Blog of the week I
Each week Rainy Day proposes to take a look at a site that deserves to be singled out for its contribution to the information ecosystem. Kicking off our series is Robot Wisdom, the blog Jorn Barger started in 1998. It was Barger who coined the term "weblog" and that should be reason enough to earn him a place in the pantheon of bloggers, but there are other convincing grounds for including him in our list. Take, for instance, his James Joyce marginalia, especially his "online shorter Finnegans Wake". Of this, Barger modestly says: "All I've done is trim phrases and sections, smoothing the larger gaps with short summaries. In general, this restores the sentence structures of David Hayman's First Draft Versionof FW [FDV]. But I've also tried to include all the most beautiful sounding phrases, so when the sense is obscure, just listen to the sounds.]"
Along with hewing a leftist political line that is often critical of Israeli actions, a stance that has earned him the wrath of warbloggers such as Matt Welch, Barger can be relied upon for a steady stream of info-babble, cam-girls and eclectic interests. Typical of the latter is his "Marta Sebestyen resources on the Web". The Hungarian folk singer came to fame on the soundtracks of such films as Robert Altman's Pret-a-Porter and Anthony Minghella's English Patient, and Barger, typically, is exhaustive in his listing of her recordings.
At first glance, Robot Wisdom's homepage design is forbidding in its austerity but closer inspection reveals an interface crafted to delight the infovore. There's a lot going on here and nothing is quite as simple as it appears. That link to Salon, for example, leads to a reformatted view of the zine's homepage without the ads.
Barger's homepage links are gems of compressed comment:
"Brilliant Jensen analysis of the crisis in US democracy"
"Short, difficult household-alchemy poem"
"Hashish-club for writers in 1840s Paris"
"Ghastly Stella-McCartney fashions"
Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom is an homage to information that places function above form and while this isn't everyone's dish today, if your aim is to construct a blog that has integrity and influence you will gain from studying Barger's approach.
