Posted Thursday 23 October 2003

The Expanding Bloggiverse

Mount Shasta: I've tinkered with the layout of "Adventures of Bloggard", but the design is still flawed: If the browser is too narrow, the grey column on the right gets squeezed down to the bottom of the page, which is nigh on useless.

If you are a CSS-layout guru and think you could improve the stability of this layout, I'd love to hear from you. I keep saying I'll go study CSS some more, but I've become caught up in the challenge of writing a new story every day.

And here I'm clearly losing ground.

In the Nucleus weblogging system used here, there is a 'draft' feature, which permits you to write up a mini-story and file it as a draft so that it doesn't appear until you want it.

Using this draft feature, as I think of events and people from the past I write these notes into a permanent draft called 'story ideas'. I keep another permanent draft called 'timetrack', which is notes on when different things happened. I'm now 59 and have never had a great memory for dates, so dating an event from my youth is kind of like "back in the winter that the pond froze over, that was when Old Man Sweeney ..."

Kind of tedious. Inexact, too.

So far, the 'story ideas' file keeps expanding faster than I can write the stories! I wonder if some day I'll pass away with more stories still untold than written down? Of course the challenge is to keep finding time to write one for every day. My life is full, and it's much too easy to skip a day. Catching up is difficult.

But the fact is, as far as I can tell, this is a completely new artform: writing interlocking stories of the people and places of a life and therefore of an era. I call this art-form "the Autoblography".

This reminds me that some years ago when synthesizers were just become popular, and affordable for musicians, I got an Ensoniq Mirage sampling keyboard. And I thought up a way to create new sounds on an Apple II computer, using a C-compiler to make on-screen software oscillators which could be linked together to add waveforms or to calculate waveforms using Frequency Modulation and other methods. To create this composite waveform (sound), the Apple II had to chug along all night, and the next morning I would pass the completed soundwave from the Apple II to the sampler, and then I could play that sound. This was very cool. It took me a year to write this software.

That same year, out in the world, the Macintosh became very popular, eclipsing the Apple II, and a guy named Donny Blank wrote the same kind of thing on the Macintosh. My idea was left in the dust, and I never bothered trying to market it.

But the point is: sometimes ideas are in the air. "It steam-engines when it's steam-engine time."

I suspect that the Autoblography as a new art-form is in the air. I expect we'll see more of these ... not the eternally boring drivel of diaries ("I went to Burger King and had a real big burger, and now I'm really full, and I'm worried about my girlfriend, and I got a B in History ..."), but a more crafted, polished view of life and living, sometimes crafted in real-time, though I expect perhaps better crafted in retrospect. (It gives you more perspective, and you feel more creative freedom to tell lies about details as art demands.)

I suspect that within ten years, there will be a hundred thousand Autoblographies on the net.

That's ten years and counting. We'll see.