Monday 12 January 2009

Happy New Year to IMS!

Belated greetings to all after spending some weeks on the continent. As with death and taxes, there is no escaping the real or virtual world and a return to the blogosphere was inevitable. New Year's resolutions include building on some of the site's improvements.

Many of you will have noticed the new Meebo chat functionality and that entries are now individually posted rather than an über-post based on usability analysis. I think that this improves information retrieval as well as tag searchability.

I've received some positive feedback but as someone has put it, my tag 'cloud looks a little dirty.' I had no idea that it would become like the BBC Weather crystal ball due to the volume of tagging! I'm exploring several options to allow for easier searchability across the postings and tags with new site indexing. You can look forward to that upgrade in 2009.

When I started INTERESTING MUSIC STUFF over 4 months ago I had no idea if it would be of any use to anyone.  Having done a bit more usability analysis, it is clear that it is.  So, I would like to say thanks to the thousands of you around the world (in over 50 countries) who have already visited and the hundreds of returning visitors. I hope that you found and continue to find the blog useful and I will endeavour to keep it up-to-date with upgrades along the way.  

Over the holidays I re-read Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word and was struck by the prescience of his observations.  In discussing the revolutionary influence of electronic typography, Ong wrote (in 1971) that 'secondary orality generates a sense for groups immeasurably larger than those of primary oral culture --McLuhan's 'global village.' From the internet to the blog, I don't think that either Ong or McLuhan could have envisioned the impact of technology and its ability to transform the dissemination of the written word. And in that spirit, here goes 2009. 

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