[photo: Joseph Carr]

I've been lurking on the -empyre- mailing list for the last several years and it consistently serves up some of the best art and theory discourse on the net. The topic of discussion for January 2009 was New Years Resolutions for Digital Futures and moderators Renate Ferro and Tim Murray invited speculation and insight on the coming year from a wide range of artists, curators and scholars. I was particularly interested in the following goal from Alessandro Ludovico's list.

Seriously investigate the relationship between offline and online content production. Not only on a theoretical basis, but also trying to figure out how to arm independent producers with both new software tools and abstract models in order to survive and develop despite the old production model crisis and the hyped economical crisis.

These comments (and dwelling on my Web Inventories piece for Rhizome) have inspired some thinking about the "value" of online activity. I'm don't have any aspirations to position online publishing and networking strictly in relation to economics and the market - Burak Arikan, Engin Erdogan (and others) are already illustrating these parallels quite nicely. What I would like to do is broadly qualify online presence in relation to terminology, inhabitation and value. What follows is a series of quick and dirty observations on online production. Some of these list items will be the seeds of more involved blog posts, others will inform some "offline activity" (design) and some might even inspire a response.

Terminology

• In a 2007 interview Cati Vaucelle (of Architectradure) described herself as a "knowledge shopper". I immediately bastardized this and started using the term "info broker" to describe my online activities. Shopping alludes to a certain leisure, while broker seems more instrumental. Under what umbrella terms might we describe online work? We employ words like "blogger" or "networked artist" - what other terminology is there out there?
• David Cohn in an interview here on Serial Consign in November 2007: "Social news sites have yet to develop niches. Instead what we have are the big four (mentioned above) who are really like large national papers. I see Digg as the large national gossip magazine, Propeller is more like USA Today, StumbleUpon (which has an interesting algorithm to determine what's hot, not Digg-like voting) is the local major metropolitan with national appeal" Does online social bookmarking function as a sort of journalism? Regardless of the answer to that question, 14 months later it is clear that the (floundering) newspaper industry is learning from self-organized online publishing and information sharing networks. Also, see Dave's Spot.us experiment in micropayment powered journalism.
• Antiquated precedent: Blogger or online publisher as switchboard operator - frenetically rerouting a network of patch cords. Online content management as signal routing: information cutting across networks, redundancy inevitable but ok.

[Michael Surtees / A Blog Post Loop]

Inhabitation

• Online presence as creative practice. See Michael Surtees as an example of the networked designer who synthesizes his dayjob, personal work, outlook and experience into an accessible and engaging stream of content. Another great example is Anne Helmond's research and blogging practice (note her new The Traces of a Networked Life project).
• Tina Roth Eisenberg (aka SwissMiss) describes blogging in relation to her creative practice: "My blog, which started as a personal visual archive turned into the best marketing tool I could have ever imagined. I now find most of my new clients through my blog, or let's say, they find me... blogging has become a part of my business model".
• Online presence as "temporary structure" to facilitate academic research for an individual or act as a forum for a class - note the countless abandoned thesis blogs.
• More cynically, online presence as co-branding. I.e. book specific blog to promote author, score speaking engagements and dote on media mentions.

Value & Compensation

• A tweet by Geoff Manaugh last month: "The new media dream: piece together a series of overlapping micro-sponsorships as alternative to full-time employment + seek out constantly".
• There was rumblings of a blogger union last year. Potential action: Bloggers restrict their food purchases to what they can afford with their AdSense revenue - a hunger strike. Would this protest be an example of a first world tragedy or a networked labour movement?
• The User Labor overview statement: "...we propose an open data structure, User Labor Markup Language (ULML), to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor for distribution. We believe that universality, transparency, and accessibility of user labor metrics will ultimately lead to more sustainable service cycles in social web." If adopted the User Labor data structure could counter the strip mining of social capital by corporations - how many people who use Facebook are even aware (or care) that it exists?
• Online publishing as playing the lottery. Example: a post on an ad-laden site gets Boingboinged or enjoys the Slashdot or Digg effect. Blog earns 50 times its normally daily ad revenue.
• Blogger or social network star as mimic of the technology startup. Extensive free or undervalued labour in hopes of eventual funding and IPO windfall - there can only be so many Tila Tequilas or $350,000 book deals.

I'll develop some of these thoughts further in the coming months.

Addendum: For some inexplicable reason I can't find a link to the -empyre- message by Alessandro Ludovico that inspired this post. To that end, I have posted it in its entirety in the comments. Beyond Ludovico's perspective I highly recommend browsing through the January archives of -empyre- as they are chock-full of provocative outlooks on this coming year.