creativity/machine

While flickr is more modestly a “cool photosharing thingy” and textamerica is slightly more ambitiously a “camera phone moblog community”, //cellBYTES is not only sophisticatedly punctuated, it’s also:

a virtual community of digital artists interested in handheld technology + public works. As mobile phone technology advances //cellBYTES will be a contemporary + archival reference of mobile phone imaging technology

It’s unclear whether this community is open or aesthetically gated though. Submissions to ‘exhibitions’ in three categories can be uploaded by email - not sure what happens to them then, i.e. what the curation level or process is. But the first exhibition included some interesting work.

Thanks to jane for the link.

Jon Hoem, Videoblogs as Collective Documentary (conference paper - pdf).

Photoblogs has had a site redesign - much cleaner, much more navigable. The addition of a ‘most popular’ list is good too.
Number one there is Brownglasses.com - and deservedly so, it is just scrumptious, as is shutterbug.

What I find interesting about photoblogs is that they are often published by people who are professionals from related creative fields (design, architecture, whatever) but that technically they are amateur photographers. So you get these really quirky and quite unselfconscious photographs presented in stunning design contexts. And the reverse is also true - a lot of professional photographers’ sites are poorly designed - and although content is king, design is still queen on the web.

And then there’s the joyously lowbrow cabinet of visual curiosities Photosynthetic Molecules, to which I am proud to contribute.

Satan’s Laundromat is “a Brooklyn-based photolog with an emphasis on strange signage, urban decay, and general weirdness.”

To my mind collecting these urban fragments is a beautiful use of the photoblog format - as much as I like cats. via new home-away-from-home Photosynthetic Molecules.