At times, the weblog feels like a very transitory format. It is the VHS cassette of media delivery. There came a point where everyone had videos: they were the future, and huge sums were being invested in ensuring the technology was as efficient as possible. The fall-off from ubiquity to obsolescence was precipitous - and video was unceremoniously ejected. And the weblog? What use a steady stream of pointers to new corners of the digital realm when we are slowly but inexorably heading towards an ultimate goal: the digitisation of absolutely everything.

Last week, both The Guardian and its sister paper the Observer announced their digital archives, pay to view sites that 'will eventually contain reproductions of every page, article and advertisement published in The Observer since its birth in 1791 and in our sister paper The Guardian since it started in 1821.' It's not cheap; a monthly pass costs £49.95 (and one wonders how long this data will stay secure in this leaky world of 1s and 0s). But it is a start. Weblogs will lose their status as custodians of the leaky, poorly-catalogued and dusty library that is the internet. Instead, they will be the modern equivalent of Gilbert Bland, map thiefs and bookbreakers for a new era.

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Other things. Those crazy 80s. See also our gallery here / go on, build a Lego model of the Imperial Executor, the 19km long 'personal flagship of Darth Vader'. The instructions are a work of art, and the model only includes 1548 more pieces than Lego's own Imperial Star Destroyer model / Military Planes Collide over East Braintree / BackStory: Casa Da Musica, the Archinect series looks at OMA's faceted masterpiece in Porto.

Good to see that Gillespie, Kidd and Coia have their own website, many years after their demise. There's also an extensive flickr pool for explorers of the modernist ruins of St Peter's Seminary in Cardross, the firm's abandoned masterpiece. It has an extensive web presence: SubmitResponse, Risky Buildings, Glasgow Architecture, Hidden Glasgow, and the Twentieth Century Society. The fashion for building websites for the dead continues - see the Basil Spence Archive.

London's new Olympic stadium unveiled, fresh controversy follows close behind: Bland as a bowl of blancmange. Really? Few building types are more suited to being empty vessels than stadiums. Conversely, the superficiality of applied decoration or elaborate structural conceits also looks most obvious on a stadium, a building of raw functionality (and flexibility, far more so than any number of cultural or creative spaces).

House and Garden shuts up shop, citing excessive operating costs. A million subscribers left bereft / The Fourth Plinth, Thomas Schutte's imaginary Philippe Starck hotel for pigeons. Flickr sets of previous Fourth Plinth projects. The official Fourth Plinth site / Why VHS was better than Betamax.

More Hidden Glasgow, a gem of a site (see 'water towers') / The Piracy Paradox, James Surowiecki in The New Yorker on the role copying plays in progressing planned obsolescence. (via La Petite Claudine). Also via LPC, Bob Truby's Brand Name Pencils. A world of long and oversized ferrules. It is a thing of beauty.

Labels: library, maps, weblog

posted by things at 22:37 / 0 comments