Intro (’within, into, in, inward’) Net redux
Closing out this third year of homoLudens and, truth be told, the
bloom is off the blog. Which is to say that if I’ve discovered anything
this year about writing online it’s that “online” is NOT the best place
for writing that aims at anything other than pointing. I started the
earliest version of this blog in May, 2000. It took about three months
to figure out how to best use it for researching (finding and gathering
links to information), reading (organizing information by topic in an
ubiquitously accessible online cache), and writing (for an audience of
mostly colleague teachers interested in reading about - what else? -
blogging). A blog made the web personally useful. I started a
second, password-protected blog within two weeks of launching the
first. I needed links to private writing and reading. Blogs multiplied
as different kinds of work - journal, travel updates, photo albums,
houseswapping, BAWP, graduate work, school library,
etc. - demanded them. Radio helped for a bit with management of all
those separate sites, but it didn’t help with managing my own research,
reading and writing. It was clear from the beginning that a blog’s
potential as
writing space was matched by its limitations. It’s even clearer now,
three years later.
Along comes Tinderbox. Doug Miller articulates its value while pointing to other ruminations from James Vornov and Ken Tompkins: “Like the Web, Tinderbox presents a whole new
canvas, a new landscape of thought space. Unlike the Web, which is
primarily public and collaborative, the Tinderbox landscape is
primarily private and maps to my own internal thought processes.”
This
is what I shorthanded as a Tinderbox-facilitated
“intro-net,” a private writing, reading and research space that was
easily uploaded to, and could download from, the web. In less
than a week using only its basic applications, it’s become my
primary writing space. A little testing of it as a note and
bibliographic organizer shows it’ll be my primary researching
and informational reading tool as well. It’s led to less
blogging and more researching, reading, thinking and writing.
Uh oh, sounds like a resolution. And on that note, the annual New Year’s pointer: “Mr. Flood’s Party.” Here’s to ‘the bird on the wing!’