A walk around the blogosphere
The very first thing I did in approaching this assignment was input “urban space blog” into the Google machine. The second thing I did was click on the top link, which brought me to Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space, a green blog with a narrow column of dense text centered on the page. I gave the page a brief scan before deciding that the pictures and text were too small for easy browsing. Also, upon further inspection, I found that the blog was largely about public policy. Blog posts about taxes and business classifications are directly at odds with my interpretation of “play.” So I quit that and turned instead to its list of links. I chose the blog link with the most “play”-ful sounding title, Bird to the North.
Bird to the North was much easier to look at. The pictures were bigger, so as I scrolled down the page I could easily become engaged with a particular post without reading through all the titles. However once I was hooked by a picture, there was often very little text to accompany it. I scrolled through about a years worth of posts without actually learning anything. So once again I looked through the list of links. This time I clicked a winner.
The Polis Blog has the same layout as all of our blogs and the blogs I went through to get there. Blog posts are on the left and in chronological order, and links alphabetized in a column on the right. This structure is standard because now we’re all adept at navigating through a website set up like that. The author of Polis Blog writes each blog post as an article. Each post has a distinct topic, a catchy title, and an eye catching image. In many articles, the author directly references social norms regarding space. For instance, on the first page of the blog, he writes “The founding gurus of urban space were so obsessed with cleanliness and order and the ‘right’ people that they left us with a million rules about who can do what where without dealing with the structural absurdities that leave some many spaces dead and truly alive spaces threatened with erasure (after all, they are illegal!).” As for play.. this blog is really well written and a delight to read. As I was playing in the blogosphere I ignored blogs that were too ugly or too boring, even if they might have been a great source of information. I recommend this blog to anyone still looking for a research topic.
