As we expected (and in fact intended), most of the blogs created on the Lyceum demo installation are abandoned. Folks who want to try out Lyceum usually create a blog, throw up a post saying something like “hello, this is a blog post”, maybe change the theme, and then abandon the blog forever. This is to be expected, because the portal page of the demo states: “This is a test installation of Lyceum for the debugging phase. All the blogs here are likely to be deleted in a few weeks.”
However, we have been pleasantly surprised to find a handfull of people who have been using the demo installation as their blogging home. When I saw this happening, I made the list of blogs on the front page sorted in order of most frequent post.
Below I’ve highlighted the most prolific Lyceum demo installation bloggers. Without further ado:
Dork.
Writing on Dork., Adair is by far the demo installation’s most prolific author. Almost every day she entertains and engages us with reflections on SILS grad student life, cute boys, and World of Warcraft. She makes frequent use of protected posts and has given very helpful feedback on this feature. In her about page we see Adair demonstrate Samuraiesque steel-willed acceptance — with a cheery twist — of the fact that her entire blog may be deleted one day:
This will be mostly used for random links that amuse me. I’m loath to put in too much work, considering that this is a beta and will be deleted, but I also like having a place to put links :)
cook england, sarah!
Cook Enland, Sarah! has brought unexpected postmodern analysis to the demo installation. For her first post, she bypasses traditional akward introductions, or blogging about blogs, and instead blogs about blogging about blogs. In another favorite post of mine, she shows us an excerpt of an IM conversation wither her 12 year old brother (are most 12 year olds that sharp these days?). In another post, a magic floating beer bottle is featured. And watch out Fred Stutzman, Sarah’s most recent post gives a whirlwind, from-the-trenches tour of social and identity issues that happen on The Facebook. At the end, Sarah proclaims her independence from social networking apps, and plants her online identify flag deep in the fertile soil of her Lyceum demo installation blog!
Because my narcissism (you know . . .) won’t allow me to completely remove my presence from the internet scene, I’m making my online identity a little more like real life (yes, I’m excluding the internet from real life. It’s terminology. It’ll be ok.). This blog will now be my primary online identity forger. People can examine what I post, and categorize me on their own terms. Terms that I probably (and hopefully) won’t be aware of when I post. Granted one can judge another only by one’s own terms, but facebook limits this by establishing the parameters of categorization. And if anyone thinks that I’m transparent based on my blog, then they are stupid. Because I’m not. Right?
John Henry Blog
One of ibiblio’s own collections, John Henry — The Steel Driving Man, has created their official blog on the Lyceum demo installation. They did this without consulting us, which makes us very happy that they found Lyceum and the demo installation to be accessible, easy to use, and featureful enough to use for production content. From the first post:
We get some interesting e-mails from our site visitors and we thought it would be a good idea to create an on-line community for those of us that have an affinity for the man they called John Henry.
We have created several main topics below. Please contribute comments to your topic of interest or e-mail us if you would like to see a new topic created.
Thanks for visiting our site.
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This is my first experiment in blogging. So I thought somewhere that would prove ephemeral would be the best place to make mistakes. But can anyone tell me if there is some very easy, quasi-automatic way to save the material I post here? Can I transfer my blog to wordpress.org one day, and keep all the original posting dates intact? Or should I just copy-and-paste anything I think might be worth preserving into Word files for future reference?? TIA!
By taichiforflies on 04.16.06 9:18 am | Permalink
Yes there will be export functionality soon enough.
By admin on 04.16.06 10:05 am | Permalink
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