bitdepth

Weaving a Web

One thing that I’ve noticed is that I’m increasing my presence online. I don’t know if the quality is increasing or if it is just more stuff, but I think that one of the reasons that I’m more prolific now is that is easier. I love using Blosxom to blog because I can create the entries with any text editor, but I always use BBEdit to write for bitdepth. But the bitdepth entries aren’t as frequent as I wanted them to be, but now with my increased use of Blogger for Screen Arts and now bitdepth digest, I blog more often using Blogger. The other things that I use often are Flickr and, increasingly, 43 Things. One thing that all these sites have in common are their fairly flexible and open APIs, which allows the information and the sites to interact with other applications and sites. What it means practically is that I now am able to blog using Flickr and 43 Things and to have Flickr images automatically show up on my 43things page as well as here on bitdepth.
Very exciting things are also happening with Technorati adding watchlists where you can follow discussions in the blogosphere based on keywords. I keep track of just about all of this stuff using NetNewsWire as if there isn’t an RSS feed, I’m not as interested in it as I don’t want to spend the time looking around to see if anything has changed. While Flickr and 43things are very fun and aren’t technically oriented, Technorati is a geeky data-rich backend that is starting to have some very cool applications built on their API.
So the exciting thing now is that we’re moving away from needing to use one application to view and share and just find and create and share. It’s exciting when you don’t have to code or understand how to code to use things (but if you can, it’s even more exciting now as you have a lot more to play with).

January 8, 2005 43things, bbedit, bitdepth, blogger, blosxom, flickr, netnewswire, screenarts, technorati

Bitdepth is 1

My first laptop was a Toshiba T1000 and it’s the first machine that really brought the Internet into my home and marked the beginning of my writing everything on a computer. I bought it from a professor of mine and used it to write essays and articles. It had 512 k of RAM with a memory expansion that could be used as RAM or to store 768 k of information or programs. There was only a 720k floppy drive and no hard drive. I used WordPerfect 4.2 which fit onto 2 floppies. In 1992 when I moved to Montreal to study I bought a modem (2400 baud) to connect to the Vax at Concordia to use electronic mail and telnet. One of the first hypertext programs that I used was Hytelnet. It was written by Peter Scott and it connected Telnet sites. This was before I used Gopher and before the World Wide Web. I used Telnet and Hytelent to do a lot of research at various libraries around the world. Then I organized things in a WATCOM database from the University of Waterloo.

Then I began looking at MOOs and MUDs to explore the fascinating culture of creating worlds and community through text. I really had a great time discussing postmodernity and cultural theory in the Postmodern Culture MOO which was the online component of the journal. It’s where I first had a voice online and began connecting with people around the world. Then it started to get more popular and a bit too crowded so I moved on to the BayMOO and then to the Diversity University MOO where I took an online course in Adult Education using technology.

The Web was (and still is) very exciting to me. I launched my first Web site about 10 years ago… right after I used Cello and Mosaic and found HTML to be fascinating. My first Web site had a rant about the film “Disclosure” and (as pretty much every site then did) a bunch of links to other sites. The site was hosted at an Antarctic research station Web site that had extra hard drive space. You just sent an email asking for space and they set you up. That was before the Web was commercial…and you could know most of the people who were around… and we were happy… and walked uphill to school in snow storms….but that’s a whole other story. Now a decade later I’m celebrating the first anniversary of my own domain and Weblog. Things have changed a lot in some ways, but not so much in others.

May 9, 2003 baymoo, bitdepth, cello, computers, diversityuniversity, education, gopher, html, hytelnet, moo, mosaic, mud, postmodernculture, technology, telnet, toshibat1000, vax, watcome, wordperfect, www

Welcome to bitdepth!

Chris Campbell here. I’m finally starting a proper ‘blog. While I’ve had a presence on the Web for the while it hasn’t been incredibly personalized. But this time, it’s personal. Hmm… sounds like a trailer blurb.

This is made with Rael Dornfest‘s Blosxom to run this. It’s a nifty, tiny Perl script that takes text files and makes them into a ‘blog. I could have used something more elaborate and powerful such as the system that my lovely wife Carolyn made, Grapevine, but for now I’ll keep it simple and pretty much text-based since that how I usually work.

So welcome again and I hope you enjoy this!

May 9, 2002 about, bitdepth, meta

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Weaving a Web

Bitdepth is 1

Welcome to bitdepth!

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