Drifting around the UBC forestry center like a wistful cyberhobo, with my backpack – including pillow-roll, since I’m heading straight for the ferry after the final session – on my back and my ASUS in my hand, in perpetual search for a power-outlet. Perhaps that it my ghostly destiny: long after civilization has either become battery-independent or has collapsed completely from want of energy, my shade will wander with ancient spectral laptop in hand, looking for a recharge.

Just come out of a session with direction by Chris Lott and art by Nancy White, plus contributions by various people whose names and links I will add, on "The Blog is Dead! Long live bloggers!" which was the first to strike a deep chord in me because it touched upon blogging as a means of creative expression as well as a means of self-expression and social networking. This was late in the session; it started with an exploration of the definition of a blog, CLs attempt to liberate the form from the tool – as he said, nobody calls a book or a magazine ‘publishing’. Then it explored how the tools had evolved and expanded, how other tools had arisen to let people do what they had done with their blogs do in other modalities, or let them do what they had not been able to do with a blog – the blog, as a predominately written form, was not appealing to people who did not like to write, but they have adopted audio blogging, Flickr, videoblogging, YouTube. The discussants explored the difference between their use of the blog as a permanent archive, versus their use of other more ephemeral forms (eg Twitter). They compared relationships maintained in virtual space as well as in person, and those maintained purely in person – more in-person catch-up time in the former – as well as the peculiar asymmetry of an encounter with a stranger who knows them through their on-line presence. That is not, I thought, something new to the modern age; writers have always encountered people who knew their writing and thought that they thus knew the person behind the writing. Then CL stood up for the blog as a creative medium ("nobody would have said Picasso was creating content") and I pricked up my ears at a distinct glimmering of possibility. I used to experiment with form in story a lot, particularly in my early years, but then settled into conventional narrative forms of the novel and – occasionally – short story. Might be time for some experimentation again …

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