Shouldn’t the idea of publishing on the web mean generating something that can “echo all around the world”?
Once again, my experience shows that if you publish something on an employer’s web site, or a company’s web site, or even in something that just takes away the work of managing web sites, the chances of it having a life to keep echoing is low.
And if you are going to go to the trouble to craft something in writing, why put it in a place where the shelf life is short?
As named a Linklover by Jim Groom (can i get that on a badge, Jim) I can’t agree more with the movie metaphor suggestion that it’s all about people, if you go to the effort to publish on your own domain, than you are going to care for it’s health more than any other entity.
My quick reflex to toss a lost of links into a post was less about being overly prepared for a conversation about Domains for the Home on the Web workshop at Grinnell College, it was more to shake my own memory try to be ready for the open ended conversations about teaching with domains.
Added later… because this is my blog and I can edit! The recording of this session:
It was not meant to be Yet Another Web Nostalgia tour, but in thinking about writing of the influences of doing what I am doing now, writing about my thinking openly, I reached back for the bloggers whose shoulders I stepped onto. There is a pattern, watch the difference:
- My Blog My Outboard Brain by Cory Doctorow from maybe 2002 is always a concept I feel comfortable with. It was published on the O’Reilley.com web site, you know the company started by the guy who drummed up the Web 2.0 thing, but if you try the link now
http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/01/01/cory.html(kind of interesting to read it’s somehow organized under “javascript” but I digress) it just flops you by redirects you to O’Reilly.com. It’s actually more worthless than a 404 page. It helps not in one bit. But experiencing this on a daily basis, I know to reach for the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine where I can link you directly to read Cory’s words, rather than O’Reilly’s company brochure. - As opposed to Jon Udell’s writing in a post about the idea of “narrating one’s work” it is still linkable, readable in Jon’s domain (I provided my own link to a workshop page that put it in context). I had the fortune recently to talk with Jon (where I nearly walk away with more to think about than I gave, still simmering on his notion of understanding and designing for other people’s “workflows”). And as Jon mentioned (and my feed reader shows) his own narration at his domain has picked up recently.
But here again is that Institution vs the Individual in terms of web preservation– stuff stays around much longer, and is more findable when published in your own domain.
There’s other early influences I thought of later, maybe the earliest academic blogger was Jill Walker/Rettberg, and jill/txt was one of the first I read, including her post on defining a weblog (when we had to put the ‘web in front). Rebecca Blood wrote a history on weblogs in 2000 long before most people even know what they were. Liz Lawley was highly influential too, in her mamamusings site.
All of those links live as they are on domains managed, cared for, fed, by their authors. Most of the links you find from there that lead to institutional sites, university/company the same, are most likely linkrotted.
Now this is just a small bit of what the Grinnell folks were seeking. They and I obviously do more in a domain than jst self blathering, otherwise ther domain use would be limited to one blog.
But it’s that idea of having a property or a Jim Groom House of Richard Scarry Rooms that provides numerous places/spaces for reflecting, making resources, course materials, portfolios, and just exploration spaces.
As always, it remains to me, as… I would be it was Martha Burtis who framed a domain as a Possibility Space.
Maybe that’s just some wordplay. But what I heard the Grinnell folks talk about was spaces for students to contribute to, to get to that still useful idea of a lightweight collection space, or a means to publish your own pseudo book, journal. I can only spin out the small bits I have or stumbled across. It’s far from the entire scope of of potential.
And yes, a shed for your Ferrari takes effort to keep up, but at least it won’t be ripped to shreds by some otehr entity and redirected to some Used Car LOT by someone else.
A Domain of one’s own means you get to say what stays or go, and not to be left a the whom of some technocrat at Gizmo.com or YouNoLngerWorkHere.edu.
And to some degree, while not fully pf ones’s own, I was able to find my own olde links from a Blogger hosted Blog Workshop site that still lives (at Google’s Whim, I better do something soon). It’s yikes, 17 years old! I think I exported a copy from a MovableType (cough old man reference) version I had at Maricopa (long ago sent to the web dumping grounds)
And then I keep remembering stuff I gotta archive in my house. For a 2005 presentation, I managed with some Javascript trickery to make Blogger go non-blog format for More Than Cat Diaries: Publishing With Weblogs an NMC presentation.
That hyphen in the URL happened because someone got there first (and is still there).
This gives me good vibes that it even works, but I think it holds up. It was a play on the casting off that many academics at the time derided blogs as “just online diaries”
The Javascript menu and button navigation from 2005 still works! As does the pop up extra notes from each “slide” in this non-Powerpoint web-based presentation. I think I better get the Sitesucker app going on this before Google flushes it.
Still while these links are not domained (yet) it still asserts my point that sites created for and maintained by the individual will have much web durability than university or company ones.
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