What is a Reblog? Blogging software that makes it easy to preview and republish articles, web log posts, and web links from other sites. The goal is to allow individuals and organizations to filter content and republish material that is most useful to their respective audiences.
It seems a little odd to me that Guthrie Lonergan posted the first great art piece that manipulates YouTube software last Monday on Nasty Nets (my description here), and it hasn’t received institutional support from either of the new media reblog sites in the city. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that five hundred new sites have been added to the Rhizome ArtBase — Sonya Nielson’s Antediluvian Fragments of Memories; thank God her “interaction with squares” was brought to my attention via the reblog — but there’s a problem in the way a reblog is set up when that work appears on the main page and Lonergan’s does not. In Rhizome’s defense “Professional Surfer“, (a show that considers web surfing an art form) includes the site nasty nets, and by extension the Lonergan piece, but the exhibition suffers from the same problem any link in a side bar has — nobody pays attention to it for long. Certainly, I have not had calls from the artists I included in the Emerging Artist Series thanking me for the attention they continue to receive as a result of being listed in mine.
As for Eyebeam, their reblog remains at the mercy of the interests of the current reblogger, which means the only thing predictable about the site is that it lacks consistent coverage of items of importance to the new media community. In theory Eyebeam news would help address this issue, but the institution uses it only to list their own events and listings, which means a lot of good work gets missed. Probably the easiest way to address the problem would be to maintain two blogs, one maintained by a professional blogger presumably employed by them, and the other by their invited guests. I am told that a site redesign is in the works, so we can all hope this is something they consider.
Meanwhile, Tom Moody has written a great post explaining why the Lonergan work is significant and who’s picked it up? No one, that’s who.
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