the future of this blog ...

i have decided to put some of the shit i learned in school to some sort of practice. and boy, that segways perfectly into a short rant.

when i first got to the newspaper, and the journalism dept. in general, they were luddites. the darkroom was seldom used, and only for black and white photography. at the same time, digital cameras were not capable of taking large shots, and certainly not the size of the cover of the tabloid newspaper. in fact, the digital cameras were often inferior to any private digis.

and worst of all, the web sites for the entire journalism dept. (including all publications) were archaic in design and considered last priority. the job of web master often fell on the only person/people who knew html -- with the exception of the rather eclectic crew at the radio station (few of which were journalism majors). no money was ever spent on web design software.

pieter was the first one i ever heard talk about the future of electronic media in journalism. even the instructors, knowing far less than the students about technology, downplayed electronic media in lectures. talk of the internet was usually saved for the last week, and usually only one day. the first time i heard an instructor say the word "blog" was in my last semester. and, of course, it was an adjunct professor. i am pretty sure the tenured faculty could scarcely use their e-mail.

i often thought it was a crock of shit that students were asked to be familiar with the newest technologies to graduate, yet the professors were often in the dark, at least in the journalism department. but i digress.

the advisor at the newspaper (adjunct again) was quite interested in the newest technologies on the other hand. and as the students began to become more and more interested in the future, he began to do what he could to help us.

our first step was trying to find a way to apply the current thinking in newspaper design to the internet. newspaper people tried so hard to move past their "fathers' newspapers," but they went ahead and stepped back a few epochs to design the web sites ... which you would think would be more modern.

nonetheless, we fell back on a few priniples we felt were key. the utilization of minimal white space. the use of images and broken down, "digestable" news items. clear thinking and progression expressed in design. and so on. it is amazing how much such simple steps enhance reading ... a necessity for such abstract writing as my own.

so i guess this is all my way of saying that i am going to post images. blogspot has made it rather easy (as it should be) to do so. this first picture comes from me having limited resources. in the future i will try and make the photos more relevant and whatnot. but it is pieter konink -- the man who taught me how to build, run and maintain a web site.

my other thoughts have been to start writing regular entries into this blog. i have no set pattern as of right now, nor am i that interested in conformation. but i would like to write more often, and it may serve as some sort of motivation. if i should do that, be forewarned that my writing may be less ... of whatever it is, and more organized. but only on those days.

for example, i may choose to once a week write an article, if you will, about a certain artist that is interesting to me at the time.

of course, with all of this, i am wondering how much is just to convince my so-called "friends" to read the shit that i write. i should know by now that would never happen. but there can't really be anyone out there that is interested in my random thoughts about metaphysics.

for what it's worth, my next such entry will most likely be diatribe focusing around why it is more important to act on behalf of the world that you cannot understand rather than the one that you are familiar with. and why that may sound simple, the dilema comes into play when you realize that your own reality is more consistent with your peers' realities than it is with the true reality. but i digress yet again.

anyway, i am going through the process of making the sidebar more pretty. i am afraid that i am going to have to ditch some of the things i have added, but i am not sure yet. eventually, i will set up another php web site and move all of this over there. so i am a little hesitant to devote too much energy to anything other than content.