unless, that is you’re a blogger: Why your Movable Type blog must die. I have to say I agree with one part of this unfair but uniquely passionate rant: that Google is becoming overwhelming influenced by weblogs and their often incorrect and misplaced thoughts, ideas, recommendations, and suggestions, including this one. Thanks, V!

Thankfully, this is the last day for me to post a post about posting weblog posts.
In case you didn’t pay attention to last week’s ramblings and shortcomings, here’s the long and short of it (mostly short):
Yesterday, I talked about the fact that every weblog or blogging in general is a kind of shorthand for something else. There’s a code, see.
The day before that, I was so tired and then it was sundown and I posted nothing. This is in and of itself interesting to me, though, because I generally do not post on Sabbath as I feel it’s somewhat abhorrent and I realize that most people would think this silly, foolish, or otherwise overly religious. It could be said that posting to your blog is not “work.” But I think it’s a kind of work, a slightly easier, more playful form of work, yet still work. I don’t know.
The day before this one, I was in New Jersey and had highway-brain and so barely blogged.
The day before that was some kind of pablum on death and blogging, which was good, if not sad.
The day before that, I wrote about the relationship between contemporary art and the activity of blogging and how blogging was the latest form of contemporary art. I’m not sure I said that, but that’s what I should have said.
The day before that, I revealed how many/few visitors I actually get to Deckchairs on the Titanic and implied that this revelation was meaningful because it was sad.
That brings us to the first post in the series, the one that started this ballgame, and there were some great comments posted about the idea of audiences, blogging, and peacefulness. Since then, no comments have been posted and that, too, is a bit sad.

A while back, maybe six months ago, someone sent me a link to the blogger code, at which you answer a few questions about your blogging habit or habits and the site provides you with a relatively unique code that you can place on your site that tells the select few what you think, know, love, and detest about blogging.
It’s a nice experiment. My code is this: B9 d++ t+ k s u f i- o+ x– e- l- c-. Not very elegant; I wish that it would be all d-plusses. (There’s a decoder for this thing as well.)
But in thinking about the logic of the above blogger code, I think that weblogs speak in their own, very specific and more easily decipherable, code. For instance, there is code around all of the following elements that make up blogging:
– The external links you provide on your site is akin to knowing who is in, who you like, who you don’t, and why.
– The type of blogging tool you use has its own classification system — with the list in order of best to worst, though tremendously unspoken, probably being: Movable Type, Greymatter, TypePad, Radio UserLand, Blogger, and Blog*Spot. All kinds of classism goes along with this codification.
– The quantity of posts one does per week. Those who post two or three times per day get extra credits typically.
– The exactitude and quality of the design tells one how interested the blogger is in relaying their sense of the world uniquely.
– The language of the blog, English being the best, of course.
– The uniqueness of the name of the blog and one’s ability to purchase a domain name of unique meaning and origin.
I understand that this sounds all cynical and yucky, but I don’t mean it to. I’m just thinking about the new bloggers on the block, those who don’t have a domain name yet, who don’t know how to install Movable Type (MT), who only know how to type and need an audience. I wonder what they do, how they get in and I wonder if there will increasingly be tools to allow the blog-cream to rise to the misty heavens of a dedicated readership.

Today, I have nothing to say about blogging. Nothing to say at all. I spent an interesting day at a client’s shop learning about the biological sciences in New Jersey. It’s going to be a cool project. And all I can think of now is that I need to post. I desperately need to post. This is what I need to do. Post. Now posting…

I can’t help but think about the relationship between writing, blogging, and death. Not to get all gnarly (my daughter’s new favorite word, which I think is so funny), but traditionally, it is often difficult for others to locate the work of artists and writers who die. In fact, it can take years and years of research, discovery, and sweat to figure out the location and locale of artworks, the dates they were produced, and the methods used in producing specific pieces. Not an easy task, but it does accomodate many academics’ employment opportunities, which is nice.
But, and here’s the but, blogging makes this all so easy. There is no difficulty in finding a bloggers’ work — it’s all sitting on a server somewhere, perhaps and hopefully in a pretty MySQL database. Death makes the writing or postings of a blogger final, yes — but also solid, organized, total. It’s this totality that kind of makes me think that blogging is the ultimate life-in-death. It’s so hyper-organized, so data-driven, so efficient that rather than laughing at death and its ultimate finality, it equates itself with it, cozies itself up to it, makes death seem nice and tidy. In other words, what I’m thinking is that blogging makes others’ lives easier but it also makes the death of an individual easier to read and understand as the cataloging is done, pre-facto.
It’s messy stuff, though. You might ask what about those people who don’t only use the weblog for aesthetic expression – say they use the computer, the typewriter, the canvas, or the video screen. And I would way that you’re right — blogging may be life-in-death but it’s also only one component of the soul’s divine shedding of self to the world. A researcher of an individual’s life would still need to collect the odd detritus of a life lived, the old corn flakes, the CD collection, the crumbs of crap that once accumulated under the paper files, in order to understand the life of a blogger.

Trying to think about thinking about blogging every day, as part of this week’s calisthenics, has given me a headache.
Having said that, I’m heavily reminded of, per Jake’s comments two days ago, 90s artists like Barbara Bloom and Fred Wilson who attempted to break apart the exhibition space and the traditional means of observation from the art and artifacts that are part of an exhibition. In typical post-modernist parlance, the two artists, along with many others, recontextualized objects to show us the “true” or “truer” museumological associations of our aesthetic past.
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but this bone-dry exercise in thinking about blogging publicly pushes me as to what the audience expects from a blog (or my blog) and what kinds of worlds come to mind through the exposition of a post. I do feel that artists who make art about art are either fundamentally boring or fundamentally prescient, or both. But what I do see is that blogs have become a means of communication, a mode of transmitting information and knowledge, not unlike the museums and galleries of our recent past. Here are some similarities:
1. Blogs and artistic institutions hide their technology from their audiences. The software of blogs is invisible as are the hardware of paintings, the lighting and electricity from above, and the Sherwin-Williams paint beneath the painting.
2. Money flows around blogs and artwork constantly and neither artists nor bloggers actually make much money. Well, most of them do not — the 1% that do support the respective markets for the rest of us.
3. For the most part, posting your blog and making art are essentially solitary ventures, except for group efforts like Metafilter or Tim Rollins’ Kids of Survival. The museum or gallery allows a group of interested individuals to observe an individuals’s generally solitary musings.
4. Audiences gain prurient pleasure from following an artist, an actor, or a blogger. This public-oriented aspect of blogging is why I think blogging is in and of itself a new artform — one that tickles the feathers of those who live vicariously (many of us) through and with others in public.
One other note: in doing research for today’s piece, I found that the artists I’ve mentioned above do not have major presences on the Web. All of them rely upon their benefactors, the art institutions, to showcase their work and keep their names and productions alive — barely. It’s as if blogging has taken over the mindscape of art’s presence on the Web, there never being very good art portals online and artists never knowing whether to embrace or hate the Web.

Day 2 of blog revelations: I took a good, hard look at my webstats for Deckchairs on the Titanic and, after much hand-wringing and deliberation, decided to post the numbers of visitors I’ve been getting. They’re pretty small, about 1/2 the number I had once thought I had, but they’re growing steadily. I’m a big believer in transparency when called for and this exercise in thinking about audiences publicly is fascinatingly choice.
Here’s the short scoop on what kind of audience I’m receiving at this blog:
Average number of daily visitors: 99 (up 30 from October)
Average number of pages visited daily: 276
Top 5 referring websites: Google, Yahoo, Gothamist, Blogosphere, and blo.gs.
Top 3 search strings: titanic, google wack, deckchairs
Interest spiked on the following days in November: 9, 20, 24, and 25
Hourly usage increases between the hours of: 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 8 p.m. to 12 a.m.

Boy, it sure has been nice these past four days to not post an entry into Deckchairs. I spent the past four days doing very little work, thinking a lot about work, spending some calm time with the family, trying to get my daughter to eat, and see old and good friends. Lovely.
But I have three thoughts about why it’s been so nice not to blog:
1. I think blogging, for all of its gorgeousness, is a horrendously time-sucking affair that can add up to little at the end of the day. Questions like “Who the hell is reading this?” and “Why the hell am I doing this?” necessarily enter the brain of the blogger if that blogger really has a brain. It’s just that few like to ask these questions publicly and let on to the fact that ambivalence is as much a part of blogging as is typing.
2. Blogging is an inherently transitional affair of the heart. It’s not documentary writing per se, nor is it publishing, nor is it diaristic, purely. It’s a combination of all of these, filtered through the limited means of electronic forms and databases and constructed so as to appear whole, unified, cogent to the outside world. Blogging is not one thing, it’s never done, and it’s never fully satisfying because, like the medium it relies upon, it’s replete but never complete. The Web is always about the next big thing, the next thing, the next.
3. The questions I’m raising are not accepted, nor celebrated, by bloggers the world over because they go right to the heart of the experience of blogging. I’m also not raising them because I want to end my “affair” with Deckchairs and blogging, nor because blogging has become dull, tiresome, and trite. (It has not.) Rather, I wonder what would happen if every blogger could write about the vagaries and ambivlances of blogging itself — the activities, the thought processes, the improbable forays on the Web and off for information and synthesis — for one week and one week only. Only then could we see what blogging is truly about.
That’s what will happen here this week — an experiment in living blogging.