructor, bringing talk of shared conceptual images of common shapes to the table, and much else besides. (And to gently chide me for my misspelling, now corrected, of his weblog’s title. There’s something about the word Tesugen that demands an extra ‘n’ before the ‘g.’ That’s my excuse, anyway.)

See you there?

Well I’m back; with a new name, new design, and an experiment in DIY blog hosting. Yes, this site is being served from my trusty iMac DVSE over my not-lightening fast Blueyonder connection. Not sure what the implications of this are yet, but I guess I’ll find out sooner or later. Just don’t expect 100% uptime as I forgetfully turn my computer off on the odd occassion.

I’ll be interested to see how this turns out for Matt - my old iBook is effectively an AirPort base station these days, bar the occasional burst of broadcasting, and it could be put to better use. Come to think of it, I’m in the middle of building a small site for a new improvised music CD-R label just now, which might be just the project to take advantage of all the Apache goodness bundled with OS X.