Gill Clough - Open University
I attended the Inter@ct seminar with interest. I normally liveblog conferences and find that it gives me a different perspective on the proceedings. This time, to do something I would not normally do, I posted a comment on the first entry in this blog using my mobile phone (no mean feat considering the numeric keypad!).
Last week I attended the ALT-C 2007 Conference in Nottingham Before the conference, the organisers invited all who wished to blog the conference to subscribe to an RSS feed aggregator. This is an online tool by which you can combine feeds from various blogs and access them such that all the posts appear in chronological order (or any other order you want) as if they were all from a single blog. About 30 bloggers signed their blogs up to this. You can view the feed at:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=0DXClBNS3BGKXshsxQnzeQ
The conference had wifi in the main centre. During the keynote about 5 people were liveblogging and by the end of the keynote, you could read five accounts from the yahoo pipe. It was very interesting and quite immersive. People were commenting on each others posts, including links from their posts to other related posts. Once delegate took pictures of about 10 or so delegates sat around the conference at different times, all using laptops (and presumably blogging). He created a brilliant slideshow of all these pictures which he posted in his blog. Other bloggers linked to it so it was very easy to find. Here's the permalink to the post http://cladonia.co.uk/weblog/2007/09/#000020
(Just checked that this link works, and the post after it contains a picture of me and Rebecca giving our presentation on the use of blogs as a postgraduate research journals - I'm the short one :))
Overall, this RSS aggregator really enhanced the conference experience. It was possible to read about presentations that you may have wanted to attend but had a clash. You really felt like you were contributing to the overall event and you certainly made connections with people and places.
I wondered if this was the sort of thing that this seminar was aiming at with the encouragement to participate?
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I think the question is also - as an artist how can I interact with my own practice and how can technology be a tool in this interaction in an increasingly mediatised age. I was trying to talk about technology as a slow space for reflection and thought and pixel finding a breathing space somewhere online. We were there very much as artists not as technologists and interestingly technology is not really the medium of my work - more of a rear view mirror. So in some ways there is an interesting contradiction between the idea of live bloggers and the slow, static image slide show of them blogging. Which I like. Thanks for comments. Michael (Inter@ct) PS I liked Rhiannon's red shoes and would have liked to have live blogged about them!
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