Cre8tive Flow

Vancouver-based business networking and technology forum Tazzu hosted Vancouver’s first official WordPress Camp last Wednesday, showcasing the great features of WordPress as both a blogging platform and a content management system. The event, which was expected to bring in about 30 people, had a turn out of over 90 at The Network Hub in Downtown Vancouver, but everyone was more than happy to sit knee-to-knee to learn, share and be inspired.

First, I want to make some comments on the reasoning behind this redesign. It’s not that there was particularly anything wrong with the old design — except that Wordpress is a far more sophisticated product now than it was when that site was designed, and we wanted to be able to take advantage of newer and improved features. With this new layout, we’re making use of “widgetized” space to create a more flexible and (hopefully) intuitive blog for Cre8asite Forums.

Thanks to Adrian for his work on the previous design!

The art of blogging still exists but finding truly creative, original blogs can take time. Sometimes blog writers themselves look at the “blogscape” and wonder why they even bother anymore. If a blogger writes from the heart, does anyone care?

When is it time to stop writing? Where do you get ideas to keep on going? How many posts is too much or not enough? Is there a reason for producing blogs other than being placeholders for ads or self promotion? Do people get any personal satisfaction from reading certain blogs?

Did marketing remove artistic expression?

When Rand Fishkin wrote What Makes a Good Web Directory, and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones in his own blog, he was writing to his readers with his own voice, his own style and, as do all of us who write in blogs, at his own risk.

It became a trigger for Smackdown’s Michael VanDeMar, who wrote in his blog, Why SEOmoz Needs A “For Entertainment Purposes Only” Disclaimer.

A thought provoking debate in Cre8asiteforums looks at what has been happening as a result of the clash, in Professional Blogging…must Back Up With Facts? and what this means. We have a problem and it’s been repeated over and over for years and seeps into new venues, like Sphinn.

I wonder if the internet is dumbing down our expectations, or whether the expectations placed upon web properties is unrealistic, or both.

I am increasingly seeing examples of Internet phenomenon being unfairly compared to an offline “equivalents”. Bloggers being compared to journalists, Wikipedia being compared to an outdated notion of an encyclopaedia and comments compared to formalized civil meetings.

Is blogging filling a new niche, or is it poor jounalism? Is wikipedia filling an information void, or dumbing downb our expectations of accuracy? Are comments a rude, impersonal, untraceable form of public discourse that is bad for society?

The background:

Andrew Bogut, Australia’s only “proper” NBA player, recently gave an interview to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Aussie version of the NY Times, in which he said some pretty pointed things about American culture. Some of the comments, it seems, came off as race related (NBA players are predominantly Black^[1] after all).

This would, on the surface, appear to be the sort of issue the media usually blows out of all proportion. But they didn’t, as the mainstream American media was, well, quiet.

Where this gets interesting for me is this articles by David Steele of the Baltimore Sun. In the article, David Steele writes:

Following my previous post, I’m finally in the process of moving eKstreme.com to a new host and a new CMS. The down side is a ton of manual work to transfer the page via copy/paste into the new CMS. This is making me read a lot of pages I forgot about. Stale content from years ago. The odd broken link here and there (thankfully, not many!).

The move is also making me reconsider the site’s structure, the databases it needs to run, all the intricate dependancies, etc. That’s a huge aspect of any website’s backend, and I’m happy with it as it stands now. The new CMS will enable a revamp of the core of the backend in the future if needed.

The recent hubbub (and yes, I am aware I use that word too much and need a synonym… how about brouhahahahahaha?). As I was saying, the recent brouhahahaha over anonymous comments has centred around the supposed damage that comes with anonymous commenting. This sentiment is summed up nicely in the following quote from a recent Washington Post Editorial:

Imagine going to a meeting about school overcrowding in your community. Everybody at the meeting is wearing nametags. You approach a cluster of people where one man is loudly complaining about waste in school spending. “Get rid of the bureaucrats, and then you’ll have money to expand the school,” he says, shaking his finger at the surrounding faces.