Hard copy?
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I recently began accumulating blog entries with the hope that the end result would be an ‘open’ record of my final year design thesis. As keen follower of Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLG, I am often surprised at the sheer abundance of material and how (like most blogs) only a small portion of the content is even remotely interesting to the individual. Along with the internet and the Web 2.0 revolution, the blogging world is experiencing phenomenal growth. So while I wait for my copy of the inaugural BLDGBLG book to arrive, I thought I would briefly speculate on what it all could mean and secondly how I might set about engineering the ‘blook’ of the future. Regardless of the accessibility, breadth, and sheer speed the web of information affords, surely there is nothing like the hard copy…is there? The way we consume our web-based media – a tendency to frantically flip between snippets – is clearly something we are becoming more and more accustomed to. And this behaviour is not confined to the written word: direct comparison can also be made with the enjoyment of digital music. Thom Yorke recently intimated that Radiohead would no longer produce in the LP format; not only for artistic reasons but also the contemporary, sporadic – ‘shuffle’ approach to listening. The advent of the download has fundamentally altered consumer culture. Just what will become of our beloved, bulky, musty, downright dusty books in the advancing information age? Granted, the circulation is constantly evolving – the life and death cycle of the book is nothing new, but as the power of the web search improves and the potential of the Semantic Web (3.0) emerges could it be that our printed circulation will undergo a more radical transformation? Indeed, could books become blooks? Of course the market is also evolving – the BLDGBLG book is certainly not the first web-to-print publication. We have already seen the introduction of On Demand Books who provide an in-store printer with access to a database of 3.6 million published and public-domain titles. Then there are companies such as Blurb and Lulu, which are capable of printing and delivering books practically overnight. The author can even opt to share their creation with others with the most popular volumes finding their way straight to the mass market through stores such as Amazon. Is publishing doomed? Given the acceleration and scope of web authorship, the blook clearly has a big future. The technology is certainly an interesting topic; the curation of such a document another. Could our books comprise of intelligent ‘mash-ups’ based on results of a given blook ‘search’? Would it take the form of a compilation, derived from meta-information such as tagging, with enhanced temporally-relevant or geo-referenced content? Or could we see the start of some absolute rubbish? The diversity of such an application is undoubtedly a good thing but one would surely question the purity of the text. Of course the original volume will always have a place – probably more the domain of the collector, akin perhaps to the tradition of vinyl in the music industry. One thing is for sure – a world without books is certainly a strange, sad prospect. Specific to architecture, whether or not the ‘Argos Catalogue’ works – such as the seminal SMLXL by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau (1995), KM3: Excurtions on Capacities by MVRDV (2005); even the more ridiculous Yes is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution by Bjarke Ingels (2009) – will become more and more prevalent as a result of this new mode of publishing, of course remains to be seen. In terms of a feasible blook, Blog2Print can already provide such a service. It is undoubtedly useful, but being able to customise and achieve an original, sophisticated graphical style is some way off. I have therefore decided to set to work on my own dynamic blook transformation with the belief that an improved version can be achieved manually. Using a PHP script I am able to filter and extract a standard HTML feed from the Information Society blog database (the default MySQL output is messy), which can in turn be fully-formatted using CSS. Click here for an example. The resulting text is then synchronised to a template (I will be using Blurb for now) – before the fitting of images (definitely a separate process, required for more effective representation…). All future updates to the blog are added automatically. And of course the database can be filtered meaning that different project-specific ‘feeds’ can be accumulated. I am also keen to achieve an intelligent ‘instant’ mash-up (I imagine a good deal of editing went into the BLDGBLG Book) but this will require a lot of work and would most likely result in very systematic (and boring) representation.  |
