Jess Larson enters the on-line world

An example of Jess Larson's chalkware
Jess Larson, fine studio art professor here at UMM, has (as she puts it) “Dot-commed herself”, setting up shop at JessLarson.com.

It’s a nice, elegant site featuring photographs of her art. She used Shutterbug to build the site. I had no prior acquaintance with Shutterbug before this, but it seems like a quite straightforward tool. It seems especially well suited to the design of largely static image oriented sites (like Jess’s). No replacement for the mighty WordPress for managing dynamic content, but quite good for what it does.

I really like Jess’s work (and I’m only slightly biased), so go check it out! I’ll leave you with the following detail I took of one of her girdles during a special show of her girdles at the PRCA last year.

Dangling around the edges

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Can Citizendium steal Wikipedia’s thunder (or at least its writers)?

Words (almost), tumbling
A student in my “Ethical and social implications of technology” course pointed us to Citizendium, an upstart Wikipedia alternative/replacement. Their goal is to solve some of the vandalism, spam, and reliability issues Wikipedia has (mildly) suffered from by moving to a model somewhere between Wikipedia’s uber-egalitarian model and the somber-expert-author model of Encyclopedia Britannica.

There are a lot of issues here (we had a very nice discussion in class on the value, or lack thereof, of having a “real name” attached to an article), but it seems to me that the central issue for Citizendium’s growth and survival is whether they can attract good writers and editors.

Continue reading “Can Citizendium steal Wikipedia’s thunder (or at least its writers)?”

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