Synesthesia Blog and Wiki Combo - Julian Elve

Julian Elve, head of Business Systems & IT at BBC Resources Ltd, writes the blog, Synesthesia – Notes on Stuff. Julian writes that it is his my personal website and not the views of BBC. There is an interesting layout as Julian also incorporates a wiki into his site. There is a tab for the tags, his del.ici.us links, a tab for articles, and a tab for archives by subject, as well as the wiki. I found his blog as he wrote some nice things about several of my posts.

The blog has been going since September 2001, which is impressive. There is an interesting post from 2004 on how his blog and wiki fit together. He writes, “Blog posts by their nature are a snapshot at a point in time and therefore imply some form of stasis. Wiki pages however are timeless and hence never finished, always open to flux.”

“I’ve found the writing style that has started to evolve since I had this combination of tools is to scatter thoughts around the wiki-spaces until some juxtaposition forms that is sufficiently clear to create a blog-entry. The blog-entry becomes a picture of my thinking at a point in time and therefore essential to mapping out some kind of path. The state of the wiki pages continues to evolve - by looking where there is activity you can see which parts of my mental associations are currently to the forefront of attention.”

Interesting idea. I like to think about media and cognition. I wonder how I would mix the two media together. Has anyone else combined these two channels?

Comments

[Julian Elve]

Hi Bill

Thanks for your kind words, and thanks for reprinting my disclaimer - it's part of my employer's blog policy that we include such...

It's obviously the week for my old posts to be noticed, someone else just commented on a post from 2005! I find this aspect of public blogs most interesting - the combination of a permanent record of fleeting thoughts with pervasive search allows new conversations even when you had forgotten that you wrote it.

I also find it a timely reminder that I have been neglecting these channels of late: certainly I don't use the wiki in anything like the way I thought I did back then. Unfortunately the spammers have become too persistent (and were costing me too much time and money), so I've locked the wiki down so it is now just an extension of the single-author site.

[bill Ives]

Julian

I am also pleased at the long term record of ideas and events that blog posts provide. I still get a lot of hits and even comments on stuff I wrote in 2004. One of these is a series of posts on attending the newport jazz festivals in 1968-69, One of the main reasons I blog is to create an accessible record and now I have that from May 2004 onward. I wish I had started sooner. I am very impressed with your 2001 start. Bill

[Julian Elve]

Bill

Thankyou! I blame Euan Semple - he and I were colleagues at the time and he was full of enthusiasm for this new thing called "blogging".

I think the accessible record aspect is a vital component, but of course (as many detractors point out) you could in theory get that without things being public.

I also think those detractors are wrong, because the public nature of the record allows for new serendipitous connections to emerge which could not otherwise do so. Further, given the churn in personal and professional technology, how many private documents stay accessible for years?

Julian

[bill Ives]

Julian

You about the connections made because of the public nature of our notes. I also think it provides a discipline to effectively communicate, know someone else might read it. It has lead to a new career for me as I now make my living entirely through blogging or helping others with their blogging. I seem to go to a new career every 12 years (that is related but different from the old one) so I wonder if this one will last that long.

Bill