trees are people too

SO, moving on. Lets make a book a blog.

My two primary features of a blog were that it a) has allows the user to interact and customise and b) that a blog is transitory, temporary and constantly changing and updating.

So, for a book, video or audio to be more blog-like, it might possess these features:

allows users to customise – visual aesthetics, colours, volume, length, direction (in a more superficial sense) content, meaning, relevance, distribution (on a more involved level)

allows the ‘reader’ to contribute and collaborate (ideally add their own content to text, video or audio, manipulate and remix it as they would like)

allows the ‘reader’ to come back at any time and find that the content had changed or been updated, and that this has been done by an unlimited number of authors.

any ‘page’ can be read in any order. The content is completely non-linear, and can therefore be read any which way, with hyperlinks offering anchors between points.

any one screen or page might contain an array of video, audio and text, all of which again offer their own links and directions to other information.

is portable, accessible from any location (or any pc, at least, so globally, let’s say)

goes on and on and on until the end of time (albeit constantly changing), in some format or another, travelling through the series of tubes known as the interweb to an unforseen destination….

Keshanee also mentioned the fact that books (as blogs) would be searchable, you would be able to search through all content for what you are after, which is a fantastic point I hadn’t thought of – the interactivity should let us control where we go and what we want to see….

This is just a few, among many many qualities of a blog you could argue could be applied to the mediums of books, video and audio. Hopefully all my indulgence in blogs will lead me to more.

BUT having said all that, I might also make my blog slightly more book like, in that it can be marked… technology such as this already exists (and is great fun) in ‘whiteboard’ websites such as skrbl, an online collaboration tool.

Maybe? I don’t know. As far as I am concerned, the more involved the better. bring on the remix.